Disposable People

“This is our last family reunion. It’s the first in a morgue.”

“This is our last family reunion. It’s the first in a morgue.”

That’s the first line of an early scene from an unpublished book, Disposable People, that my son Torrey left behind in the wake of his suicide. He was a writer and a film maker. He left dozens of unfinished short stories behind, as well and hundreds of pages of journal writing, much of which I’m still wading through. Some of which I’ve read a dozen times already, especially those of his last days.

But it was this scene that brought me up short; in it he writes of the direct aftermath of a suicide from a father’s point of view. His grip on the raw emotion of moment is chilling; the foreshadowing of his own suicide, even down to the abrupt note he left behind.

He was partial to writing his first draft in long-hand; here’s the scene exactly as he drafted it:

This is our last family reunion. It’s the first in a morgue.

Even working around the scraps of dead people all day doesn’t make staring at your own son’s blue face any easier.

“Yeah, that’s him.”

They start pulling the sheet back over his face and I grab the edge of it.

“Can I have a minute?”

The coroner or med tech or whoever says sure and slinks away.

I touch his face. Inside I’m rending my clothes and smearing ash in my hair. Until your kid kills himself, you get to go through life pretending you aren’t cocking the whole thing up.

Something that hasn’t worked quite right in years — my spirit maybe — goes the rest of way now and completely breaks. I feel like an emotional quadriplegic. A tiny, stunted 200-year-old bonsai tree.

My wife and daughter are in the hallway sitting on hard plastic bucket seats welded to an I-beam. I don’t think my daughter really understands what’s going on.

“John?” My wife looks ready to eat glass.

“Yeah?”

“…”

My shoulders are slumped and I’m looking past her, trying to disappear into the ivory white paint of the hospital cinderblock walls.

“John!”

And I lose it. “WHAT? WHAT JOAN? WHAT THE FUCK AM I SUPPOSED TO SAY?”

Through the fluorescent glare shinning off her brimming eyes I see hate parading along the squint of her drawn tight eyelids. I go in for the kill.

“What the fuck, Joan, you gonna make me say it? Alright, it’s him, okay? It was Tyler. He’s fucking dead.”

Then my tunnel vision breaks. A sniffle shatters the cold silence, a superheated counterpoint. Wide angle lens. My daughter’s eyes are peeled back and something like intractable failure harpoons me.

I make to give her a hug and my wife grabs her. My daughter begins sobbing on the front of her shirt and tears roll down Joan’s face. It’s carved from marble, she’s looking at me straight on unashamed. The message is clear, I’m not allowed to share their pain.

I turn and walk away, banks of overhead lights hanging from the shitty drop ceilings are strobing over my broken face.

Automatic double doors hiss open once, twice. The air is clear and warm. Stars shine bright and dense. The full moon is inscrutable. There is nowhere to hide.

“Dear Everyone,
I’m sorry.
Love, Tyler”

I’m sitting in my rental car parked behind a strip mall. When you get married, have kids, lay awake nights dreaming about the future, this isn’t one of the things you prepare for. You think about maybe having to pay for more college than you budgeted for. You wonder about what happens if your mutual funds go tits up. You think about how you’d feel if your wife starts fucking another John.

You don’t spend too much family planning time thinking about what do when your kid kills himself.

Not consciously. There are times, sure, when every parent stays up nights worrying if their kid will grow up alright. Tow the line. Apply themselves like you know they can if they really try. If they have the right motivation.

Torrey Nolan Meeks — Nov.5, 1982-Aug. 31, 2014