I’m 30,000 feet over some flyover state headed to the west coast, drawn there because the Brilliant Tragedy that was my second son is now gone forever. He finally completed the suicide he’s been chasing since he was 16-years-old. Sometime in the early morning of Aug. 31st he bled out in his apartment, alone and lonely.

And now I must scrape up the remainder of what was his life on earth and claim his all but anonymous body now lying naked in some metal meat locker in the morgue of the LA County Coroner.

The “Parental Handbook” they give out at a child’s birth has a chapter conspicuously missing — they tear it out on purpose so as to not alarm new parents — that chapter, I’ve come to know, is titled, “How to Bury Your Child.”

But I strongly suspect the chapter would be nothing but blank pages anyway. You see, there really are no instructions for this scenario because a parent is Never.Supposed.To.Bury.Their.Child. Never. Ever.

After 16 years of waiting for this to finally happen — of expecting it — and of, at times, I am ashamed to admit, silently suffering thoughts of wanting it to Just.All.Be.Over — I am tormented and anguished by grief that I ever could have thought such a thing. The reality is nearly too much to bare. I was not prepared, not even close, for the relentless power this kind of death rains down on your soul.

I’ve come on this trip with my Darker Angels riding shotgun; bringing my better angels to this fight was a lost cause from the moment I received “The Call” from the LA County investigator and so they are left behind, bound and gagged and we may never hear from them again…

Anger is typically my drug of choice and I have every excuse in the world to get high right now. But my dealer has chosen this exact moment in time to abandon me and go mysteriously missing. Now, when I need him the most, I got nothing. I am so numb that I can’t even gin up the anger I have time and again gone to, to supercharge my emotion and light my senses on fire in the same artificial way all drugs do. Everything just keeps getting sucked into this black vortex of suicide.

There is no protection to be found. “Take care of yourself,” is an all-too-common refrain, but the self-defense mechanisms I’ve been developing my whole life, installed during my teen years, honed in my 20s and 30s — perfected in the crucible of battlefield reporting — and deployed in my 40s and 50s — have abandoned me as well.

The tactic of suppressing some terrible event, like the horror of war, by burying it deep in my psyche — something that I was surprising adept at doing — now proves to be a cursory fix, like attempting to stem arterial bleeding with a roll of gauze and some duct tape. Because just when I believe I’ve succeed in holding my grief at bay my base emotions revolt and decide to reboot my entire system and I am left in default mode, without any of my defenses or walls and the reality of his death grips me in unfathomable emotional heartache that manifests itself as wrenching physical pain.

And I cycle into and out of this state too many times to count. This internal rollercoaster is asphyxiating and I long to take just.one.deep.breath, just one, in the hopes that it will clear my head, for just a moment of clarity, and allow me to deal with the tasks before me.

My journalistic instincts are screaming out for me to chronicle everything — that’s what I do — it is what I have always done, regardless of the situation. It is a strategy that has always served me well and one for which I’ve never had a moment of regret. Yet now, at every attempt to write down my observations, record conversations or just take notes, my head is filled with mush. When the investigator was trying to confirm my identity as next of kin, she asked for my address, the numbers I reeled off were all transposed. My wife, having overheard the conversation, quickly moved to correct my unwitting error.

My fingers are lead weights. Every key pressed feels like a tree being felled in a forest, deliberate and destructive.

The start and stop belligerent hesitation of trying to write about this comes from the fear that wrapping his death in some kind of “Fear and Loathing” gonzo journalism will move it, once and for all, from the fiction I choose to believe to the reality that is.

You see, the Brilliant Tragedy that was my second son is now gone forever. He finally completed the suicide he’s been chasing since he was 16-years-old. Sometime in the early morning of Aug. 31st he bled out in his apartment, alone and lonely.

There are no words. There will never be any words…