All New Shades Of Blue

"Every action in our lives touches on some chord that will vibrate in eternity.”- Edwin Hubbel Chapin

To a Lost Soul,

I have witnessed the slow unraveling of the family you left behind. Of the home which you helped build slowly, then suddenly let collapse. To a world you no longer belong in, the children you bore still remain. What of this compound of love, seized by the heartbreak that is still left hanging in the air. To a Lost Soul, I wonder if you were truly ever there.

One of the most important yet most difficult aspects of my life to explain is “the Compound.” The Compound (aka Blue Island Compound, aka BIC) consists of my 2 sets of neighbors. These neighbors are not just regular neighbors either. They are mine and my family’s lifelong friends with whom we share everything. We have gone to the same church our whole lives also which plays a huge role in why we’re so close. We have almost no boundaries with each other and our homes. Each family is free to walk into another’s any time they please and to ask for anything. Each family has two children, one boy and one girl, ranging from 16-23 years old. We fight, love, share, hate, and forgive just as siblings do. There is almost nothing that we don’t share. Basically it’s as if we all have two other sets of parents and siblings. We live through each other while sharing joys, happiness, pains, and hardships. I cannot imagine a life without “the Compound.” When I was away at college and most people were excited to be far from home I secretly missed my life and wondered why anyone would want to leave home. I realized though that not everyone has a family like I do. Not everyone has “the Compound.” If you’re reading this and you aren’t one of my friends or haven’t been over here this most likely sounds completely strange and bizarre. I cannot even seem to express in words how much this family means to me. Without “the Compound” in my life I would be a completely different person. I mean, imagine having one very strong willed mother in your life and then adding on another two. I don’t even want to imagine what it’s going to be like planning for my wedding. I don’t want to imagine how turned around my life would be if I didn’t have these people in my life or as my family.

This year though our family, our “Compound,” our crazy way of living was turned upside down and made even crazier. We lost someone. We lost someone who sometimes looking back it’s hard to remember what it was even like when he was here. We lost a soul, a piece to our family that will never be replaced. We lost a father. The cause? Choice.

Suicide has never affected me so much as it has this year. Between the months of December 2009-April 2010 I came home for five funerals; three of those being suicide.

Suicide. What can you say to that? You learn to bear this consistent numbness to the subject. The first one was shock. I didn’t understand it.

The second one was anger for it hit my home, my Compound.

And by the third one, it was just “life happens.” We have no answer. You end up just saying “everything happens for a reason” because you have nothing else to say. You have no answers for how someone could do this.

It hurts so much and makes me beyond angry when I think about his decision. You wanted a giant elephant in the room? Well congratulations, now you got one. But like I said, his soul had been fading away for months, maybe even years. There are only certain moments or events where the absence of his presence is really felt. You want to see or feel where the hole he left really is? It’s not in the holiday dinners which he use to cook, or the Chinese takeout nights, or even the yard work left undone by him. It’s in the family. It’s in his wife, his daughter, his son. It’s in the Compound. It’s in the look that his grown baby girl gets when they’re looking at the new house they might have to buy because they can’t stay in their old one without him there. It’s in his sons eyes, which are red and stoned from not having a father to tell him better than that. It’s in the wrinkles his widow has as she shakes her head and worries about how her children will fair. It’s in his dog not being trained or getting walked as much because he was the one who always did that. It’s in us, “the Compound” looking on at our other family members and not even being able to say anything because what is there to say? It was a choice, and he chose not to stay.