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Memories of an 84 Year Old Co-Worker [Abridged]

They were together 18 years, and never married.

One night, after they had both been drinking, they had a fight.

He told her he was going to sleep downstairs, in the basement.

She found him the next morning. He had hanged himself.

He put in my new fence last year, and I don’t think he smiled once.

He met my son, Jimmy, at the club, and bought him a drink.

He showed him his new bandanna. (He had a motorcycle, and loved it.)

It was after 2 am that same night when Jimmy got the call.

He had shot himself, in his driveway, with a gun he kept in his truck.

His elderly mother was inside the house, and she found him.

My brother-in-law’s wife died of cancer two years ago.

He didn’t go to the funeral. He had begun forgetting things.

His son went home to check on him. He was lying on the couch.

He had been dead for hours. There was no autopsy, as far as I know.

A lot of us think he killed himself, but who can say.

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Subject: Mourning the Loss of a Student / Excerpts from a Text Message Conversation

Dear Campus Community,

As many of you know, the Penn State family lost one of its own this weekend.

While the hearts of all of our faculty and staff go out to his family (and who can begin to imagine the pain of losing a son or a brother?), we understand that it is often our students and faculty who feel the magnitude of a tragedy like this one most profoundly.

With that in mind, counseling services are being made available to all students, free of charge. Trained, sympathetic counselors will be accepting walk-in sessions at the Student Health Center this week (Monday through Friday, 9 am to 6 pm). You can also find a directory of toll free crisis intervention hotlines on the CAPS section of our university website.

If you think you may be experiencing symptoms of depression, if you feel trapped and hopeless, or if you have been contemplating suicide, please seek help immediately.

Sincerely,

Eric J. Barron, President

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“Please Clap.”

Last Friday I dreamed that Jeb Bush shot himself.

I was in the house where I grew up, standing in the living room. I could hear the mice inside the walls, eating the insulation. I could smell them, too.

I was looking through the window on the door and he, the former governor of Florida, son of one president, brother of another, was looking at me from the other side. He had already opened the screen door, and he was waiting there with that Charlie Brown smile, the eager, desperate, confused smile of a lost child who is too polite to ask for help, and who was raised never to talk to strangers besides.

I thought I should probably let him in; I never got the chance. Instead, I saw him raise a handgun to his temple, and I saw him pull the trigger. There was no sound. He fell out of sight, and the screen door closed.

And then I was outside, on the porch, by the body. A female friend was there, next to me, except that sometimes she was my little sister, 10 years ago, when we still spoke. “We need to get rid of him,” I told her. “We’re responsible.”

We put the corpse on a white sheet, and we dragged it across the lawn, into the back yard, behind the chicken coop, where there was now a swamp that had never existed when I was awake, a regular Louisiana bayou. We loaded the former governor onto a raft made of inner tubes, and we floated out into the green water, pushing ourselves forward with sticks.

We stopped. “Here,” I said. “Here.” We kneeled to roll him over the side, and I saw that his head was crushed and his face was gone, smeared away. He was unrecognizable, like Emmett Till in his casket. We pushed him overboard, and watched him sink.

I woke up laughing.