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One year later…
In about two or three days, it will be a year since I broke my leg. These things are pretty traumatic when they happen although they register only slightly on the Big Picture screen. It’s the things that happen outside of yourself that really take over the picture.
Nine days after I broke my leg, I lost my best friend to suicide. I have difficulty to this day expressing how important Mario was to me perhaps because I’m still coming to terms with what happened, how it happened, and with the impact he had on my life.
Mario and were also cousins, but we grew up together as brothers spending almost every free moment we had together during our early childhood. As we entered our teen years, other forces came into play, but we still maintained strong presences in each other’s lives. He had relationships with the people I knew and vice versa. I watch my two sons today and I’m reminded constantly of my bond with Mario. We really were brothers.
My wife and sons would come together as family with his wife and daughter one last time in 2002 when they came to San Antonio to visit. The weeklong visit was routine, but I didn’t realize that it would be one of the last times I would talk to him.
Months after his visit, my wife and I would separate and a year or so later we divorced. The event sent shockwaves through the extended families. Divorces do that. My ex-wife and I were the cornerstone of the family for the nearly 9 years that we were married. We represented stability and we tried as much as we could to emulate that, but it wasn’t to be. Our split left people disillusioned - no one more so than Mario, I think.
I would call him repeatedly during the divorce process. He never returned my calls. His wife had said he was extremely angry and disappointed in me. It left me lost. I felt abandoned.
In hindsight, he probably felt abandoned too. Not only did I move away from Denver, I punched him in the gut with my news. It was “Steve fucking a good thing up, yet again.” He had probably had had enough.
I would never speak to him again after his visit to San Antonio. Five years later, I would receive a phone call from a mutual friend that he was dead.
It was a mid-morning call on August 7 - the day after his death. Kate hands me the phone, she says it’s Aaron. I’m in bed recuperating from surgery on my leg only days before.
“Hello?”
“Steve.”
“What’s going on?”
“Have you talked to your family?”
{I knew here that something was wrong. My heart began to sink.)
“No. Why?”
Aaron searches for the words and he begins fumbling not quite knowing how to say it.
“Mario’s dead.”
Things are a blur at this point. I’m hysterical. It had been 5 years since I spoke to Mario, but the 30 or so years before that were suddenly upon me. In seconds, I would relive every single memory I had about Mario and then millions of gallons of despair would suddenly rush in and begin drowning me.
I managed to force out questions. When? Where? How? Why? The answers would stun me.
Mario had been going through a divorce of his own. It was a longtime in the making as divorces usually are. Psychologists might say that they can spot a divorce from years away.
Toward the end, Mario was in jail for a weekend over a domestic dispute. I had never known Mario to physically harm anyone, so I figured in the heat of a chaotic moment, he grabbed Kelly - maybe pushed her, but I would never see Mario striking her. Besides, an earlier bad relationship would leave Kelly resolved about never letting anyone hurt her the way she had been hurt before. My knowledge of Mario had him overreacting and making threatening overtures toward her and she, based on previous experience, was resolved to nip it in the bud. Mario goes to jail and she tells him she’s filing for divorce.
“What a f*cking cruel turn of events,” I think, when I hear about the impending divorce. “What an ironic and f*cking cruel turn of events.”
Mario leaves his house and his small son and daughter and moves in with a mutual friend. He begins to unravel. He secretly tapes a conversation with Kelly on the advice of a sh*t-for-brains lawyer that used to date his mother. He plays that conversation and some other audio for friends during a camping trip. He is seemingly unstable.
And on the monring of August 6, he tells the friend he’s staying with that he going to go see Kelly. No one close to him would know what happened to him until later when they see the report on TV detailing a murder-suicide. It’s his white work van and it’s parked in front of his two-story suburban home.
Other details are too painful to go into, but what the day amounts to is Mario leaving his life and taking Kelly with him leaving behind two little human beings and devastated family and friends.
I’m still stunned even as I type.
As I delivered the eulogy, I had two thoughts that haven’t left my mind since. One is about all of it somehow not seeming real. The other is about never having been so acutely conscious in my entire life. It seems poetic enough. Some people call it magic realism.
I don’t know what to call it. It defies reason for me. Most of the time nothing seems to matter and at the same time everything matters. It’s a little tug of war that I’m always playing out inside my head…
In September, I travel home to Denver. My sister is getting married.
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