And now for something completely...
Um...depressing? Personal? I'm not sure exactly how to classify it. I'm sure some of you are like 'oh no, not some more pointless whining about your life...'
Just to get it out there, it's not pointless whining about my life. It's not really whining. It's more of a kind of reflection on an event, albeit extremely depressing, that really seriously affected me.
Here goes...
Flashback to the end of January, 2001.
It was last semester of senior year of high school, and my English class of choice was creative writing. It was a pretty open-ended class, and to start off the semester, our teacher had us reading the collections of a lot of the students before us. We were reading collections dating back to the mid to late 1990s, so a lot of the people who had written all the stories were people that none of us really knew. I didn't really know anyone who had graduated earlier than 1996, so I tried to stay to booklets later than that. Of course we were all looking for stories of people we knew as well.
So Tuesday, of that first week, January 30, 2001, I was reading a collection from either 1995 or 1996, just kind of skimming through, when a name caught my idea. Kurt Mehlenbeck. Aha! Someone I knew. So I read his story. I have no idea what he wrote about. Couldn't tell you for the life of me...not because it was uninteresting. I'm fairly sure I did actually read the whole thing.
Two days later...
I was on the way home from West Allis from an oboe lesson, and my dad had driven me that day because he had to run some errands out in 'Stallis, so he took me and just picked me up afterwards. Somewhere on the way home, he told me that my grandpa had read in the papers that Kurt Mehlenbeck was dead.
Kurt was only five years older than me. We'd known each other for years, because our parents had always been friends, and I took piano lessons from his mom for a year and a half. He had actually had to 'baby-sit' a lot of us younger kids a few times along with Teresa while all of our parents had dinner parties. I say baby-sitting loosely, because it wasn't really babysitting so much as making sure we didn't all like, fall off swingsets and bikes and such. Either way...he was only five years older than me. He was 22, and he had died.
The obituary was very vague, as most are, so I didn't know why he had died. Car accidents, fluke accidents kind of crossed my mind, but I had that horrible, nagging feeling that it wasn't an accident or a disease.
The next day, I asked one of my friends who had also taken piano lessons from Kathy if she knew anything, but she also had only knew that he died. People had heard about it, but nobody knew why.
That afternoon, we were all over at church for the youth group's ski trip. We asked if our pastor had heard anything, but he had only heard that he had died too. It was like nobody knew why, and so we were all really confused.
I spent the whole weekend skiing and having a great time...but Kurt's death still really bothered me. I didn't say anything about it, because I had no reason to be so bothered. Yes, we had known each other for years, but I hadn't seen him in years.
I got home that Sunday in the early afternoon, and I was sitting in the living room talking to my parents. All the sudden, my mom said that they had to go soon. I asked where, and she replied that they were going to Kurt's funeral, which was that afternoon. I hesitated for a minute, and then asked "How did he die?"
It was a suicide.
That had been my initial reaction, but I told myself that it couldn't be possible. I mean, seriously? Nobody I actually knew had ever committed suicide, so it didn't seem possible.
I made up my mind to go to the funeral.
I changed my mind about a million times too, while I was getting ready. I felt somewhat obligated, I didn't want to, but I did.
A lot of my parents friends were all there, people I saw on a regular basis. Even some people I hadn't seen in years. But it was so depressing. There were all sorts of pictures up of Kurt in his younger days, looking just like I remembered him. There were also pictures of him as I didn't remember him, in the many years since I had seen him last. His brother was there, his girlfriend, and his parents. I offered my sympathies to both of them, but I started crying when I talked to his mom. I don't think it helped anything, but her words just made me even more sad.
I doubt I will ever forget what she told me. "Lauren, never, ever, shut your parents out of your life."
The funeral was tough. I cried my way through the first half of it, but eventually I got to that point where my eyes just burned from crying, and my head hurt so much that I had to stop. I couldn't remember a time before when I had been so sad since my fifth grade teacher's funeral when I was in sixth grade. And even that was completely different. That was a loss due to cancer, not suicide. This was even sadder.
I made it through the funeral. The ending hymn was one that had the Welsh tune Ar Hyd y Nos (All Through the Night). I cried my way through that too.
In the weeks that followed the funeral, I couldn't understand why the death of someone that, in retrospect, I barely even knew had affected me so much. Why it had hit me so hard. I was VERY upset about Kurt's death. I couldn't explain it to anyone. I cried about it a lot. I couldn't hear All Through the Night without bursting into tears. I didn't even try to explain it to anyone, or talk about it with anyone, because I didn't understand it.
In the meantime, within a month, my creative writing teacher (ironically), took us on a tour of all the memorials at the high school. There were benches, and trees, and plaques, and other memorials of alumni that had died, whether it was during their high school career or after. Our assignment from there was to write about a memorial of some sort. He left it very open-ended.
I wrote about Kurt.
I wrote about finding his story, about hearing how he died two days later. I wrote about how I didn't want to go to the funeral. I wrote about how sad it was. And I wrote about how I cried.
And somewhere along the lines of writing about it, I came to a somewhat shaky conclusion as to why Kurt's death hit me, someone who barely knew him, so hard.
I wasn't just crying for Kurt.
I was crying for Kurt, and anyone else who came across such hard times in their lives that they felt that the only way out of their hard times or their depression was to kill themselves.
This conclusion didn't make me any happier automatically. But it helped. Writing about it helped.
I even read my story to the class, at the urging of one of my classmates. I had to swallow back tears for pretty much the whole time, but I made it through.
And about a year later, I found out that one of my other childhood friends, one of the other kids that hung out at the dinner parties, had been pretty affected by Kurt's suicide too. He wrote his college application essay to Madison about Kurt. It made me feel better, in a way, because Ian had known Kurt about as well as I had.
I have never, ever told anyone about this. Yes, I just said I wrote about it in my creative writing class, and read it to everyone, but it was different. I never wrote about my personal struggles with his death. I didn't write about how I couldn't listen to All Through the Night without crying, or how I would think about it just randomly and choke up. It was something that I never told a soul.
I haven't forgotten how I felt then. I choked up a couple times, and I definitely shed a few tears just writing this. It's hard to think that Kurt was just 22 when he died, and I'll be 22 in less than six months. And it's hard to think that today, he would be 26.
There's a lesson to be learned here somewhere.
I'm not sure what it is, but I'll give it a shot.
Never take life for granted.
Things always turn out okay in the end...if it's not okay, it's not the end.

- posted by L. @ 1:05 AM