Sons of Suicide

By Dan Andrews

An insightful, viscerally emotional memoir, Sons of Suicide relates the story of a young man’s life after losing his Mother to suicide—and succeeding, in spite of experiencing one of the most devastating tragedies known to man.

At eleven, Dan Andrews was abandoned by his Mother. Fatefully, she made the timeless drive down Lake Shore Drive in downtown Chicago, parked her car alongside Buckingham Fountain, and, after sitting and smoking a few last cigarettes, drowned herself in Lake Michigan.

His Mother’s grave decision has given Andrews the ability to perceive and contemplate loss in a way not written about in recent history. Shared with brutal vulnerability and skill, sprinkled with humor and sexuality, Sons of Suicide masterfully entertains and enlightens the reader— serving as a catharsis to the feeling of loss, a feeling to which all humans relate.

The author, Dan Andrews, has also pledged for every copy of Sons of Suicide that is sold, one dollar out of his personal royalty will be donated to the Will To Live Foundation, visit their website for more information about this wonderful organization that is spreading awareness and helping with the teen suicide epidemic. Purchase today to help put an end to suicide.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dan Andrews
• Release date: Nov 25, 2012
• ISBN: 9781301780945

Dan Andrews

My name is Dan Andrews. I am on a mission to create the best books in the world. My first book, Sons of Suicide, is now available.

Book preview

Sons

of

Suicide

Dan Andrews

Sons of Suicide

By Dan Andrews

Copyright 2012 Dan Andrews

Smashwords Edition

http://www.sonsofsuicide.com

All Rights Reserved.

Edited by Maxwell Hoover

Cover Design by Alex Laniosz

This book is available in print at most online retailers.

No part of this work may be reproduced without written permission from the publisher, except brief quotations for review purposes.

This is a work of non-fiction.

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Disclaimer: If you are a copyright holder and you feel your work has been represented unfairly, please contact the publisher.

Disclaimer: I have tried to recreate events, locales and conversations from my memories of them. In order to maintain their anonymity in some instances I have changed the names of individuals and places, and I may have changed some identifying characteristics and details, such as physical properties, occupations and places of residence.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1. Is She Dead?

Chapter 2. The Person I Was Before

Chapter 3. Your Mom…

Chapter 4. Gamerz Garage

Chapter 5. Enzo

Chapter 6. The Wonder Years

Chapter 7. Firsts and Lasts

Chapter 8. The Danimal

Chapter 9. Stepping Through the Threshold

Chapter 10. Hit, Form, Win.

Chapter 11. What Do You Want to Do For the Rest of Your Life?

Chapter 12. Straight Edge

Chapter 13. The American Dream

Chapter 14. I Am Not a Statistic

Chapter 15. Villain University

Chapter 16. Up, Up, and Away

Acknowledgments

A Letter to Piraters

Connect with Dan Andrews

Introduction

For a long time, I have searched for a memoir that dealt explicitly with loss on a personal level. Month after month of searching resulted in disappointment; there was simply no story available that satisfied my desperate desire to connect with an individual in a profound way through tragedy. Sons of Suicide fills a gap: it offers readers something that I had long searched for, but couldn’t find; it offers the experience of a person who has coped with and triumphed over one of the most devastating forms of loss known to man.

This book is the story of my life from the day that my Mom, Susan Andrews, committed suicide by drowning herself in Lake Michigan. Within it contains the person I was, the person I am, and the person I will become. I have taken painstaking care to provide you the reader with as much insight into my tragedy as possible, in hopes that you can in turn use the lessons I learned to survive your own personal struggles.

To be clear, this is not a sob story. Certainly there are parts that may depress, sadden, or strike a chord within you. The goal of this book is to inspire everyone who has experienced loss of any form, regardless of how trivial it may seem to others.

I do not take my Word or promises lightly. This book records a true story, based on real experiences. As I am writing in the present, reflecting on my past, I present these experiences as truthfully and accurately as I can recall them. Only a handful of names and locations have been changed to protect certain individuals and myself from legal consequences.

As a result of the accuracy with which I record my experiences, I have been forced to portray events and topics that will likely offend the average reader. It is simply the nature of the person that I am. I ask only that you read through to the end and that you do so with an open mind. By doing so, you will have, at the very least, the entirety of my work to reflect on.

Thank you for supporting me by purchasing this book. It means more to me then you will ever know.

I sincerely hope that you find tremendous value in the words I have poured my entire life into. I encourage you to pour yourself into my words just as I have, and together we will create the wonderful blend that makes for an amazing reading experience. Thank you again.

Welcome to Sons of Suicide.

Is She Dead?- Chapter 1

Life isn’t short,

it can just end fast.

The baited hook sat calmly in the pond. The worm half alive, struggling to survive, surrounded by clouded water, ignorant, was swiftly consumed in a flash of shiny scales as I held on and reeled the clear fishing line in to bring the fish to me. It was a warm and slightly overcast June day. No place could make me happier than the local pond, fishing with my friend Alex Walker. The fish hadn’t been too kind to us that day; the largemouth bass and blue-gills just weren’t biting like they did on most days we spent standing on the bank, but we still managed to nab a few. As we were making our way around the pond, a navy blue DuPage County Sheriff’s police car with two officers inside pulled up to the curb of the road next to the pond, no further than fifty yards away. At the time, the thought of my mom didn’t even cross my mind. I was aware that she had been gone for a couple of days, but such intervals weren’t out of the ordinary. She would occasionally go to my Grandma’s house for dinner without notice or sometimes to spend the night, but she always returned.

When the DuPage county sheriff got out of his car and waved me over, he told me that my dad wanted me to come home, and he offered to drive me there. I had ridden my bike to the pond, so I agreed to let Alex hang onto it for a couple of days until I could get it back from him. I threw my fishing pole and other gear into the trunk and slid into the hard polymer backseat of the squad car. I had never been in one before, so I asked the two officers, Why are the seats back here plastic?

One of the officers jovially responded, Just in case anyone we pick up is drunk, and they have an accident.

Then, with a moment’s pause, I asked another question that still haunts me as I write these words today:

Is she dead?

A surreal aura had taken over the prophetic moment and one of the officers dodged the question by responding, We’ll talk when we get you home. I had never thought I would ask if my own Mother was dead, let alone at twelve years old. Nine years later, I still cannot figure out what compelled me to ask that question. It was strange being picked up by the police, and Mom had been missing longer than normal, but there was nothing to indicate that she might have died.

We arrived at our apartment, located in Clarendon Hills, a small, affluent town in the western suburbs of Chicago, Illinois. I walked with the officers to the door of my family’s apartment, where there was a strange-looking man with a white beard standing over my brother and dad, who were sitting on the couch. The first thing I noticed was their bloodshot eyes and their hot, puffy faces. They were clearly upset by something. The police introduced me to the strange-looking man. He had the appearance of a priest, sporting a white collar and wearing a black robe, but he told me upon shaking my hand that he was a Deacon, which is basically a step below a priest, a minister of sorts. I was confused as to why a Deacon was in my home. Then, as I walked over to my dad, he opened his arms, grabbed me, and simply said, She’s gone. We both started crying.

I hadn’t known pain until that moment. And from that point on throughout my entire life I have had an inexplicable emptiness inside my chest, though it has grown smaller over time. I then ran into my parents’ bedroom, and my dad followed after me, trying to console me.

After we were exhausted from the sheer pain and energy expended due to the tears that were shed, my dad decided that we had to tell the rest of the family. We went to my Grandma’s house and told her the news that her daughter was dead, which left her heartbroken just as it had left us. My Mom and Grandma had always been close; she was the one my Mom turned to when things in life weren’t going so well. They had much in common, not only because they were mother and daughter but because they both suffered from depression, for which they even took the same medication prescribed by the same psychiatrist. Years later, I found out that before my Mom committed suicide, she had told my Grandma that she sometimes thought about driving her car into Lake Michigan.

The day ended up turning into a sad sort of family reunion. Every time before when I had gathered with my relatives, it was for a happy occasion, a holiday, a birthday, something happy. This reunion was the polar opposite. It was a reunion of agony and loss. As we shared the news with arriving family members, we were consciously shattering their lives. Slowly arrangements were formed by our family to organize the wake, funeral, and burial. It was convenient that my uncle Morris, my Mom’s brother-in-law owned a memorial company. He would be able to create the headstone and organize a meeting to select a casket.

That night someone needed to go to the morgue and identify the body, a task delegated to my dad. I had desperately wanted to go with because I wanted to see her; I still didn’t believe it was true. My family discouraged me and said I couldn’t, of course; they didn’t want my last impression of her to be from a morgue. This is a decision for which I am entirely grateful. Of all my family members, I was probably the calmest and most collected. When one of the closest people in your life passes away, you get a feeling like you have been shot with a gun. The loud crack, impact, and disbelief overwhelm the fact that the searing pain is not immediate; the blood isn’t spurting, seconds pass, slowly the pain dawns on you, as the blood begins to flow, and you realize that this is what death feels like. Sometimes an ambulance gets called and the gunshot wound heals. Other times you lay in the street as your life goes to waste. The same thing happens when we experience tragedy. Some people patch themselves up and carry on. Others think they are helpless and bleed to death, over the course of a lifetime, because they cannot find resolve within themselves.

My Mom wouldn’t be around to see me graduate middle school, she wouldn’t be around to meet my first girlfriend, nor would she be around to see me graduate from high school and send me off to college. She was ultimately robbed of so many memories due to the actions of a careless psychiatrist, a title of which he is entirely undeserving. My Mom battled depression for many years; it started at the end of high school when she broke up with a boyfriend she was close to; and over the next twenty-plus years, she was prescribed virtually every anti-depressant pill, anti-anxiety pill, and every other medication that could possibly treat her depression.

I recall, soon after her death, finding a letter from one of the drug companies, the company making profits off the sale of this product. The letter said that the dosage of this drug and its combination with others were unsafe, and it also contained a warning: to consult with her psychiatrist to address this concern. The irony is that her psychiatrist was the one who put her on all of the drugs to begin with. Because of the deadly negligence and malpractice of her psychiatrist, I don’t have any resentment towards my Mom; her judgment was so severely clouded that she did not understand the pain and damage her actions would inflict on her loved ones. Her suicide was a result of taking over half a dozen of the most potent anti-anxiety and anti-depressant pills ever to have spilled out of a chemist’s beaker, some of them in much higher than the maximum recommended dosage, all of which were prescribed by a doctor. Obviously, she was incapable of rational thought, as anyone in my family would tell you.

My Mom loved my brother and me more than anything in this entire world—her final letter expressed this in it—and wouldn’t have willfully left us for anything or any reason, had she been in a clear state of mind. Even though her judgment was severely clouded by a pharmaceutical fog, it was still ultimately a decision she made to take her own life, and because of this, I do feel as though she did abandon me and my family.

A couple of days after the event, I was at the wake for my own Mom. My brother, Matt, had picked the quote on the back of the funeral card:

God saw you getting tired

and a cure was not to be

so he put his arms around you

and whispered,

Come to Me

With tearful eyes we watched you

and saw you pass away

and although we love you dearly

we could not make you stay.

A Golden heart stopped beating

hard working hands at rest.

God broke our hearts to prove to us

He only takes the best.

Eerily perfect.

The first funeral I ever went to in my life was hers. I couldn’t help but think that both God and my Mom had abandoned me. The all-knowing power that we are told about from such a young age—a force said to be benevolent, caring, and loving—had forsaken me and my Mom. Where was He in her time of need? Where was the miracle while my Mom was inhaling the cold dark water that would suffocate her?

To this day, in response to any religious person who tries to tell me, it was her time, I simply shake my head, and say, If God saw fit to take my Mom away from me at twelve years old, and cut her life so short in such a heart-rending and grotesque manner, I want nothing to do with him or his afterlife.

She looked so pretty, lying in the casket, but her face was uncharacteristically cold, as was her skin. She smelled of her favorite sweet perfume. The perfume was by Clinique, called Happy because the way it smelled was supposed to make you happy. She wore it all the time, and the fragrance still brings her presence back to my mind. Now, the name seems oddly ironic, since it makes me anything but happy. Part of the eleven-year-old boy who stood by her coffin that day thought she might just come alive, as if she had been asleep that whole time, as if it all had been a nightmare. Another part of him wanted to jump into the casket with her because he was certain that a life without Mom wouldn’t be worth living.

In spite of my young age, I insisted on speaking at the wake in front of everyone who loved my Mom. It was the first speech I ever gave. I said the things you might expect: She was the best mom ever and I don’t know why she wanted to leave us. Relatives recall that my voice was extremely calm during most of it, though I mostly remember myself choking on my words through burning tears and gasps for air. It was all so real. My dead Mom behind me, the living in front of me, she was just gone. My world was collapsing around me. There were no words that I, or anyone else, could say that could have been worthy of Mom’s funeral. I just wanted to leave everyone and join her. I wanted to see her again—even if it meant a bullet in my brain or a rope around my neck. No fate could be as bad as living without her.

In the sickening soft-yellow lit room, suffocated by floral décor, the funeral directors played and the mourners listened to Amazing Grace and Somewhere Over the Rainbow by Israel Kamakawiwo’ole. To this day, when I hear Somewhere Over the Rainbow, it takes everything I have to not get choked up.

After the funeral proceedings, we stood around talking in the Clarendon Hills cemetery. The cemetery is quite peaceful, and there is a huge old walnut tree right near her headstone. So, because of the tree, we have always had to bring along a little broom to clear away the leaves and twigs in order to read the headstone. While we stood at the cemetery that day, one of my family members had the bright idea to tell my grandpa that his daughter Doreen, my aunt on my dad’s side, had passed away the night before. This additional tragedy only compounded his state of misery. She had long battled with skin cancer and finally lost the fight. I’ve seen pictures of her taken when she was young. She was an attractive girl then, though I only remember her after the cancer treatments, which left her appearance sadly frail. I never had time to grieve my Aunt; I was too busy trying to deal with the fact that I would never hold my own Mom again. I cannot imagine the pain my dad was in: his own sister and wife had died within one week of each other. I’m not sure that, even nine years later, he has had time to come to terms with it.

This was all compounded by the fact that same week my great-grandmother broke her hip, which resulted in a rapid decline in her health, and ultimately led to her passing away not long afterward. It felt as though my Mom, aunt, and great-grandmother had all died the same week.

One of the worst parts of that day was hearing the things that people and distant relatives said. A hopeless feeling would grow as each word slipped from one of their mouths. They would say that they understood, but I knew that they couldn’t. Each second they spent pathetically spitting condolences was a second too long. The longer they bumbled through their condolences, the more my heart went to waste. I wanted to believe them, but their words were meaningless. They had not experienced the suicide of their Mom at a young age; all of their breath was wasted.

Tears fell with the casket into the earth. In the corner of my eye they pooled, threshold reached, down my cheek they fell, one after the other. The casket descended deeper, past the roots, past the earth, escorted by insects, covered in beautiful, living, roses of different colors. Each saline drop carried with it my sanity, as I was drawn into hysteria. I wasn’t only weeping for her. It was everyone, my Mom, my brother, my dad, everyone that I loved. That day, I attended two funerals. One was Mom’s, and the other was mine. The old Dan Andrews was buried with her. I do not regard myself as the same person I was when my Mom was alive. In my mind, they have become two different lives I have lead. Anyone who has experienced loss at such a young age can tell you that afterwards it seems as though all of your youthful exuberance is gone in days. I was forced to grow up and experience twenty years' worth of pain. This type of devastation requires maturation at a rate no one would wish on a kid. Because of this terrible loss, I was set down a path in life few have ever known.

The Person I Was Before- Chapter 2

I took a walk to remind myself why I wasn’t the one who gave up on life

with a cigarette and a swim.

The old Dan Andrews died on June 11th, 2003. Before then, I was just an average kid, for the most part. I grew up in white suburbia in