His name was Johnny. He was gentle. He used to carry me around when I was little. Johnny, his mother, my grandmother and his older brother came to live with us for a little while after my mother died. We lived on a drought riddled dry land farm in Nebraska, far from town. For some reason, perhaps financial, they returned to North Loup Nebraska where they had a home but we always knew that Johnny had not forgotten us.
Johnny was not much older than my brother. I always felt that Johnny had been special to my mother who had tried to fill the gap after his father?s death until his mother remarried.
When I reached adulthood, his home was always open to me in my travels from Midwest Nebraska to eastern Lincoln. It was my one link with my mother?s family. Beulah, his wife was a chatty little woman and they had four children.
And so, it was like a hard fall knocking the breath out of me when one early morning at work I was called from my desk to receive a phone call from his oldest daughter, choked by tears in her voice, saying that he had shot and killed himself, alone, before the youngest boy came home from school to find his dad dead.
Things had been rough for Johnny. Beulah had a habit of getting out of the car in mid-flight if she wanted to go somewhere other than where they were headed. One day after both had been drinking (which was a Sunday habit), Beulah got out of the car and was propelled into a cement bridge abutment ? killing her. Beulah?s family blamed him.
So, it was a cold stone floor that I stood on that wintry day, in a cold gray room, bare but for an undecorated casket at the funeral home. The casket would not be opened and I did not see him a final time. My heart felt like it could burst??Why did you do it, Johnny??, ?Didn?t you know we loved you?? Tears of frustration came. Why couldn?t we have gotten help to him somehow? It was forever too late now.
I listened as other relatives talked about this happening. When Johnny was a student in high school, the male shop teacher (woodworking) seemed to take an interest in Johnny. The teacher began to invite Johnny to drink alcohol. Perhaps the sting of his mother being on welfare was alleviated or the loneliness of fatherlessness pushed him. He graduated from high school, took a job at the Grand Island Vets Home for awhile.
There is another overpowering feeling of guilt which I have felt after a more recent suicide in my extended family. After downing two bottles of wine, he, like Johnny, committed suicide by shooting himself. Why couldn?t I have reached either one to listen to their heart language? Why didn?t I try somehow to get to them and lift their loads? I believe many felt the same way.
Suicide is a social oppression loaded onto a broken soul. No one takes time to listen, to build support; to encourage...no one just takes time, nor do we always have the kindest words to say. We do not understand.
Alcohol is a DEPRESSANT to one already depressed. It is an opiate deadening reason that finds no answer to the seemingly unsolvable problems. It is the Great Deceiver who revels in hopelessness, inviting self destruction. It leaves dishonor, shock, debts, and so much more. Suicide creates indelible memories. My heart will always hurt and my eyes will not remain dry.
Please pray for me that I may be used somehow to reach the persons who need reinforcement in life's situations that seem overwhelming. Those who seek to drown troubles in alcohol, that they may know that depression is not the end of everything requiring that they self-destruct.
Luella Hughes
