Part 5
It's the middle of a dark night. I'm driving fast down a two lane highway. The road in front of me is dimly lit by headlights. I drive faster. Suddenly, I realize that I'm drunk out of my mind. But the drunker I feel the faster I drive, and the world becomes a blur. I feel myself losing control, swerving to the left and then to the right. I can't escape. The tree in front of me grows brighter as my headlights approach. I know it's the last thing I'll ever see. My car collides with the tree, and at that moment I wake up in a cold sweat…
Winter was on its way. The dying leaves and cloudy skies were a reflection of my internal world. The time between losing Steve and losing Joe had been a mere 32 days.
A veil of vivid memories stood between my eyes and my surroundings. All I saw was Joe. My trusty pressure relief valve, marijuana, transformed from my daily delight to my sadistic slave master. No matter how much I smoked, I couldn't get happy. The inner peace I had once felt was replaced by inescapable pain. I found myself vividly reliving every moment I had ever experienced with Joe. He was in my dreams. I would get lost in thought and imagine him walking through the doorway to tell me he was still alive.
What makes marijuana use so insidious is that, although you can maintain a relatively functional appearance, over time it slowly steals your soul. It's almost imperceptible in real time, like watching grass grow. But if you don't mow it down, you'll wake up one day and wonder how your lawn got so ugly.
Having prior knowledge that Steve's end was at hand allowed me to obtain an ounce of closure, but Joe's death hit me, and everyone who knew him, like a sucker punch. Needless to say, the fall of 2015 was spent in grief. There were torrential tears, days of denial, and mental breakdowns in which many people cried, "I just want my Joey back."
In retrospect, this outcome couldn't have been more obvious. People who make it their life's mission to test fate, and perpetually dangle themselves with one hand off of a cliff, usually have their death wish granted.
Joe's demise became a demarcation line. Some of my friends made it their excuse to dive deeper down their paths of destruction, while I and a few others were gently guided somewhere safer.
My own emotions simmered on the backburner for a few months, but ignoring reality was like turning up the heat, and eventually things boiled over. My mental breakdown happened the night before Thanksgiving. There was some petty drama unfolding in my family, and I told my mom I didn't want to go to our Thanksgiving dinner. When she asked why, the floodgates opened wide, and all I could say was, "I just miss Joe."
It was like that sentence was a cork jammed into a hole in the bottom of a sinking ship. It could no longer sustain the pressure of the flooding waters that threatened to drown me in the facts of life.
Luckily for me, what followed my unexpected outburst was a 3-hour-long therapy session with my mom, a conversation I will never forget, the type of therapy that money can't buy. I emerged from that conversation with a little less weight on my shoulders, and from that night on, slowly but surely, I began to develop a new sense of clarity and understanding. I even tried quitting weed. I attended my family gathering, and everything went just fine.
It's hard to remember the timeline here, but somehow, during all of this tragic chaos, JD and I found it within ourselves to write and record a new batch of songs. In fact, it was the best material we had ever written. I had always been crafting music in my mind from a very young age, and now that I was older and more experienced, this habit seemed to be paying off. I believe that having a creative outlet to channel all of my pain and suffering into is what saved me from going completely off the deep end during this time. I could always drift away to an imaginary world of rhyme and rhythm where even the most painful scenes became beautiful.
Despite it being the first Thanksgiving without Steve, there was some excitement in JD's family. Anthony had flown in from California for a surprise visit, perhaps feeling called to fill in the masculine void left by Steve's absence.
I was glad to be invited on a family outing to Dave and Buster’s in Grand Rapids one evening, where all the little cousins could play games and run around. Although Anthony's presence usually put me on edge, I felt relaxed. There were now bigger things in life than worrying about impressing anyone. As we all sat around the table, there was much talk of music, Michigan-Michigan State rivalry, and all the small things in life that bring us momentary joy. JD told me that night that he could hear a change in my voice, a resolution.
Of course my grief didn't disappear overnight. That would still be a long way off. But that wholesome night with my second family was one of the first steps down the road to acceptance.
It was around this time that JD and I started talking seriously about moving to California.