A Better Obituary

On a memory...

We’ve spoken before on finding ourselves in our memories of others, and an unsurprisingly clear reflection on this has emanated from the mind of our friend Arbogast.

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A Better Obituary

There is no “correct” way to grieve. However, the way we grieve in THE CURRENT YEAR is unhealthy. Our ancestors wore black for a year; we take selfies at an open casket wake. These are not comparable civilizations. It is cliché to say, but respect and civility were the first causalities of our culture war. To expect their return is a fool’s errand, and yet I still felt profound shock when Caleb’s mom posted about her son’s death on Facebook.

“He died in our garage. He hung himself.”

This is how she, a grieving mother, responded to an inquiry about a fundraiser for her son’s funeral costs. The words, so callous, cut me like a linoleum knife. I knew Caleb, of course. That is why I was lurking on his Facebook page to begin with. But I cannot say that he and I were close. We just happened to share a few years in adolescence together. Still, reading those words made me feel even more heartbroken for the guy. How could someone be so blunt about suicide, especially on a wide-open social media forum where any sicko could come creeping along and get off on her son’s demise? I have known other suicides in my thirty-odd years, and each time the families played as coy as possible. Vague euphemisms replaced cold facts. Their boys (and they are always men) perished “unexpectedly at home” or “after a brief illness.” These sanitized code words informed those who knew what to look for, but for the masses online and IRL, they left open a comfortable mystery—a mystery that the family could settle in private. Caleb’s mom decided on a different path. Maybe the decision came out of anger. When someone commits suicide, they leave behind pain that never goes away. There is just this empty void—a black hole offering nothing but doubt for those who survive. Some suicides are egotistical. Yes, they want the left-behinds to suffer, and to see how much they, the dead, mattered in the world. Others kill themselves because they feel like a burden. Then there are those who cannot fight the internal war anymore. They are tired of waking up and feeling like dirt. They are sick to death of pretending that everything is fine. They are through with being lonesome. I feel the most affinity with this latter group. Each year of my adulthood has grown lonelier than the last. 2020 was especially rotten, as months in home confinement coupled with a society-wide aversion to intimacy made me reach for my revolver. I know I’m far from the only one.

But I have no idea why Caleb killed himself. His obituary never said anything about health problems, or drug addiction, or a broken heart. Obituaries rarely give anything other than the barest outline of someone’s life. They are anemic things fit to be consumed and discarded immediately. They are, at their core, a simple slew of sentences reminding history that someone existed. Obituaries are not good enough. The one the rural newspaper penned for my grandfather mentioned his service in World War II and the fact that he had been wounded at Bastogne, but it failed to note his humor or his habit of playing practical jokes on everyone, friend and foe alike. The refusal to report grandpa’s greatest hits, from the time he dropped toilet paper on his neighbor’s roof while riding in his friend’s Cessna, to opening his colostomy bag at the dinner table to make us all laugh a little at his cancer, will never be forgiven. I feel a similar antipathy to the author of my grandmother’s obituary, as well as the hack who did not bother to write anything meaningful about Caleb. Both deserved better.

Caleb appeared like a lightning strike in middle school. He may have been there all along, but I did not notice him until the seventh grade. The woodshop teacher paired us together in a group of four to complete a woodworking assignment. I cannot for the life of me recall what the assignment entailed, nor do I remember doing any work at all. My memories are consumed by Caleb. He was without a doubt the weirdest, most dangerous, and most interesting kid I had ever met.

Caleb loved professional wrestling. This love is how we first bonded. We found that we both preferred Extreme Championship Wrestling, or ECW, to the safer federations of the WWF and WCW. To us and other young men then running through puberty, ECW’s blend of gore and gorgeous women hit all the sweet spots. Eros and wrath could be satiated with one pay-per-view. Or at least they could for me. To Caleb, ECW sometimes did not go far enough. He always wanted more burning tables, more barbed wire matches, more blood. And Caleb was not content to just complain about it either. The next year, in eighth grade, he either created or joined a backyard wrestling federation that specialized in doing ultraviolent exhibitions. Think cheese graters used as weapons, or a trampoline full of thumbtacks. Caleb flourished in this world for a time.

There were other violent tendencies. He had an unhealthy interest in serial killers. He would go on for a while in class or at lunch about the intricate details of Ted Bundy or the Zodiac Killer. While nowadays a lot of normies are true crime addicts, and one cannot filter through podcast recommendations without stumbling across middlingly attractive women talking about murder, back then such a fixation on human darkness marked one as off-kilter. Caleb knew this and ran with it. His favorite way of disturbing people (including myself) was to talk about all the different ways that animals can be abused. Caleb’s detailed analysis of the effects of WD-40 on a canine’s inner ear or eyeballs left no doubt that he spoke with first-hand knowledge. Caleb earned his reputation as the student most likely to carry out a massacre based on such talk alone.

As much as I was encouraged to avoid him by everyone else, I kept talking to Caleb. We had too much in common in terms of taste, especially music. He loved the Insane Clown Posse, while I was then just getting into punk rock. I would talk about the awesomeness of Black Flag and Misfits, while Caleb would wax poetic about Slipknot and Korn. Our tastes marked us as different in the classroom, but neither of us cared about that. We were both used to being a little weird. For me, the oddness came from a personal tragedy that marked me as outside of the normal frame of reference for the other kids. For Caleb, the weirdness seemed deeper and much darker.

Caleb certainly had all the hallmarks of an abused kid—he was prone to fits of anger, he had poor to non-existent social skills, and his collapsed posture, which made him almost look hunchbacked, indicated sub-optimal self-esteem. Caleb also had a habit of lashing out at authority figures, especially those who tried to correct his usually anti-social behavior with mild criticism. Our church league basketball coach was one such figure, and after several games of the meek insurance salesman telling Caleb to hustle back for defense or box out, Caleb had enough. During a recorded game for our church league playoffs, Caleb, while in the middle of a transition caused by a turnover, stopped at the half court line to scream at our coach. “Stop yelling at me!” he barked. The move silenced, then horrified the crowd. Caleb’s impertinence shocked the church-going parents. To them, his behavior indicated a broader youth revolt against legitimate authority and morals. This occurred in the late 1990s after all, when the entire entertainment industrial complex churned out overly sexualized and violent products. You could not escape the Jerry Springer-ification of American mass culture. Caleb seemed like just another casualty.

I knew better. Caleb’s mid-game tantrum was the rare time when he dropped his guard and showed the world just how vulnerable he was. Caleb wanted to be loved and liked, and he desperately wanted to be seen as anything other than the shabbily dressed and destitute “trailer park trash” that everyone saw him as. But, as with so many other perpetual “losers,” Caleb could not help himself. Not on the basketball court, not in the classroom, and not in the world.

Caleb left my life just as quickly as he had entered it. After eighth grade, Caleb either moved, went to a different high school, or was so much of a ghost at our high school that nobody can recall seeing him in the hallways. He may have gone part-time to the trade school that had a partnership with our high school. Many of our county’s poorest boys (again, always boys) are shuttled off to the trade school to learn how to be mechanics, plumbers, etc. This created a class divide, as the other half of the high school came from the well-to-do sections of the county, where golf resorts and realtors outnumbered factories and farms. Once again Caleb found himself on the dirtier end of the hierarchy.

In young adulthood, while I drifted through different states and cities in a sort of vain voyage to surmount my own blue-collar roots, Caleb worked a series of odd jobs. I learned during prolonged Christmas vacations at home that Caleb worked at a gas station. Then it was a liquor store. Then nothing. All my Caleb news dried up beyond the occasional joke about his Facebook account. You see, in the last year of his life, Caleb became a prolific poster on social media. Much of his posts were about fairly normal, if not somewhat edgy stuff like complaining about football games, extolling the virtues of certain strains of marijuana, or sharing his opinions about the benefits of a Bernie Sanders presidency. Caleb posted lots of pictures about Guy Fawkes, or rather Alan Moore’s version of the Roman Catholic theocrat executed by the Anglican monarchy of England. Caleb also did livestreams where, like an even more schizophrenic Alex Jones, he went on for hours and hours about chemtrails, black helicopters, the 99%, government hypocrisy on drugs, and the abuses of the justice system. I joined one of these livestreams, then hopped off once Caleb noticed my name and gave me a shoutout for agreeing with him. Just like in seventh grade, I found myself attached to Caleb but simultaneously stained and shameful for being so close to someone so abnormal. 

At some point he was arrested. Caleb was arrested multiple times. Offenses included DUIs and illegal possession of narcotics. One of his convictions was documented on his Facebook, as Caleb took a picture of himself stealing gas from the tank of police cruiser. Caleb never seemed to have served much time in prison, however. At least the local justice system took pity on him. Maybe that was some karmic consolation prize for all his other handicaps. If so, then it was not enough.

Caleb killed himself not long after the new year. While spending time with his extended family at their beachfront rental, he locked himself in the garage, tied a noose, and leapt from consciousness to the beyond. A day later, his mother would tell the world as much online. Thus ended the sad life of Caleb.

I wish I knew him better. I really do. I would love to write here about all the times Caleb made people laugh with his trademark black humor. I know I laughed at some of his jokes in woodshop class all those many years ago. I similarly wish that I could write here about Caleb’s relationships. He was probably a good boyfriend, a good son, and a good grandson. I do not know. I do know that Caleb had a rough life. The world worked against him. His brain was off-center, his socioeconomic condition was never stable, and most of the people around him preferred avoidance. Clannish small towns can be as cruel as they are kind, and all the drugs and alcohol could not calm Caleb’s worried soul. Suicide seemed like the solution, but it never is.

Like several other men I have known, Caleb went to his grave early and unnaturally, leavingt behind social media pages that will never be updated. They left behind girlfriends, dealers, and sometimes kids. The most tragic of them left behind little besides the store clerk who misses seeing them on Friday nights, or the town librarian who would break professional omerta to talk to them about the most recent Dan Baldacci novel. Still, they left something behind. We all leave a little bit of ourselves behind. These ghost traces are everywhere if you really bother to look. And they’re growing too. Caleb’s story is emblematic of generations of suicides—mostly working-class white men with more addictions than prospects.

Every suicide bears the responsibility of making the wrong choice, but most made said choices after a lifetime of disappointment. Nobody, especially not the sick punishment regime that we call the modern world, bothered to explain to them that every particle in the cultural ecosystem, even those we wrongly accuse of being “losers,” has value and worth. One does not need to make lots of money, earn a spot in the C-Suite, or date a model to matter. In fact, most of the young men out there, and many of them reading this, probably feel worthless. I know I do. Some can only drift from low-paying job to job. Some worry about never being able to find love or even a tiny bit of tenderness. Some fret over finding meaning in a world tripping over itself to expose just how meaningless it is.

Caleb probably experienced all these thoughts and doubts. He and his life had value and worth. His life is now a memory, and memories, both dark and bright, demand to be kept.

This is my memory of Caleb.

Thank you for reading, and check more from Arbogast!

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