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I sat, reading, fighting back the sleep.
I heard the loud creaking of the garage door opening; routine.
Then, the hysteria. I couldn't tell if it was someone laughing, arguing, or crying, but I knew something was off.
I got up quickly from my bed and speed-walked through the TV room, muttering incoherent responses to my mother's questioning.
I opened the front door.
Sean was pacing frantically with the phone in his hand, crying, shouting in agony.
"Sean! What's going on?"
He stared me right in the face, tears streaming.
"Tyler just committed suicide!"
I froze, mouth open, and proceeded to run as fast as I could to tell, or rather scream, the news to my mother.
"Anna, STOP!" was her response, but one look at my face and she knew I was serious.
And I could still hear Sean. "No, Tyler, no... no... Tyler, no..." between sobs and wails as my mother ran to him.
"In the garage," he said, "I found him in the garage..." and he continued to struggle.
"Did you call the police? An ambulence?"
"Yes, they're on their way... I can't get ahold of Rachel..."
He was on the phone at the moment, but I didn't ask who he was talking to.
It hit me. I collapsed onto the stairs on the front porch, face in hands, hysteria bursting out of my eyes...
I coulldn't believe it. I wouldn't believe it. We assumed he was dead. I ran inside the house, grabbing three of the many rosaries hanging on my bedpost, ran back outside into my driveway, ignoring the gravel stabbing my feet, delivering one to my brother.
The police were nearing our house when I decided it was best to get the dogs inside. Mom made me take them into my room, and when I did, I didn't leave. I sat on my bed, thinking frantically of what I could do. I notified as many religious people as I could. I sat and prayed.
You must understand that in a situation like this, it doesn't matter what you believe in. All you care about is that something is done, that you've made any attempt you can to help yourself cope, to put your bets in with Heaven, to ensure a safe entry for who you love...
I talked to Geoff on the phone, and that calmed me down a little. But he had to hang up at some point, and the panic returned. It felt like hours sitting in my room, helpless, hearing the ambulance nearing our house and the hurried movements underneath my bedroom. I realized once Geoff asked that I didn't know what Tyler did to kill himself. But no, he wasn't dead yet, he couldn't be.
They had found a pulse. A distant pulse, but a pulse nonetheless. That was good, right?
Finally Sean came into my room to check on me. I went back outside with him, and by this time Rachel was home, her Hummer parked on the side of the road. They stood in a group underneath the street light at the end of my driveway. The shouting continued.
The rest is, understandably, a blur. I know that the detectives and police officers roamed my basement in hopes of finding a suicide note, all in futility. My mom was the one to tell the police the goings on of the day.
I had stayed home from school due to illness and fatigue, and was surprised to see that my mom and Tyler pulled up around noon. He came in, drowsy and depressed looking, and my mom filled me in that his Effexor dosage had been doubled that morning, and the poor kid couldn't handle it.
Let me tell you about Effexor.
It's side effects could compose an entire set of encyclopedias. The worst one? SUICIDE. Families are currenty suing the manufacturers because family members committed suicide while on that medication. Both of my brothers have taken it, and tried to stop cold turkey, with dangerous side effects.
Tyler had eaten lunch and dinner with us, intermittently sleeping in the basement. I had spent most of the day reading my book in my room.
Tyler had seemed normal all day, and that's what my mom told the police.
Sure, he had run away about a month ago, but he went to the hospital and got some help - but also that damned medication.
We decided to go to the hospital as soon as we could. While the detective took photos of our basement and garage with my mother, I sat with Sean on the front porch, stroking his hair; I knew something was wrong, that he felt guilty. I inquired.
"I could have helped him."
"We all feel that way, Sean..."
"No. Today."
"What? What happened?"
"I was busy. He wanted to go to the lake and talk. I could have helped him through this..."
It wasn't until later that I knew the full extent of what happened and why my brother felt responsible.
Mom and Sean had been sorting through old Beanie Babies, assigning them prices for an upcoming garage sale. Sean was looking the prices up online, and Tyler came into the room to see if Sean would go to the lake with him. Sean told him yes, but to wait just a minute.
"Just a minute" turned into fifteen, but not on purpose, because Sean was busy, and on any normal day, fifteen wouldn't make a difference.
But that day, it had.
Sean went downstairs to check on Tyler as soon as he could, and that's when he saw it.
Tyler had hung himself with his belt, from the top of one of our workout machines.
If Sean hadn't gotten there when he did, if he was even a minute late, Tyler wouldn't have made it. And so we rushed to Henry Medical.
It didn't hit me until Sean and I prayed the rosary in the tiny little family room they gave us. Even then, it wasn't as bad as it was when I finally saw Tyler. He was breathing artificially, so his chest was popping violently up and down every other second. There were several people in the room, many of them his friends. Rachel stroked his hair while Eli rubbed Tyler's feet. There were three or four girls in there crying. I sat, breathless, terrified, mouth open, tears welling, and then it all came out. Seeing him like that was a total and irreversible confirmation that he had actually just tried to take his own life, and that he may have succeeded.
Even so, it was worse than we thought. The cat scan that they took at Henry Medical gave the impression of an arterial bleed in Tyler's brain, meaning that pressure was welling up due to violent spurts of blood. A lung had collapsed. Still, when we looked at Tyler, he seemed to be in there somewhere. He was squeezing hands at least. Rachel had to make the decision to move him, because with the difficult condition Tyler was in, he had a chance of dying while being transported to a hospital that would take him.
The nurses and doctors at Henry Medical said that Tyler wouldn't make it through the ride, and that they couldn't find a hospital that would take Tyler, but they were wrong about both. Reluctantly, they let Rachel sign to have him transported, only after she signed a waiver that recognized the hospital's dissention. It took my family a while to decide whether or not we'd follow suit to Grady Memorial Hospital. We decided to go.
Sean, mom, and I piled into the car. I was in a daze for the whole car ride. We got there, and Tyler was already going into surgery, to get a trachiotomy. A trachiotomy is when the surgeon cuts a hole in a certain area on a patient's throat, inserting a tube, to enable better oxygen intake. We soon found out that that was Tyler's main problem, that his brain had lost too much oxygen, that his brain was beyond repair. Henry Medical, for lack of euphemism, FUCKED UP. They didn't get Tyler enough oxygen, because Tyler was regurgitating into his throat and the feeble tube they used.
And so we sat in the surgery waiting room on floor six. I was so incredibly exhausted; time had escaped us completely, and I was surprised to look and see that we were nearing 2 AM. I knew at that point in time that we would be there all night.
Mostly we sat in apprehensive silence. Rachel was outside of the room, in the hall. A few times my mom went to go talk to her. Sean and I stayed together, just as we had been doing the whole time. He and I said the rosary a couple more times, and when the atmosphere in the room lightened up just a little bit, we played a few silly games of "I Spy", welcoming the unfamiliar feeling of laughter. We even went so far as to sing songs from our favorite move, The Labyrinth.
We finally got to go see Tyler again, this time in groups. He looked so different, laying there with a neck brace, tube in throat, gasping for air at a regular tempo. His lips were pale. He looked dead already. As his girlfriend's mom spoke softly to him about who was there with him, tears streamed down his face. We don't know if he could hear us, if his brain was even functioning, but it seemed to be a good sign at the time. It was a response. His last response. He would open his eyes widely every now and then, staring up at the ceiling, looking horrified at his own predicament. Sean and I stood back, speechless. By this time I was numb. If I was crying, I didn't know it. We left the room after several minutes.
They sent us up to the seventh floor, and then back down to the fifth floor to wait in an open waiting room. I hate that room now. Nurses and doctors and janitors of all sorts walked in an out of hallways with noisy carts, and even worse: smiles on their faces. I made a habit of closing my eyes every time someone walked by. I couldn't remember the feeling of happiness. It was probably four or five in the morning when I finally fell asleep, perched on Sean's arm, and this sleep lasted for less than an hour. When I woke up I was terribly groggy, and all I wanted was to go anywhere that had a bed. My mom was so tired, too, and there weren't any seats left for her, so she squatted down by a table and put her head on it. I could have sworn she fell asleep that way. We tried to get my dad to come pick me up, because he was with my brother Geoff in Flowery Branch. I had been sending him text message updates about Tyler's condition, letting him know that there was no response on Tyler's behalf to any of the things the nurses did. Tyler went in for another cat scan as soon as the sun touched the other buildings of Atlanta, visible through the large window behind the chairs we were sitting in. I remember my mom buying me a poptart from the nearby vending machine, and though I thought I was hungry, I soon felt like I was going to throw up. I just wanted to go home.
The poptart woke me up enough, though, to the point where I could take in my surroundings without wanting to scream in fatigued agony. Rachel, the poor girl, was asleep under the arms of several chairs, wrapped up in Tyler's jacket. In the preceding hours, we had gone outside to smoke several times, and Rachel joined us now and then. She would rock back and forth, blaming herself.
"No, no, no he cain't go like this, he cain't die like this, he just cain't... I shouldn't have sent him to his granny's this weekend, I shouldn't have given him that medication... he cain't go like this..."
She was slowly losing her mind, and with good reason. Tyler was the only child she had that lived with her, that she could see every day. She once told my mother that Tyler was the only reason she got up in the morning.
My dad finally picked me up at around eleven in the morning, and Sean stayed at the hospital while my mother and I went home to sleep.
When mom and I got home, we had to hurry to pack Rachel and Sean a bag of clothes. This meant I had to go into the basement. My dad was down there getting some tools, and we could see into the room where it happened. My mom was crying again, very loudly. After my dad left, my mom and I went to the gas station to get some ginger ale and lunch. On the way home, she told me that while she was in the bathroom, she had a conversation with one of Tyler's friends.
My mom had told this girl that she needed to go check on me, using my name, and the girl recognized it. She said that Tyler said I was the most beautiful girl he'd ever seen.
I wish my mom hadn't told me that, because I immediately wanted to go back to the hospital, at least to say goodbye to Tyler, and also because it made me regret not spending more time with him. I was always so preoccupied with homework. I remember when he first moved in with us, he'd come upstairs while I was doing homework and ask me if I wanted to go swimming, or play video games, or go to the park, or just go on a walk, and I'd have to tell him No because I had hours and hours of homework to do. Eventually he stopped trying. If only I would have given him more attention, gotten to know him better as a person... but there's no going back now.
My mom and I lay in her bed and sleep consumed us immediately. I got text message updates from Sean.
10/14/08: 12:49PM: "Tyler died but they brought him back - doesn't look good"
10/14/08: 1:02 PM: "Tyler has about two hours until he dies"
Mom and I were torn. We didn't know if we should go back to the hospital or not. We decided to stay and wait, just in case it was too late. We prayed and slept until I got another text.
10/14/08: 4:01PM: "I guess they're still trying to decide whether to pull the plug or not"
and then another
10/14/08: 5:01PM: "They're going to try some new medicine and try to give him some more time"
So finally my mom got up, dressed, and to the phone to try to call Paul so that he could ride with her. She wanted me to get ahold of someone so I'd have a place to go. I called John. No answer. I called Ta, John wasn't at work. I called Lydia, no answer. Sarah texted me in response to my Facebook update: "Anna is praying anxiously for Tyler Smith".
She didn't know who he was:
Tyler Smith is Rachel Peretz's son. He is fifteen years old, and his birthday is on October 19th, just six days from the day he hung himself. He has blonde hair and blue green eyes. I've known him since I first met Rachel, and he used to have a crush on me. He was annoying, but in a cute way, the first year or so I knew him. He grew up fast, though. He moved in with me earlier this fall, and enrolled in Dutchtown High School. We'd eat breakfast together every morning, and I'd find him out front of the school building every afternoon to get in the car and go home. We'd either get another snack together or go our separate ways. Every now and then he'd come upstairs and watch TV with me, or talk with me, or play video games with Sean. He ran away, as previously mentioned, but when he came back he told me about how beautiful he realized life was. But he also told me about how his girlfriend, Ivy, had cheated on him while he was in the mental hospital. I loved him, in a friendly way. I cared for him so much. The last thing I said to him was "I'm going to go read" and sadly, I cannot remember the last thing he said to me. I stroked his arm affectionately when he got home from school early on that fateful Monday, and I remember wanting to hug him. But I was sick, and gross looking, so I contented myself with what I could. The last thing we did together was eat. I remember we talked to him about his medicine, and how it wasn't good that he was taking it. I told him about my brothers, how they had taken Effexor, and its effects on them. We convinced him to eat. He went down to sleep. I saw him again one more time, when he came back up to eat again. That's when I had finished my dinner already, and went to go read in my room. I shouldn't have. I should have stayed with him, and talked to him, and been with him.
Lydia finally called me back. She agreed to take my mom to the hospital, and to take me to John and Joel's apartment. We got to the apartment, and things were better for a while. It was better than home, at least, where I'd be forced to think about the grim realities. John and I watched Speed Racer, but I was distracted and tired, and only wanted to be held. My dad called for an update. It was then that he told me the truth about how Sean was currently doing.
This is the conversation that sent everything crashing into place, the conversation that said to my heart, "no, nothing is going to be the same, ever".
This is the conversation in which my dad told me that Sean was going to commit himself to a mental hospital as soon as this was all over, because he was going insane with the sight of Tyler hanging from our workout machine in our garage in his head. This is the conversation in which my dad told me that Sean feared that Rachel would take her life.
My dad picked me up around 1 AM. He, my mom, and I went to Waffle House. I couldn't sit up straight. I couldn't remove the blank and empty stare from my eyes. I ate part of my waffle, and some biscuits and gravy, and drank some chocolate milk, but it made my stomach hurt even worse, and my eyes refuse to open more vehemently. Finally we came home. I couldn't sleep in my room, so I set up camp in my old room upstairs, which is coincidentally where I am as I write this account.
I turned on "The Princess Bride" and watched it on my laptop. It took me no more than ten minutes to pass out.
Geoff woke me this morning. He came into the room and shared the bed with me. I put my head on his muscular stomach and fought back tears. He distracted me by making plans with me this weekend, but the conversation inevitably moved toward's Tyler's impending death and funeral.
I ate something. Geoff left to go to the doctor (he tore his bicep), my dad may or may not be here right now, and I can here my mom trying to get ahold of Sean right now.
We haven't heard from Sean all day. It worries me.
Tyler is dying as I write. He's on full life support, with no chances of survival. Even if he did survive, he would be "a vegetable", still relying on life support. Rachel can't decide if or when to remove him from life support, and someone's going to have to make the decision for her. She's worried that he'll go to hell, but my mom is convinced otherwise. "God loves his children," she says. She's right. Tyler will be happy again soon.
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_document's journal
happy
stressed
blah
sick
totally cool
nostalgic
drained
