I wrote in January that I wanted to have a good February, for seven years now it is my worst month of the year next to December. I was actually working on the anniversary of PH’s death and with the Olympics I had every reason to believe that February 2010 would be at least a little easier than past ones. I figured after I hashed it out last year in various posts that I had for real reached a place of finally saying to myself it is just a day like any other day, that and attaching meaning to it gives it power. It isn’t that day anymore, that day was over seven years ago, that day is history. I remember observing my feelings on the 4th while working, acknowledging the loss, but I felt no need to cry or tell anyone anything and I wasn’t sad, I had a good day.
The month on the other hand was one I will not soon forget and it had little to do with the Olympics. Turned out that just because I thought I had dealing with the loss in the bag this year that I ended up facing one of my most challenging Februarys since the knock on my door that long night ago. In some ways it still seems only fair that I should be challenged by suicide, that is partly why I hang on so tightly to PH’s death. It reminds me of what I have almost on too many occasions done to my family and friends.
The Olympic rings and the torch were close together and close to our apartment, we waited a few days into the Olympics before we attempted to go and see the torch, I’m not that down with crowds, I’m sort of small. I was picked up off my feet once in a crowd going in various directions and was carried and shuffled around for what FELT like a good minute of claustrophobic helpless fear before my feet found stable ground. We’d already been down to see the rings trying on a few occasions to catch them with the actual Olympic colours but were only able to see them green, blue and gold. To be honest, I’m pretty pissed off at that, I don’t know why it was like that, if anyone knows please enlighten me it was beyond annoying, except OF COURSE the rings being gold when we won gold, that was great.
On the walk to the torch we photographed the rings in green and were in good spirits, having finished our red mitten beers we were excited because the area didn’t look busy. It didn’t dawn on me to think anything of it; even when I saw the police standing at the top of the stairs that lead off that part of the seawall and into the city. I wanted to take some photos from the top of the observation deck and headed in that direction when I was stopped by a cop and told there had been an incident and the area was closed off. Having no idea what was going on I was not impressed, everything appeared to be extremely calm. We’d finally gone out to see THE torch that good ol’ Wayne lit up in the pissing rain, the fact that we could hear that moment from our window, come on, let us see the brilliant torch of the 2010 Olympics already, shove your police incident. Because I am completely non reactive and am always level headed when faced with situations that don’t go my way it only made sense that I had a few choice words for the police incident.
After a short detour we ended up on Hastings street. We had walked back pretty far before heading up to Hasting but this area was also blocked off by barricades and cops, we asked a woman waiting on the curb what was going on, to which she responded that there was a jumper they were currently trying to talk down up on the construction crane directly in front of Canada Place.
My body didn’t go numb, but I had an immediate reaction. I turned left, back towards the crane skirting the area that was blocked off; at the corner of the 1000 block of Hasting the reality of it hit, multiple cop cars were present, swat had just arrived and there were fire trucks. People had started to gather on the stairs by the United States Embassy and the Starbucks. The closer I got the slower I started to walk. Adam was naturally trying to divert me from even going into this area at all but I felt this bizarre pull, a right to be there, maybe I hadn’t seen someone jump to their death but in the month of February I had lost someone in a very gruesome self inflicted way, be it seven years ago or not.
There was a girl standing with a man and she had a camera set up on a parking meter pointed up at the crane. I didn’t say anything to her, I’m sure she wasn’t the only one but she was the most obvious. I can’t find the words to express what state of mind I was in but I wasn’t being rational, obviously, I mean who feels like they have a right to watch a man jump to his death? It wasn’t even close to as extreme as when I was told that PH had killed himself but some of the feelings washing over me where similar. Adam asked me what the HELL I was getting out of this, why wouldn’t I move from the middle of the sidewalk and continue on towards the party on Granville. My feet felt glued to the pavement and slowly like I’d taken a few too many extra milligrams of Clonazepman I tried to explain that I needed a new memory, that I was supposed to witness this, if he jumped, that is what I’d remember, that is what my mind’s eye would focus on, not PH. Even saying it I knew it wasn’t true, and crazy regardless, there is no erasing those memories, but the screaming reality of what could have taken place right there in front of my eyes suddenly tossed me directly into anger mode. I highly doubted the sickos on the stairs had lost someone to suicide, or even knew what it was really like to want to die that badly.
I was angry because I said I wasn’t going to get upset this year, I was over it, and any sadness was mostly for my friend’s family and I was proud to have finally gotten there. This little test as I saw it wasn’t what I had bargained for, so what, I finally get to a peaceful place over a tragic loss and even if we had have just walked on by I’d have STILL known there was someone up on that crane. And suicide victim Andrew Koenig had not been found yet and I was already feeling challenged with that, it just wasn’t staring me in the face. But now TWO extra February suicide challenges, it made me wonder what it even means to be over something. This may all sound selfish, but when you’ve been through it on more than one level: level one having put your own self in the hospital multiple times and slept off many a prescription med OD, and on level two having lost someone. Lets just say I can’t even remember what it was like before I went through it. When someone attempts to or does take their life it fucks me up, whether for two minutes or a day or I drop into a depressive state for a bit. When I remember what I almost did to my family and friends that thought doesn’t get far in my head without an internal voice saying, “what about PH’s family?”, look how far that pain spread though his friends and rippled down to acquaintances. In fact that was a third challenge I faced this February, getting mail from someone who knew him. This does on occasion happen but it has never happened with someone I’m in contact with and the connection was made in the still getting to know each other process. I faced this by not letting it make me sad, it simply showed me yet again how fantastic of a person he was, just how many lives he touched in his short 36 years.
Adam wasn’t surprised there was a dude up the crane, he himself being a casualty of a job loss directly related to the Olympics. It made sense what with the state of the city that it was a perfect time to end it all. If the city had anything to say about it nothing was going to get in the way of how great the Olympics were, not twenty-one year old Nodar Kumaritashvili from Georgia dying in a training run for the Luge, not violent protests, not the suicide of Andrew Koenig, not a tent city of homeless people on the East Side, not that.
The next day I scoured google with every search string I could think of, scraped Twitter and found nothing. I was left to assume they talked him down.
Most Februarys I just remember PH, this February maybe I tried too hard to forget. I didn’t stop and remember the good times until I got an email reminding me to. I think I confused being over something with letting it go. When I walked away from the scene wanting to kick that bitch with the camera, I thought this just isn’t fair, haven’t I been tested enough? Apparently I had been tested enough, I just didn’t have some of the equations figured out correctly. I can let something go now without ever having to be over it, I’ve let go of a number of things but I’m not over the memories they came with and in most cases I wouldn’t want to be, even the really bloody hard ones.
Always one to appreciate the little things, I was extremely excited about the innovation in giving urine samples, the funnel on top of the regular looking container with the lid and a nice little hand-wipe all in a sterile bag just for me. I went on to explain to Adam that this funnel was such a fantastic advancement that I couldn’t even believe it, why had no one done it sooner?
