So Long, My Boy

Nicholas Andrew Butcher died tonight. He was my son and I loved him, he was a good kid who lost his way. He lost his way enough that tonight in the county jail he took his life. At 3:00 AM the police knocked on our door and brought us the news. Two distressed cops and a chaplin came to my door to tell me that our son had committed suicide. It wasn't a long conversation, there was no need for them to have to watch my wife fall apart and there was nothing anyone could do to comfort her and my grief was bone deep enough that an outsider was no more than an annoyance.

Nick started his life as one of those people who charm you with no particular effort on his part. Things stopped working out for him by the time he went to school, school was a struggle and outside his interest. He couldn't stick with things long, even things he was good at. By age seven he could burn me out of a ball glove and throw accurately, a pitching standout in the making. A couple years of baseball and he no longer cared about it, he kept at it a bit longer, I think to please us, and quit. By the time he quit he was no longer a desirable team mate because he just didn't care. Much of Nick's childhood was like that, things he liked and was good at stopped mattering. Drag racing entranced him for a season and then he wanted nothing to do with it. It became the ordinary course of events that short term interest was followed by disinterest of a fundamental nature.

By high school he had started to get into trouble, pissant stuff, but sufficient until he finally stole my wife's car and cracked it up. That launched a couple years of trouble and involvement with the courts and juvenile department. He pulled himself together enough to get a GED and he enlisted in the Oregon National Guard. We went to his graduation in Columbus GA and I spoke to his Drill Instructor who allowed that Nick had been a stand out after a rough start. Allowed is the proper word, DIs aren't nannies and their job isn't reassuring parents. He moved over to the Portland area and got a decent job and quickly moved up and true to pattern lost interest in it and his girl friend and walked back into troubles. When they got deep enough he moved back home.

This is a small enough town that you become known and if you become known for troubles, you will be watched. Nick couldn't seem to keep away from things that would cause him troubles. He's been in the county jail for the last two months awaiting trial, and it seemed that there wasn't anything against him and he insisted that this he hadn't done. Despite practice Nick wasn't a good liar, it seemed as though the part that lied was always in conflict with the part that knew better, whatever; he was no good at it. Nick's pattern was to do well and get tired of it and make bad decisions mostly involving the easy way out.

Tonight he made another one of those decisions. It's no one's fault, not the jail or anyone else, he just made another one of those Nick decisions. I'm sure that he didn't consider that despite our disappointment and anger with him that this would break our hearts. It does. Now an hour later as I type this tears have finally started to run down my cheeks. My boy is gone and it hurts. I kept hoping he would find his way back, that my pal would win out in the end. There are inumerable good memories of the kid I loved and now that's what I have. I choose to let the bad stuff fade and to keep alive pictures like the 4 year old lugging his toy gun throught the woods trying to sneak and still keep up with Dad on an elk hunt and his pride in learning woods craft and ability to spot animals no human should be have been able to. Squatting in the back yard catching for him in fear of being broken if a pitch got away and his absolute laughing pleasure when I had to pull the glove off and rub a badly stung hand.

In a couple hours I have to start calling my parents and sister in Michigan and tell them. My mother is not going to take this well. She's too old to have this kind of news, that her grandson has preceded her. It certainly is something no parent ever wants, to outlive their child. I have now done that and it is wrong on so many levels of experience that an explanation would only have meaning to some one who already sadly knows.

I share this with you because it is the only monument he will have beyond a small family. His friends are not the sort to carry anything forward from this, from his life and death. There will be no funeral or services, they are for the living and the only ones who would find it meaningful don't need it or the pressure to travel long distances to commemorate something this sadly pointless. He knew that my own life had been a mess and that I'd started over again right before he was born and that there is such a thing as a come back. He decided to do what he did, and that's how that is going to have to be. He'll have no more failures to deal with, but there is so much that he will have lost out on. We'll deal with this, because we have to deal with it but it will never be right. He almost made it twenty one years, almost.

So long my boy.

(Because this keeps getting accessed I'm adding a 1/25/11 postscript - you should read this, also:

Giving a damn whatever you might think as a response to the folks who've spent time on this post.