Story bud

I read in the news over my cereal this morning of the capture of two boys, 19 and 20, cousins suspected in the murder of one of the boys' great grandmother. The story describes the relationship the grandson had with slain woman, how they loved each other. The great grandmother doing everything possible for the young man, who suffers from bi-polar disorder, who has had a rough time in high school. The mother and the great grandmother are the only family members mentioned in the story.

Where is the father?

I wonder this aloud to myself, writing in the morning dark of our sleeping house. How can a young man grow up in such a way as to never express himself violently and then suddenly to murder a member of his family who adores him? I think what gripped me the most is the insult to the grandmother, the severe and emotional trauma so fleeting but intense. She died of blunt force to the cranium, but was there a moment when this final insult occurred to her: to be murdered by someone you love deeply and without condition? There is something Shakespearean in it, something epic. How can we do this to each other?

But where was the father? This question looms tall for me, not because I wish assign blame in any way. I ask the question because as a father myself of a sixteen year-old, I cannot look away. My son is also experiencing the anguish and depression, the desperation of his aloneness. He too has had his struggles in school, mainly with peers and with fitting in. And of course, I had my own similar challenges at that age. I remember very well the idea that no one could possibly be feeling or thinking what I was. No person alive would understand. And like my own son, I also considered suicide. While I still believe that no one can truly understand the precise nature of this suffering, I do know what the suffering is.

A self-loathing, a blackness overtaking reason, steeping in its brine of doubt, barring the corridors leading to redemption or release or both, depression turns off the exit signs, outs the lights, pins its victim to a seat in the cinema of self-devise from which to repeatedly spectate an auto-tailored tragedy in compounding detail. O the mind of the self-absorbed teen is one to fuel a car, lift a plane, steam a ship. Energy untapped and divine, an awful and frightening force it is among those of us unwitting, hapless passengers.

But it is not to be taken lightly and this is what I fear to write: as a father, one who has suffered these dark arenas too; how do I find my way into my son's world? I've been looking for a story. Perhaps this is it.