He Gave Me

He gave me beauty for ashes
The oil of joy for mourning
The garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness.

Isaiah.

These words are printed large on a poster, at the centre of a little shrine of small polished rocks, flowers, and his picture, a young, handsome, forming into shape boy who was 15 when he went out into the orchard at the back of this house at 2am and put a bullet through his brain.

I tried to kill myself at the same age, probably for many of the same reasons; there seemed no escape, no way of winning approval, no life worth living in the ceaseless torment; anything to shut up the noises in the head and the same insane persistent belligerence of depression; the waves of melancholy too deep to deal with; the personal humiliations too impossible to cope with; so many things being tortured through our psyche and never understanding why; why things were the way they were; why the world was held together with glue and we walked along the bottom of a lead aquarium, why we were so wierd and the rest of the world was normal; why the agony that we bore every day afflicted no one else.

Born defective; a subject of ridicule; not just the village idiot but a deeper leprosy, as if it was all that we could ask for to be born again.

The beast has stirred and I must go; into crowded days and crowded lives; a life that I would never have had if there had been a gun lying around the house; instead all I could find were pills; and they weren't enough.

I will never forget that day when we buried him; the mother, wept out; holding it together after the acres of private shock and grief; clutching the framed portrait of her son; and as the coffin was lowered in the ground she flashes the portrait so I can see it; and she says to me; see, it was the same, he even looked like you.

And walking down to that grave my father, who had beaten us both so badly but was now an aging, wounded, conciliatory bull, had whispered to me quietly: "Can you believe it, Macquarie Bank shares went over $50.00 this morning. I bought in at $19.00."