“To live is to fly, all low and high/ So shake the dust off of your
wings and the tears out of your eyes”
--Townes Van Zandt
As Furman Elite set out for an early morning threshold session, the first of the year, Jeff looked up
into the clear October sky and declared it a great day to be alive. Two months
ago, I woke up to one that surely wasn’t.
Right before noon on August 24
th,
I was in Athens, GA crawling from an air mattress on the floor of a duplex, reeling from a late night and ears ringing from a Drive-By Truckers
concert.
After the show, the Gilmer boys
got word that our beloved 14 year old golden retriever was in end -stage renal
failure—I pressed my father to euthanize her as soon as possible and resolved
to stay in Greenville, having long accepted the realities of her advanced age.
John, my identical twin, had taken it a bit harder, shedding a few tears outside of
the Georgia Theatre. We were going to lose our childhood friend, but it was ok.
It was ok until John
received a call that would change our lives.
As I filled my Gatorade bottle with
water, I didn’t hear his phone ring—I only saw him bouncing on his toes,
carving a path into the carpet, eyes narrowed, as if focusing on something far
off but rapidly approaching, mouth downturned, strained. I could almost taste the
metallic pang of fear in mine. Within seconds the urgency of his voice matched
the lines in his face, “Wait, calm down. Wait, what?” Grasping like a drowning man at the side of a lifeboat,
I pleaded with my brother,“Who is that? What’s happening? John, what’s happening?” Unmindful, his eyes
widened.
“Patrick, are you sure? Ok. Ok.” He stopped,
pivoted toward me, and shared the vision, now clear and monstrous: “Clint shot
himself.”
One of our oldest and closest
friends, a former high school cross country teammate, had committed suicide earlier
that morning. It’s still difficult to even write the line, let alone countenance
life without someone with whom I had expected to share a great deal of it, but
in that moment, I saw the grim realization in my twin’s face, a twisted mirror
of the trauma that would soon be my own. I paced in a tight circle, taking
the phone from my brother to hear for myself from our inconsolable “triplet,”
Patrick, also a former teammate. I aged years in
the hours that followed, as we notified our friends and family. I didn’t weep
until I finished one last call, to the home phone number that I had memorized long before cell phones did it for you.
As I write this, I still have
Clint’s number in my phone, as if I can somehow recall him to life if I
preserve the mundane traces of his existence. It’s hard to read our text
conversations. That’s where he doesn’t feel so distant. Maybe he can get off
work to go fishing this weekend. Maybe we’ll just have to get lunch. The vague,
lingering sense of unreality lives in an iPhone.
I got a call the next day and knew in my heart what it was about: I had already begun writing the eulogy. His father’s voice cracked when he asked me—only
if I were comfortable—to say a few words, the words that a parent never could. He wept before I could finish
telling him that I would love to talk about his boy. I packed a black suit, a
week’s worth of clothes, and my running shoes and headed south on 85. I bought a Beach House album and played it on
repeat until I cleared Atlanta. I didn’t stop driving until I hit empty. I
forced myself fix a dinner plate after I pulled into our driveway in Mobile. I
hadn’t eaten a proper meal in almost 24 hours.
My twin and I, always better together, found the right words to honor our friend and finalized the eulogy as we cared for our dying dog. Our old 5A state championship team gathered at our high school track and swapped stories late into the night.
The next day, I pretended that facing a packed chapel was no different than toeing a starting line and finding courage in the face of doubt, strength amid pain. The unspoken lessons of an unforgiving sport that often demands more than you believe possible to offer kept my voice steady and clear. They helped me to hold a sobbing mother and to tell a 12 year old how proud he made his big brother. And
like one 400m repeat past the breaking point, we woke up the next morning and put Honey to sleep. I carried her cradled and wrapped in a blanket into the vet's office and closed her eyes when she was gone.
But those days were only the beginning
of my battle with grief, a near-constant retreat. As an athlete, it affected
my body in ways that I couldn’t have imagined: I lost sleep, my joints hurt, my
head throbbed. They were the phantom pains of mental distress, as real as any
physical ailment, but impossible to pin down. Easy runs became a chore and
resisting the urge to crawl back in bed a daily struggle. I surveyed my
previous season, one of both incredible progress and incredible disappointment,
and wondered why I was even trying to rise above my station any longer. The gap
is too wide; the times are too fast.
I
delayed my return to Greenville, one day at first, then another, then a
week.
I stopped preparing for the LSAT,
then I stopped reading, then I stopped writing. As life turned mechanical, the
most important gears ground to a halt. By September, my family, close friends, and running were the only things keeping me from an emotional breakdown.
Suicide is a complex and terrible
thing, one that few are quick to discuss openly. It’s easy to recite the
platitudes of grief as if a rosary, to cling to them just the same, but it’s
far harder to meet this sort of bereavement in full stride. It places you in
open dialogue with your own mortality in a way that accidents or illness never
can. A freak car accident, a sudden heart attack, a terminal cancer—actuaries
might call them “acts of God’—are perhaps easier to accept, though never
easy. Such were my uncle’s death by
pancreatic cancer and my grandfathers’, both by heart failure. We carve space
for the vagaries and contingencies of life and the inevitability of death, but
we seldom make provision for self-destruction. When it happens, you can speculate about true intentions and mental illness, search for mitigation in toxicology reports, construct a narrative and try to ignore the bits and pieces that don't fit. But there is no process, no protocol: grieving
a suicide is intimately personal and often tragically solitary.
There is no getting
over loss, only living with absence. I feel guilty. I feel angry. I wonder when
long becomes too long. I fear a time when his death may become a convenient alibi for my own
anxieties and fears, my excuse to again retreat from life.
Most of all, I miss my friend.
There isn't a happy ending or silver lining
to this story, only a new beginning to my own. To carry a legacy of life, not of death, of
gain, not of loss, is the final charge. If you ask me how I’m doing, I’ll
probably say that I’m doing alright, and that’s good enough for now. What
better way to live and to heal than to chase down some dreams with a remarkable group of athletes and coaches. The retreat is over, and I'm not taking another step back.
It’s great to be alive.
Sincerely,
Lee Gilmer, 10/24/13
P.S. Congratulations to the Furman men and women for their performances at
the SoCon Championship—It was a privilege to watch you fight for every spot and make history down in Birmingham.
