Master of Puppets

8/07/2011 1 Comments

My brother-in-law Joe died in 1999, and still to this day I miss him. He was 4 years older than I, and Kevin and I were very close to him. We had made a pact that whoever dies first would let the other one know what it was like on the other side, but before I go any further with that, I would like to tell you what happened with Joe.

One afternoon he had stopped by our house, and I noticed right away he was fidgety. I’m one of those people who is sensitive to other people’s energy and had felt the chaos in his. When he entered our house, he immediately went to the window and peeked out of it. He told us that black helicopters were following him. Kevin and I looked and of course there were none. We tried to assure him that nobody was following him, and then Joe went off into a bizarre story about the mob. He said that he knew people in the mob who could make it look like he died. As he was talking to us, he continued to fidget and started making weird wet fart noises with his mouth. It was so annoying that we told him to stop. Anyway, we realized what was going on with him. He was on Meth, and let me tell ya, it was heartbreaking. After that day, Kevin and I tried to talk some sense into Joe and help him, but he continued on that path. One night he came over and was carrying a pistol. Now that I look back on it, I wish I had taken the gun away from him, but I didn’t. Instead I begged him to get rid of it and that I didn’t want him to die. He told me he didn’t give a fuck if he died, and then narrowed his eyes at me and said that he remembered our pact. My heart dropped, and I didn’t want him to leave my sight. I wanted to pull him out of that dark, soul-sucking world he had gotten himself into, and bring him back to us. But Kevin was concerned about my safety, and had forbidden Joe to bring any of his Meth-head friends to our house. So we tried an intervention, which honestly was pathetic because it didn’t work. Looking back on it now, there was so many things I would have done differently, but unfortunately I can’t rewind back to that time in my life, and possibly succeed at saving Joe. Not to long after that, my life would be altered in a way that would leave an aching hole inside me that nobody could ever fill.

It was a Tuesday on February 16^th that I received a call right when I got home from work. It was one of Joe’s friends. He told me that Joe was in an accident and was at the hospital. I tried to get answers out of him, but he refused to elaborate and kept repeating to call the police. I called Kevin’s work afterwards and relayed the message to him. Kevin told me to meet him at his work, and he’ll call the police station. My heart was racing and my whole body shook. On the way to Kevin’s work I started screaming and crying, banging my hand against the steering wheel, telling Joe that he better not be dead. When I entered Kevin’s work, he was on the phone with a police officer, and had a somber look on his face. As soon as I approached him, he looked up at me and slowly shook his head. I couldn’t believe it and slammed my hand on the counter he stood behind and yelled as my hand made contact with the counter, "NO! NO! NO!" I dashed outside and bawled in my car. I could hardly breathe and the world seemed to have shifted out of place. It was horrible, and even now as I write this I’m emotional about it. I don’t wish this experience on anybody.

Anyway, that morning Joe had gone to a drug house and when he left, a guy he had owed money to confronted him. Joe pulled out his gun and the other guy pulled his out. They shot each other and both died. That night, when I was finally able to go to sleep, I had a vivid dream about Joe. He was sitting on a low wall, and I asked him what it was like being dead. He told me it was weird, but he was getting use to it. I have heard that spirits can communicate with you through your dreams, and I still wonder to this day if he actually had visited me. I don’t know, but I haven’t heard from him since, and I miss him every day. I have another brother-in-law who was Kevin’s sister’s husband who had died a few years later from drugs as well. And again, Kevin and I had tried to help him get off the drugs, but in the end he had chosen drugs over our help.

When I think about my family being decimated by drugs, a lump forms in my throat that I can’t seem to swallow. The reason why I’d decided to write this post was because yesterday Kevin went to the store, and there was a new girl working there with scabs and track marks on her arms. When he told me that, I slowly shook my head and that damn lump formed in my throat. If only I could get in that girl’s face, tell her my stories about what Meth and drugs had done to my family, and wake her up. If only it could be that simple, but truthfully it’s not. If it were, the people that Kevin and I had lost to drugs would still be alive. Joe would be alive, and our world would be a much brighter place.