Cathedral Stone
Seeing Too Much and Feeling Too Much
with a Layer Missing

by Susan Dunn
September 2000

Lowell -- bulbous pemphigoid blisters

The most important thing in life

Is to be able to ‘stop the madness’

And that means when you hear

“And Captain Fuckup couldn’t even pull off a suicide right,”

That’s your cue to STOP the conversation –

Just say NO

If you’re the sensitive type, like me,

The type that’s missing a layer of skin.

You’ve got to know those “cue” words --

Like when ”fuckup” is combined in any way with “suicide” --

Or you’re going to be lying awake at night months later

Picturing the boy with his face blown away

And his brains all over the carpet –

Maybe his eyeballs are still in his skull,

Maybe not,

Feeling his way across the wall of his parents’ bedroom

Leaving for his parents – God knows what they did to deserve this,

That’s always the question, isn’t it? –

The quintessential Martha Stewart wallpaper

Using products readily available in the home,

In the new minimalist flesh and blood red --

For … oh, who knows … 30 minutes, an hour?

In that shape 1 minute would have been too long,

Trying to … just what was he trying to do?

What do you do after you’ve blown your brains out … sort of.

It’s my thing, evidently … the deaths of young men.

The year before that I accompanied a friend on a sympathy call

To her friend who had watched while her husband and their older son,

Who were sitting in the front seat of the go-cart,

Ducked under the wire that decapitated the younger son,

The 15 year old, who was sitting in the back seat.

I used to lie awake at night wondering – did they yell to the kid?

Did they even think about him being back there,

And why didn’t he see it?

I’ve heard so many awful stories about kids dying …

The computer nerd told me his brother’s son was an addict,

And he didn’t come home the night before they were going to take him to rehab,

So the father got mad, washed his hands of it all, as fathers will,

And said he wasn’t going to take him.

The mother was determined, so she called the older brother,

The family star, who was studying to pass the bar.

They went and got the addict, and they all got in the car and headed for Oklahoma.

3 hours later all 3 of them were killed by a drunk driver who crossed the median.

“My brother almost didn’t make it,” said the computer nerd.

I was appalled.

I was tricked on that one, too, though it wasn’t that gory,

Because I thought our theme was “happy endings to addict tales.”

So, I used to lie awake at night,

Wondering about all those details I couldn’t get out of my head,

Because I’m missing that layer of skin and those stories get in and fester

Like a bullous pemphigoid blister and never really heal.

I wondered how a head falls off

When it’s been cut off by a wire.

Did it stay in the go-cart, or fall to the ground?

Who picked it up?

And I pictured Levy-Dhurmer’s painting,

Because a mother of a son would hold that head to her that way,

Attached to the body or not.

I would.

And I wondered what a man does who’s lost his whole family

Strictly speaking “due to” the addict who, if he’s typical,

Had already caused 100 years of pain.

And those are horrible stories,

But now there’s one so much worse,

It’s pushed them from my thoughts.

It isn’t a mystery – he was in the bathroom of a house

At 53rd and the Av in Seattle,

And it isn’t a mystery – I know all the details

He shot-up with one sterile needle (found in his pocket)

Containing bad stuff, all revealed in the blood test;

And there was no pain,

He had just called me,

Having found out his chances for his Ph.D. stipend were excellent,

Then shot-up, then got high, then it hit his heart, and that was it;

And there was no gore –

He was immaculate when they pronounced him dead at the hospital

Hair freshly washed, no dirt under his fingernails or toenails,

His clothing (given to me in a sealed orange plastic bag)

Smelling fresh and clean, and vaguely of him,

His teeth shiny clean --

How very like him, I thought, how considerate

To die that way. That’s how he kept his room.

So it was a simple death, really,

Unremarkable to tell,

No one would stop me from telling it,

And I know every detail.

It’s just that he was mine,

And it happened to me.

With this one,

There is gangrene,

And the prognosis is not good.