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a Midwestrn Eulogy

Suzanne Pearman

    We were in the same homeroom in high school because we both had last names that started with the letter P.

    Your dad died when you were a kid, maybe ten or twelve years old, and you started buying weed from a sketchy man who hung around the streets of your neighborhood. He had a nickname, like Big Mike or Smoky or Villain — something that would look right on the cover of a hip-hop album — and he didn’t care about how young you were.

    Teachers made you sit out in the hallway at least once a week. I remember you answered a question correctly once in U.S. History, and Mr. Sidenbender was so shocked. He said that you were smart and had a good memory and you could do well in school if you just wanted to.

    I don’t distinctly remember you dropping out of high school, but you must have.

—

    I keep thinking that you never had a chance. I keep thinking that the system failed you, and I think “the system” because that hurts less than admitting that I failed you and all of our friends did too.

    I feel like I was just a tourist in the type of lifestyle we lived in high school, and then I got to grow up and move on and leave town forever, and I was the only one who ever had a chance.

    The last time I spoke to you was August of last year, and you told me you were homeless and looking for a place to stay in almost the same breath that you told me I had grown up into quite the amazing woman.

    It hurts now to consider the juxtaposition.

—

    We kind of dated briefly when you lived in a house with Alex Lindzy, whom I hated because he used to grope me in the high school cafeteria and had prank called me on my house phone once.

    You lived in the basement of that house, where the walls were covered in murals depicting the mythology of Insane Clown Posse.

    I was thinking the other day that the only people in my life who truly know me are the ones who remind me - when I try to deny or discount it - that I actually had an ICP phase once.

    I feel like no one I have met in a very long time has any idea who I am.

—

    Bob was the one who called to tell me you had died. He told me through sobs that he felt guilty for introducing you to heroin, and I told him I had introduced you to meth.

    It seems inconsequential which drug you specifically died from; it could have just as easily been any of them.

    Someone wrote on your Facebook wall that you went out the way you wanted to, and that is both accurate and simultaneously the saddest thing I’ve ever heard.

    You will be the reason I buy waterproof mascara, and I wish you had been more than that.

—

    Kalee is the one who is planning your funeral, because your mom stopped caring about you years ago.

    My mom said that everyone deals with grief in their own way, and that I shouldn’t judge your mom, because her worst fear has just come true.

    I thought, I don’t think your mom was that afraid.

—

    I saw you at a party once sometime after high school, maybe the first Christmas break of college, and I remember thinking, “These people aren’t good for me. I only want to see them once a year and know that they’re still alive.”

    I feel like I abandoned you. We all did.

—

    I am thinking how flimsy my characterizations of people from high school become when I remember that they are entire people.

    I think “redneck” a lot. I think “never left town.” I think about how grateful I am to have distanced myself from all these people, and then I get thrown off when I remember how much I used to care.

    I remember bus rides to school when I’d look out the window at miles and miles of cornfields, and I would think, “Someday I will be as far away from here as possible.”

    You and people like you are the reasons why sometimes I feel like I understand growing up sad and poor and disenfranchised, but when I’m honest with myself I know I really only know what it feels like to grow up sad.

—

    When Bob told me what had happened, I told him, “We have to be the ones who survive now.”

    I meant it, but the words rang false, because I don’t think anyone except me ever questioned whether I would make it.

    If someone had polled our graduating class in high school about who we thought would be the first to die, most people would have said you, I think.

    I don’t know which is sadder — the deaths that happen suddenly, and unexpectedly, or the deaths that you kind of expected all along but still couldn’t stop from happening.

—

    No one will tell the story at your funeral about the time that Bob almost died because he shot heroin for the first time and you and some guy dumped him in his front yard and left him face down drowning in a puddle in his driveway.

    When Bob told me that story, I blamed the other guy, because I didn’t know him, and I had always liked you — but it feels important to cling to your flaws now until things feel better.
The more I can remember the bad things about you, the more I will feel the presence of justice in the world.

—

    I saw a picture of your ex-girlfriend who had dropped out of school in eighth grade and had a reputation of being the most insane girl in our entire town, and in the picture she was wearing a fancy dress, and she looked beautiful, and she looked normal.

    She has an eight-year-old daughter now.

    It made me wonder, when did she grow up, when did we all, and why’d we have to leave you behind, and why — when you died at 25 — will we only ever remember you the way you were in high school.

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