They say “celebrate the life and mourn the death.”
With Carlos I think it’s the reverse. I cry for his life, for his pain, for how dark it had finally gotten that he finally gathered the courage to flee his demons after twenty eight years. I celebrate his death. For him. He won his last battle.
As far back as I have memories, to when I was nine, when he came home to the states, I remember an angel.
Only, ever. An angel.
He had a big, fluffy, curly afro as a baby, and a big, wide smile. “Is that real?” People would ask my aunt as we walked through a store with my cousin. “No. I put a wig on my one year old.” She would roll her eyes. Even then, people didn’t get him. But she did.
He loved dinosaurs when he was a toddler. He played with Power Rangers as a kid. His first bedroom was bold reds, blues, yellows. Happy colors. And he was a happy kid.
Except for when he wasn’t.
Mostly, I think that when he wasn’t happy it was because he was beginning to realize that his skin didn’t fit right. The world was too small, too straight, too…. just wrong.
When he wasn’t happy he went to a dark place, inward, deep inside, and voices told him it was him that didn’t fit right. He was too big, too crooked, too… just wrong.
And, on some level, I think what the voices said was true. He didn’t fit right. He was too free, too wild, too open, too observant, too wise, too… unearthly.
An Angel. A Tortured Angel.
He saw through all of us, through the need for a BMW, the need for the perfect hair cut, the need for an office job that pays 50k a year with health benefits and a 401k plan. He saw the depths of the ocean and the smallest creatures as they crept. He saw life as fragile and imperfect and too goddamn fucking hard.
Once, in the car when he was a young boy, he was struggling with a math problem in the backseat. I remember the despair when he said “Ugh! I’m such a loser! I’m no good at this!”
My Heart Breaks for that Kid.
The kid with lizards that he kept so carefully in a room whose door always had to be closed so as to maintain the right temperature as the beloved lizards, Luna and Sun, crept along their branches that reached up to the ceiling of his room. That kid loved life, just not his own.
His mother always assured him that he was not a loser, that she loved him, that he was perfect the way he was, dreadlocks dripping down his back, plain black t-shirt over slightly baggy jeans and worn tennis shoes, drinking his yerba mate before heading off to another job, this time at the vet, that time at the shelter, this time at the reptile room, that time at the smoothie shop.
She Loved Him
Even when he drank himself to oblivion to chase away the demons, when she found drugs, pipes, empty bottles, and a passed out full grown man in her bathroom, still too drunk to pick himself up and head back to a bed. She loved him even when he screamed at her “Why did you adopt me?! Why should you love me!? I’d be better off dead! I should just kill myself!”
And even when she screamed back, out of years of pain and frustration, agony and a simple loss of what to say after she had heard these words hurled at her, thrown at her, leaving dents in her soul, “If you were going to kill yourself, you just would! You wouldn’t be talking about it!”
Oh, What Kind of Mother Says that to Her Son?
What kind of son slices himself up with a knife, hangs himself from the bathroom door in his mother’s house, the house of the only person he could always turn to?
The kind of mother who is out of options, who is at her wits’ end, who gives and gives and gives to a man who doesn’t know how to do anything but take and take and take, crying all the while that he doesn’t want to take, he’d rather be dead.
The kind of son who knows that his mother’s home is where he needed to die. And who is finally ready to do it. He needed to be with her even in his last moments, even if that meant she found him, even if that meant breaking her heart one last time.
Carlos was tortured soul. An angel sent here to battle demons.
An angel? You ask. How could you call this monster an angel? He terrorized his mother, he destroyed himself, he caused everyone around him pain and misery. An angel?
Yes, an Angel.
Let us remember that Michael was an angel. Raphael was an angel. And yes, Lucifer, was an angel. They were also the fiercest warriors. They battled demons and fought endlessly against a reality beyond our comprehension. And Lucifer, God’s mightiest warrior, his most trusted, beloved soldier, dared to question his will. So we label him devil.
So Carlos questioned the world. He questioned the boxes we all live in. He never belonged in a box. He questioned the rules of the game. He was never any good at games. He battled with the voices in his head that told him he was in the wrong place, wrong time, wrong life.
Just because we couldn’t hear the voices doesn’t mean they weren’t real, demons with black eyes and charcoal wings, snickering at his pain, chasing him wherever he went, turning dreams into nightmares and love into agony. And he battled with the real live voices of those all around him who he knew were saying the same: loser, waste of life, devil.
He Battled
He battled his way through a world he never really belonged in. And he battled his way into a death that gave him the sweet release he had no other way of finding. Like a warrior.
We say, about those who commit suicide, “if he could only have gotten through this phase, if he could only see, if she could only wait, if she could just listen.”
Carlos did wait, he did see, he did listen, and none of it helped. He put his pants on one leg at a time countless times, went into work countless times, surfed through his pain countless times.
He cared for animals, and he mostly remained calm and patient with those of us humans too attached to this world and determined to stay on our hamster wheels, running and running and going nowhere, then judging him for daring to refuse the wheel. We say “carry on.” He did. He carried on, and on, and on.
Until He Just Couldn’t Carry on Anymore.
He did cause everyone around him pain, but only because it hurt us to see him hurting so badly. Our hearts break to see him so broken, and always with that broken smile. And he was so quick with a smile for so long, but it was always a smile with sadness in it. He was ethereal, made of material that shimmered if you looked too close, like he was already half spirit, but couldn’t shake his flesh.
Looking back now, I hear different words in his enraged outbursts, the quieter, softer, hidden words under the shouts and the yells: “let me go. let me go. please just let me go.”
There was no other path for Carlos, there was no day that saw a brighter future, the world was not going to change, and neither was Carlos, and the two could just never see eye to eye.
I’m a mother of a child very similar to Carlos when he was a child.
She’s sweet. She loves dinosaurs. She’s an angel. She’s ethereal. She’s an empath that carries a sadness in her that runs deep for others’ pain, especially animals and small creatures. And she’s a warrior.
I’m lucky my aunt and I have seen the similarities from the beginning and I can try to learn from Carlos’ trouble. I can try to help her stay out of the boxes, shape the world to her vision, ignore the voices that tell her she doesn’t fit.
My grandma and my aunt have said to me, time again, “you’re the perfect mother for a child like her.”
I would say the same thing about my aunt. No other mother could have loved Carlos the way she did. No other mother could have seen his purity through his pain. No other mother could have been strong enough to listen to his distress year after year, and still smile, still buy his tea and his granola, still keep a bed for him.
My cousin held on as long as he did because of his mother, the love, the bond, the only thing that kept him in his skin. He didn’t stay for drugs or alcohol, for money or material things. His mother was what kept him human, flesh.
My uncle says he didn’t kill himself. The disease killed him, the depression, the voices in his head.
I Disagree.
He killed himself. He did not die a victim of depression or disease. He died a warrior. He killed those voices, the depression, the disease. With a knife and a rope, a smile, and a fuck you, he escaped.
If there is a God, and even if there’s not, I imagine that when he finally shed his skin, finally burst free from his earthly box, a giant fellow angel swooped down from above, eager to embrace his spirit, pulling him into the shroud of her shimmering wings and whispering, “finally, finally, finally, you let go.”