Content Warning: Suicide by Firearm

Irreversible

Dogs bark as I ring the bell, but they quiet when the key turns. I open the door to my brother’s house, and they rush outside to pee. They’re alert and alive, so I think I’ve made it in time.

The next sound is silence. Then my feet crunch over brokenness—lamps, pottery, shards from overhead lights. I tiptoe over the wreckage and cry out, hoping to hear a deep, familiar voice.

No response.

Nine months prior, my brother and his wife had moved overseas, leaving my nephew in charge of their home, the mail, two family dogs. Now, they couldn’t reach their son. When my brother called me, I told myself, Whatever it is, I can handle it.

This is who I am, the family fixer, wrestling skewed situations back onto their rails.

So I descend the stairs to their basement, repeating a monologue I hope will turn dialogue. I’m here. Are you? When I pause, the air grows heavy.

There are two bedrooms in the basement. One door is open, and the other is closed.

The pressure in my chest threatens to suffocate. I want to be the hero, turn depression and despair into treatment, and eventually, triumph. I believe in my nephew, envision a future of happiness, friendships, love.

The open door reveals a cherished guitar, smashed; dresser drawers, pulled off their hinges; his mirror, shattered in a million jagged pieces; Coors Light, Silk Milk, Taco Bell, discarded clothes, dirty dishes, and all the emotions and tears that I imagine underlie this chaos, strewn across the floor.

Fear thumps in my head and I push it away. I haven’t found anything, yet. Not really.

So I’m daunted by the closed door’s flat surface. At this moment, this fragile, tentative moment, possibility still exists—the idea that I can act, do something, save him.

Cold metal chills my hand when I turn the knob, inch that door open. As I do, my eyes drift down, find my 23-year-old nephew, curled like a child on the floor. I see his whole life in that posture—baby, toddler, a lanky tween sleeping till noon. And an innocent, sad, frustrated young adult turning inward, regressing, wanting to rest.

Except he’s too still, too silent. And I’m too late. Blood pools on the floor and he’s lying on top of a shotgun.

A. Shot. Gun.

The gap between the potential I saw in him and the life he couldn’t envision for himself explodes in an unfathomable instant. The trajectory of his despair, a bullet train I couldn’t reroute.

I dial 9-1-1, and the operator struggles to decipher my hyperventilated words. My body stutters as I inhale, repeat the address.

Paramedics arrive but there’s nothing they can do. One of the medics hugs me before directing me to the police, who want me to talk to the detective assigned to the case, and eventually, the coroner. I repeat and relive with each new arrival, etching the sights, sounds, odors, and emotions into my mind, my psyche, my faltering sense of stability.

I rub palms down my face as a collage of memories collides—standing back-to-back with my nephew, measuring his growth against my steady height; the way he’d shrink in stature, but expand in spirit as he’d hunch over his guitar and strum melodies he’d composed himself; his subtle, sly humor that would make his mother laugh and laugh and laugh.

My stomach seizes as I make an unimaginable call, one that spans oceans.

I’ve failed the family.

Street sounds whoosh in one ear; my brother’s silence swells in the other. Then his wife’s voice pierces the void, filled with insistent disbelief. “No. No. NO!”

And I wonder if he’s disappointed, if she’s angry. Because I was unable to intervene; because I hadn’t prevented this tragedy; because it’s my voice on the phone, instead of their son’s.

Loneliness stifles outside noises. My brother, my sister-in-law, my sweet nephew, they’re all so far away. The distance pulls, expands, threatens to snap.

When I return to my own home, the smell of their house remains. I blow my nose, wash my face, shower, throw my clothes in a big black bag and dump it in the trash.

Yet the scent lingers.

The detective had labeled the scene, “Rage.”

The psychiatrist I will later see diagnoses, “Trauma.”

I call it heartbreak.

And I slog through life differently.

Every waking moment viewed through a filter of pain as I ache for the past—wind on my face, during bike rides in crisp autumn air, with my nephew, just a few months ago.

Every instant of stillness expands, and I dread my mind’s return to that motionless room—no breeze, no familiar voice, no interaction. Only echoes.

And every evening, as darkness shrouds light, I writhe in bed and wait—for a newly prescribed sleeping pill to still my mind, fog the vivid images of my nephew’s irreversible choice.

Suicide Prevention (US): call or text 988 for the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline

The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention https://www.afsp.org 

Lisa C. Peterson holds an MFA from UNR at Lake Tahoe as well as a BA and an MA from Stanford University. Her work has appeared in Hypertext Magazine, Sport Literate, The Closed Eye Open, Sierra Nevada Review Blog, and elsewhere. For kicks, she enjoys long hikes in the Colorado Rockies with her husband and a dog who looks like a cross between a cat, a dog, and a fox.