This entry is about suicide, and it could be disturbing, so please don’t read it if it might be painful for you.
I was listening to this song today, and it was breaking my heart like it always does, and I started remembering being eight years old sitting in the back of a car outside of a dry cleaner’s. My aunt and my mother were in the front and they had something in a bag on the seat between them. They were talking low but disagreeing about whatever it was. My aunt was crying and my mother looked . . . like she’d seen something both pitiful and repulsive.
“She wants to keep it,” my aunt was saying.
My mother: “We should just throw it away. Get rid of it! She’s out of her mind.”
“I can’t, Sis. He died in it. She wants to have it.”
“They’re never gonna clean that. They can’t. I’m not taking that in there. It’s got his . . .”
And then she said what it had on it. I can’t even write it. It seems obscene to lay it out in words. But I began to understand it was what my uncle was wearing when he shot himself in the head.
This song, to me and probably many others, is about the devastation of someone you love taking himself away from you, absolutely, abruptly and forever. It begins with a father and the empty, aching place he has for his boy who is gone.
Daddy please hear this song that I sing
In your heart there’s a spark that just screams
For a lover to bring
A child to your chest
That could lay as you sleep
And love all you have left
Like your boy used to be
Long ago wrapped in sheets warm and wet
And later it’s a brother speaking:
Brother see we are one and the same
And you left with your head filled with flames
And you watched as your brains
fell out through your teeth
Push the pieces in place
Make your smile sweet to see
Don’t you take this away
I’m still wanting my face on your cheek
And that’s the part where my heart breaks. Not just for the ones who left. But for the ones who loved them. For Steffi, who I know not to take over the Sunshine Skyway bridge when we’re out driving together. For Susan, whose grief hangs on her face like the weight of her boy at the end of a rope. For Lisa, who had a husband and then just had pieces of him on a robe in a plastic bag.
But Jeff Mangum/Neutral Milk Hotel doesn’t leave you all alone with that:
And when we break
we’ll wait for our miracle
God is a place . . .
