Hi Jim,
It’s been a while. Not really, but it has been a year. A year without you. A year of dispair.
Everyone knows about this. Everyone knows I lost you. Everyone else that has survived a suicide in their life – they share it. With me.
Two weeks ago I was in the hardware store. They know me. Our conversation shifted over to suicide, I can’t remember why. I shared your story. They shared theirs. I was gobsmacked. I was so taken aback by what they shared with me that they stopped.
One woman said, “Hey, do you need, like, a hug?” I nodded yes. We cried. Grief once again. This time it was us being together – and I’m not at all ashamed of myself. I must suffer the loss of you. Because of what you did. And now i’m doing what I need. Life without you really, really sucks.
Suicide sucks!
It’s different without you. I wish things were different. That we didn’t have to go through this. Because I don’t like it . I wish it was a sense of humiliation. My emotional reaction was somehow too much, or over the line – something like that. But it isn’t. There’s no one at all that can tell me whether my emotions are too much or few. I don’t even get to choose these, my emotional reactions. They’re WAY too big, way too intense. Fact is, I have no emotional perspective, nor a philosophy to provide me shelter. Nothing. Not one thing protects me from suffering the loss of you. And I assure you, I suffer your loss every single time. All the way to full-on despair.
I’m sorry. I can’t help it. I wish I somehow could.
That’s half of the story. And that story is still being written.
Your loss does not define how things go from here. When you chose to take your life you took many decisions away. For you, your family, and goddammit, for me, too. I have no access to you. Your brilliant mind, your giant heart.
What I have is a legacy. My brother, my rival. My cherished immovable object I could oppose and see – really see my own reflection in you. I miss you in this shadow most of all.
Goodbye.
Hello AND goodbye.
I will never let you down. I will always stand for the things we’ve created. I carry your mighty intentions into fruition. I’m grateful you showed me how.
To you, my dear reader, please know this. Ellis would rather we focus on winning. That we fulfill on our commitment to serve the men of MDI, in a thoughtful, heartfelt way, He hated “Yo mamma” jokes because he thought they made bad light of “momma.” I said it made light of the ‘yo,’ not the ‘momma.’
If you’ve experienced suicide or have things to say, please share. Because this Ellis guy was pretty awesome and it really does take the likes of you and me to take action, and make his tragic loss something we can be proud about. RIGHT?
Read the Honor Book!
I swear your book Huh? The Joys, Sorrows and Comic Relief of Miscommunication was written about me. I can be insufferable.
Kempner,
Thank you for this piece! Thank you for your honesty and revealing your truth about losing a dear friend.
Ellis and I were friends as well, just for two or so years. Jim initiated the relationship. He encouraged and supported me mostly in the area of story telling through writing.
This is where what you wrote comes in. I have this “gift” to honor those that I’ve lost; parents, friends, Men of MDI, even a 12 year old girl from a former church. It was my writing about Bill Tillman that facilitated our friendship.
The thing is whenever I sat down to write about Jim it would never come out. I tired for days, then weeks, then more weeks, but it just wouldn’t flow. But I know why.
Jim taking his life threw me sideways. I’ve dealt with suicide and attempted suicides, a brother , friends, I’m been on suicide watch more than once; but with Jim it was different. Maybe because Ellis is pretty much the last person I would have thought would end his own life. Maybe it was because how he poured into the lives of others, how he was the one who expressed his value for me as a friend.
So I say thank you Kempner, because I have been stuck in the grieving process, I still am. I know the reality, yet a year later I am still in disbelief. It was pain that I didn’t want to face, that I couldn’t reconcile. So I decide to set it aside and I wrote him off, the same way I felt he wrote me off by never even letting me know anything was amiss. I chose anger and betrayal as the story I told myself rather than to feel the uncomfortable, all most unbearable underlaying emotions.
All that said Ellis was a man worth honoring! He is a man worth celebrating so many levels, even if he was a Miami Dolphins fan. So for me there remains work to do, to lean into the pain to bring to the surface the beauty of the man I knew as my friend.
Rest in Peace Ellis
Hey De Francisco, thanks for your comment. I appreciate everything you said about this piece and about Jim Ellis, but I should clarify that this Open Letter was written by Justin LaBarge, not by me.
I wrote a piece about Jim for the first issue I edited after his death, back in March of last year, but this one came from Jim’s long-time Legacy Mag partner and co-founder, LaBarge.
All the best, and thanks for contributing a great piece yourself this month. We appreciate it.
– Kempner