More Confessions From a Grieving Man

More confessions from a grieving man

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PUBLISHED BY:

Glen Brumby at Smashwords

Copyright © 2018 by Glen Brumby

ISBN 9781370499069

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License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

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Acknowledgements

I am grateful to all of my friends who have provided feedback on this book, particularly my poor suffering partner for life, dear Aija, my great friend Professor Gerard O’Brien, a giant of inspiration to me for three decades, as well as my friend in grief, Jan, and Mary T and Jenny C too.

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Other books by this author

Non-fiction

Confessions of a Grieving Man

How I Found My Red Plastic Chair

Fiction

aleX gOes To baLi

Pandora’s Ark

Mister Bagus

A Counterfeit Tribesman

For Elise, this time.

‘Sometimes even to live is an act of courage.’ - Seneca

Contents

Finding oblivion

Part one, The start - a survival of sorts

Part two, Deconstructing Elise

Part three, To save or not to to save, that is a question

Part four, Fear and Loathing

Part five, Goodbye dear Elise

Aija’s eulogy for Elise

My eulogy for Elise

Finding oblivion

On 21 November 2017, at the age of thirty three, our only daughter took her last breath. In a squalid Labrador unit, in Queensland, on a mattress strewn with needles, she coughed and lay deathly still. Surrounded by piles of debris, unwashed dishes, all manner of rubbish and evidence of a neglect for life, it was a scene of vandalism and decay. Holes were punched in walls. Plasterboard ruined in patches where Elise had practiced her knife throwing. Crazed spirals deeply etched in the surface of the ceiling provide ample evidence of episodic mania. Locks were broken, windows and doors refused to close any more. They were covered by torn and failing curtains used to live in darkness or at the very least, in shadows. With no space to sit and little place to even walk on the floor the only obvious habitable spaces were on the toilet or in the bed. Hidden among the rubbish were boxes of court documents, criminal records, fines, all unpaid and an upcoming summons. More pointless processes and punishments beckoned, an endless stream of them, leading into a future of no hope.

This is the context and what was left of our Elise. She became the fourth forgotten person in recent months to die unnaturally in that living room. Soon afterwards the coroner wrote me a letter advising a toxic mixture of Fentanyl, methamphetamine and hydromorphone was detected in her system. This is a book about how a much loved little girl came to this awful end. It concerns attitudes about people and drugs. It is a story of the consequences that flow inevitably from the so called ‘war on drugs’ and all the victims, including those injured collaterally and ultimately it is about the fragility of our mental lives and what happens when things go wrong.

The pathologist determined the drug cocktail had caused her death. She had injected it into the back of her hand because the other veins in her arms and feet were well past their best. The chemicals, mainly the synthetic opiate Fentanyl, shut down her breathing reflex. Then her brain began to die, mercifully ending her life of torment, with little pain at the end at least. We understand a fellow space cadet sat on the bed with what was very soon to be officially an object instead of a person, a corpse, and she decided it would be fitting to write an extensive number of obscenities, obscure references and pictures on the body’s right forearm and hand in black ink, with a pen. A policewoman who had some time later attended the scene told us the next day in a bland interview room at the Southport Police Station, with a nice hint of sarcasm, the words were possibly of ‘special’ meaning to that young woman.

That person has disappeared from Elise’s life. For a while I wanted to ask her why she neglected to call for help or attempt resuscitation. Now I don’t care. There will be no joy in unraveling even more dysfunction. It’s too hard to care anymore. My wife Aija heard a news report soon after Elise died about three Gold Coast police officers who were in trouble because a recording of them laughing at the state of a young man who died from an overdose had been played at an inquest. I wonder if they considered checking if he was ok or if maybe they’d decided all druggies were better off dead. Naturally, when the coroner said the poor young man could have been saved with simple chest compressions questions got asked about standard police procedures. But I know the answer, people find it hard to care about druggies, drunks and crazies. They’re so easy to see as other and worthless, unworthy of compassion. Sadly it seems you need a procedure to make our well paid guardians achieve even a basic level of care for some of us, and unfortunately it's the ones who probably need it most.

Elise Rachel Brumby was born in 1984 in Munich, Germany, to loving parents. She died in 2017 in the most tragic circumstances I can imagine. Lonely, hopeless, indifferent, deeply unhappy and looking for one more slice of oblivion. For us, her parents, we are grieving through a fog of frustration, confusion, feelings of guilt and most of all a deep sadness. Yes, we had expected things would end badly for decades and yet when they do you are hit by that biological truck anyway. A tsunami of chemicals associated with the loss of a loved child swamps you in evolution’s punishment for an all too prominent failure. The memories, the good times, the bad times, all the laughs, all the hopes, they stab you in the heart and you feel sick, replaying them in your head over and over. It really hurts, it does. And you can’t help but wonder about life and the point of it all. At the moment I think about dying and mortality generally. It looms especially large right now but the focus of life, while you have it, probably should be on living not dying. I suppose that's what tragedy feels like, and still, even though we’ve been here before when our beautiful son Aleks killed himself in 2011, we are rediscovering it all over again as if we never knew it at all.

But all that is not what this book is about. This story is bigger than the aching personal grief we are feeling right now. It’s about more than personal loss and the tragedy that is our family. These circumstances are even more tragic because they are too common, tragic because it need not be so, but most of all they are tragic because Elise’s circumstances prove to me that whatever seemingly concerned people say, the truth is our society just doesn’t care about people like her. What’s most tragic of all is that I see no hope this will change. Certainly, not during my lifetime.

So be warned, this book will not be gentle or restrained. I’m not writing this for people who already agree the war on drugs has failed and is now a completely empty rhetoric. Or for those who think resources are best spent on caring for people instead of punishing them. No, this is for the people who believe I am either an idealistic dickhead or a dangerous nutcase who is simply wrong about the way the world works, a guy who in any event, should be ignored. It's for the people who think punishment works, that we can build enough prisons and that it’s simply up to everyone to choose how to live a good life or be damned. Originally, with the greatest of respect, this was intended to be my final bullet for the ‘just say no’ guys, the ‘tough love’ brigades and the ‘zero tolerance’ bunnies. And the ones who think a self can pretty much always help itself and that there are two types of people, good and bad, with a bright, simple and clear line to be drawn to separate them. I guess you could say I'd heard too much about silly stuff like that which kept on not working, and not working, until it was too late. And now our Elise is dead.

I was going to say if this was you then you are the problem. I was going to say people with your views create opportunity for politicians to peddle nonsense and ignore reality. Yet who can blame them? Because to do anything at all you have to be the one who gets elected, right? It's a circle, community attitudes lead to elected politicians and naturally they reinforce the attitudes which got them elected.

But. You ‘war on drugs’ guys are good people too and I am happy to concede you're quite right about a lot of things. My point was books like this are read by those who already agree. We all love having our ideas confirmed, but there is no progress in that. In fact I don't like cheer squad politics at all. So it's got to be about getting new policy thinking into the mainstream. Being forthright was meant to prepare you, if you read on, to bypass the predilection we all have to actively formulate counter arguments, using whatever reasons we can find, to shoot someone else down. It's more like mortal combat than intelligent discourse. Taking sides is in our DNA, we can't help it. We start out with the firm aim to reject. And my suggestions will surely raise a big reg flag. You'll see them as counter-intuitive if not totally crazy. I didn't want that. But, even this is all bullshit. The real reason I wanted to come out all guns blazing was because I’m hurt, I feel angry and I wanted everyone to know this. That's rubbish and it won't get us far so I'm sorry.

Still, you’ll be preparing solid responses to what I say as you go along to preserve the moral order as you know it. Fair enough. I appreciate that order too, only to the extent it works though. I accept you have good motives. However, being almost right isn't enough. The scale of the harm is too big to ignore anymore. Current drug policy is expensive, it doesn't work anyway and it's pushing people towards dangers like Fentanyl. It's wrecking whole towns in places like Mexico, it is ruining countless lives across the planet and drugs aren't actually declining in availability. No, recently I heard a smug policeman say although they'd captured a BILLION DOLLARS WORTH (it's always a great big number eh?) the market price reportedly hadn't moved. The implication is there was a sea of drugs out there and we need a lot more POLICING. Usually they say the opposite, which is the drug supply has fallen so the drug dealer profits are higher, and this is GOOD right? Look, either way there is little sense in it. It's economics and whichever way you go, once you have a solid demand and a robust market, there will be drugs. And so it has been, drugs were available whenever Elise wanted them. The only problems were cost and quality. She knew there were always problems knowing the strength and doses but she said the people who got it wrong were idiots. Then she got it terminally wrong too.

But anyway, the point is we can't just accept all these deaths and the mayhem that goes along with them and give up. Going even further and shooting everybody like the police are in Manila (and in Indonesia now too) is at least logical if the actual taking of drugs is so very very bad. But is it? Are extrajudicial executions, basically murdering people, really the solution to people getting high? How can the lawless killing of people, including more than a few innocent bystanders, possibly be better than tolerating highs? So please give it a rest and listen to Elise’s story. Just have a think about it. Leave behind your