4th of July without Frank
Nov 11 '00 (Updated Nov 26 '00)
This past 4th of July I rented the movie 1776, a musical set during the American Revolution. It was the first time I had watched it without Frank.
Frank and his wife Desta always watched 1776 on the Fourth, and I would join them, sitting in the living room of their renovated Victorian house, watching the TV while sipping a beer, talking politics in between the more dramatic parts of the movie. It was an annual ritual.
I met Frank and Desta and their two sons when they moved to Alabama from New York, where Frank had built houses for a living. When recession knocked the bottom out of his business he came to Birmingham to manage a motel for a large chain.
Frank quickly became my best friend despite the great difference in our personalities.
I admired the fact that if there was a job to be done Frank would just plunge in and do it, whether it was fixing a door or going down to city hall to rail against the latest injustice perpetrated by the politicians. I also admired his energy and his extraversion. He seemed impressed with my ability to take setbacks in stride -- and astonished that anyone could sit down and knock out a coherent, ten-page essay in a mere couple of hours.
Our binding interest was politics, and we plotted coups till the small hours. When it came time to instigate them, I stayed at Frank's computer churning out brilliant manifestos while he made phone calls, sweet talking and cajoling others into joining the rebellion. It was a perfect division of labor.
Frank and Desta's house became a way station for neighborhood kids, political conspirators, and people needing a sofa to sleep on or a friend. Their doors were never locked, and we felt free to drop by any time for conversation, a beer, the use of a computer, or the loan of a book from Frank's well-stocked library.
The Shadow
There was a shadow side to all this activity and conviviality -- Frank's manic depressiveness. His "down" episodes seemed brief and inconsequential at first; occasionally, usually in winter, he would have a week when he seemed sluggish and withdrawn, but then he would bounce right back.
Frank's long slide down began, ironically, when he and Desta realized their dream by moving to some waterfront land they had found in Florida. There was an old trailer on the property they planned to live in until Frank could build a house.
The house never materialized. Frank quit his last job in Birmingham (he had held a succession of sales jobs after leaving the motel) and never bothered looking for anything in Florida. Their money ran out. Desta got a teaching job with a tiny income, but mostly they lived on credit.
Their rising debt, along with IRS troubles, plus the fact that Frank had moved his elderly and ailing parents in with them, fed his mood swings. On a manic tear he would go out and buy stuff on plastic -- computers, building supplies, an orchard's worth of young fruit trees (he had a fantasy of starting an orange grove on his land although he lived in a part of Florida that is too cold). Then the bills would arrive and he would sink into a depression so deep that he would stay in bed for weeks, unable even to come to the phone.
The Spiral
In truth he was no longer having mere mood swings, he was cycling between sanity and craziness. Medication didn't help. There was a time when he called me every day for a week and talked for up to three hours straight without a pause for breath, describing impossible money making schemes or just careening disconnectedly from one subject to another.
I went to see them in Florida. One Fourth of July we sat in their trailer and watched 1776, then shot off fireworks down by the water. It almost seemed like old times.
My last visit with them was less happy. Frank was in a foul mood, snarling at Desta, at me, at everyone. They were living in outright squalor; there were holes in the walls and roof of the trailer, and the rotting floor had animal feces on it (Frank had added a lamb, a pig and geese to their menagerie of cats, dogs and parrots). The atmosphere was so depressed that I had to get out.
As I drove away I was struck by a sudden thought: Frank is going to kill himself one day, maybe take Desta with him, and there's nothing I can do to stop it.
But then Frank seemed to get better. By the fall of last year he had built a workshop next to the trailer and had gone into the business of building and selling computers; I'm writing this on a system that I bought from him. On the phone he sounded more rational than he had in years.
The last time we talked was in December. One day in February the phone rang and it was one of his sons, now grown and married with a child of his own. "Steve, I've got bad news about Pop," he said. "Yesterday he shot and killed Grandpop and Grandma and Mom and himself."
To Understand
This is supposed to be an editorial on coping with death. For some of us there is no "coping" to be done, just a desire to understand.
Frank had been my best friend, but I shed no tears for him, nor for Desta, nor for his mother and father. Yet just ten months before I had spent a day sobbing over the death of my dog.
Some people's life trajectories have endings that, in retrospect, seem inevitable. Not a violent man, Frank nonetheless seemed fated to have his life end violently. He once told me that if government thugs ever came to arrest him, and he knew he was facing 20 or 30 years apart from his wife and from Rosesong (the name they had given their five acres of Florida paradise), he would go out shooting.
My first reaction to the news that day was to offer to help Frank's sons in any way I could, although they seemed remarkably calm and collected. I think this was because Frank's behavior had long ago driven them to distance themselves from him.
My second reaction was to try to understand what happened. Not just what was going through Frank's mind, or what might have set him off, but also the gory details. Did he kill the others in their sleep? Whom did he shoot first? Was there blood all over the trailer, and did the son -- the one who called me -- see it?
A local newspaper in Florida carried stories of the shootings and I read them on their Web site, bookmarking them and re-reading them several times. One included a photograph of sheriff's deputies removing the body bag with Frank in it from the trailer, and I even felt compelled to try to figure out which end was his head and which his feet.
No one will ever know exactly what happened that day in that trailer. What is known is that Frank called 911 early in the morning and reported that his father was having a stroke. Probably, that was just a ploy to ensure that the bodies would be found in a reasonable amount of time.
The likely scenario is that Frank had been up all night brooding over his financial predicament and becoming increasingly despondent. His credit card debt was probably over a hundred thousand dollars by then, and among the mail found in the trailer was a collection letter from the IRS. Perhaps, too, his father's health had taken a turn for the worse.
Maybe Frank was completely out of his mind. Or maybe he simply saw no way out of the hole that he and his family were in.
I also wonder: If his sons had been there, would he have killed them, too? Would he have killed me if I had been there? And, of course: Could I have stopped him?
Finally, I have to remind myself that this wasn't just a suicide, but that my best friend was a murderer. Others who knew Frank and Desta have speculated on the possibility of a suicide pact, but the facts don't support it. Desta loved her teaching job, despite its poor pay, and she had a new grandson she adored. I'm convinced she did not want to die.
It has been nine months, and I have neither grieved for Frank and Desta in that time nor felt a need to. Is this a way of coping with death? Yes, for some of us it is, in some circumstances. The absence of weeping and moaning does not signify callousness, but an acceptance that what is, is.
If I mourn Frank and Desta, it is in the missing. I miss their generosity, their intelligence, their basic kindheartedness (yes, even Frank's). During the election I missed being able to call Frank to discuss political events for hours on end, solving all the world's problems while we were at it. And as for the 4th of July, well, my memorial to him and Desta, for the rest of my years, may be to watch 1776 and remember drinking beer with them as fireworks exploded in the sky above Birmingham.
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Epinions.com ID:
Steve_NC
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Member: Steve Smith
Location: Chapel Hill, North Carolina
Reviews written: 28
Trusted by: 28 members
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