You Would Never Break The Chain

TW: Suicide

#SuicidePreventionMonth

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I pulled in to Center Street with around 28 minutes to spare. Maybe less. My flight had been delayed and I’d jumped into my car only to speed headlong into rush hour traffic. I can say with authority that nervously pounding your fist on your steering wheel does not, in fact, cause traffic to flow more smoothly, nor will it part all of the minivans and Bro Trucks a la Moses parting the Red Sea. I had to try, though.

Weeks and weeks and weeks of helping produce this Fleetwood Mac tribute show—setlist, rehearsals, schedules, singers, stage plots, input lists, mix notes—had funneled to today. I wasn’t gonna miss it.

Or, at least, I really didn’t wanna miss it.

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I flew in to Phoenix the night before, missing—for the only time in the near decade we put on the Rooftop tribute shows—the final rehearsal before the actual show. I’m sure I overestimate my value in those situations, especially with a band as good as we always had and the fact that it’s a last rehearsal, where you wouldn’t (ideally) be making any colossal changes anyway¹. But, as an anxious worrier and Guy Who Likes Things Just So, I really would’ve liked to be there.

I had a more important place to be.

Holly picked me up at the airport curb and took me directly to the local LDS chapel. The local bishop and his wife (who happened to be sort of friends² of mine from college) met us there. They’d procured a guitar I could borrow.

I’d been asked to sing an old hymn, “Abide With Me”, at the funeral the next day. So we were making sure the sound setup would work. They had set aside a little platform with a microphone, music stand, and a chair, where I sat and played the song through while Holly, the bishop, and his wife all stood at the back of the chapel to see how the sound carried, if there were feedback issues, etc.

It carried. There were no feedback issues.

See you tomorrow, we said. And we drove off to be with the rest of the family at Holly’s sister’s house.

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The next day, I steeled myself to keep my composure for my part of the service. Part of that is just making sure to let myself cry, if I feel so inclined, during the service before I play. Not hold it in. Something in my mind believes that if I empty the coffers or let the dam break early, then, at very least, there won’t be any pent-up emotion waiting to happen when I get up there to play my song. (I’ve sang at enough funerals—and not always successfully—that I do have some strategies and best practices.) You still get hit by the emotion in-the-moment, but you don’t get the kinked hose releasing thing. Man, if you cry—really cry—your voice is the first thing to go. Not great for singers.

That said, crying before you sing isn’t all that great for your voice, either. I kept some water on hand.

That said, who’s not gonna cry when attending the funeral for someone you love who took their own life? Who's not gonna cry when it comes time to reckon with everything that got us here, what it means today, and what it might mean tomorrow? Might as well have some tissues ready.

When it was my turn, I walked up to my little platform. I quietly double-checked to make sure the guitar was in tune. I took my usual deep, cleansing breath. A slow, shaky inhale through the nose. A deliberate exhale through the mouth, quietly though. Like a ritual.

I played fine. It wasn’t Whitney Houston Singing The National Anthem At The Super Bowl. And it was a far cry from Aretha Franklin Filling In On “Nessun Dorma” For An Ailing Pavarotti. It was just me and a borrowed guitar, invoking the prayer in the hymn’s lyric:

When other helpers fail and comforts flee
Help of the helpless, oh, abide with me

That lyric has always stood out. The gold, as Paul Simon has often called his favorite lyrics in a song. In this case, I couldn’t help but think of my brother-in-law’s wife and kids as the helpless in question. And I also couldn’t help but think about my brother-in-law, in his darkest hour, as helpers failed and comforts fled.

The funeral went long. One of my brother-in-law’s dearest friends spoke and did an incredible job connecting with each of the kids. It’s the most memorable part for me, no offense to anyone else.

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We hugged and nodded and cried and even laughed outside in the sharp Arizona sun before finally leaving the church and driving to an open house. With the portion of the day (funeral and song) over that I had come for, my anxiousness had a hard time not fixating on my looming concert 619 miles north³, watching the clock, thinking about the small margin for error in my travel time, about my Uber to the airport, my check-in through TSA, Southwest Airlines’ not-impeccable record of on-time flights, my eventual race to my short-term parked car, my 40-minute drive to the venue, my lyric sheets and MC introduction notes, my guitar on the stage (set up by my friends), the chorus chords to “Gold Dust Woman”, whether I had remembered to pack an extra battery for my guitar’s electronics….

Me. Me. Me.

How predictably human, to be centering myself, even on a day when five beautiful kids buried their father.

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I spoiled the ending already: I made it to the show. Not with a whole lot of time to spare. But enough time to catch my breath.

The ritual. A slow, shaky inhale through the nose. A deliberate exhale through the mouth.

I grabbed some water—trying to hydrate after a day of tears in the desert—and sat at one of the tables in the backstage area with my friends Libbie and Stephanie. One of them harmlessly asked how I was, knowing that it had been a bit of an escapade to get to the show. I unexpectedly crumpled into tears. Couldn’t even speak. I stood up and walked into the empty hallway to gather my wits.

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Minutes later it was showtime. And my song was first⁴.

I knew, before I even stepped to the mic, that I had nothing in the tank. My voice was shot, between the singing earlier and all the crying and the socializing with family and the travel and the stress. I was sapped, hoarse, ragged. Exhausted before the show even started.

The band was good. My vocal performance was not. In light of the day’s earlier events, though, these lyrics hit hard:

I can still hear you saying
You would never break the chain

The things that bind us. They feel solid. Until they aren’t. We trust them. Until we don’t. We are so connected. And, as such, we are so vulnerable when anyone, anything breaks. No wonder it’s agony when we lose someone.; they are part of us. Not just symbolically, either.

I didn’t sing the song how I’d hoped, by any stretch. (There’s that Me. Me. Me. again.) Luckily, there were 17 additional Fleetwood Mac songs sung by 17 additional incredible singers. Cherie Call doing “You Make Loving Fun.” Tessa Norman doing “Rhiannon.” Robbie Connolly doing “Oh Well.” Kiki Jane Sieger doing “Edge Of Seventeen.” There were more, but it’s all a haze.

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Have you known someone who committed suicide? You probably have. Or will.

If you did, you probably thought about what you could’ve done differently. What you might’ve said or done, and when. How you may have failed. What you may have missed.

A whole litany of What Ifs crowd in, shoulder to shoulder, standing room only.

If I could, baby
I’d give you my world

I know I could've loved you,
but you would not let me

For me, not a first-string person in my brother-in-law’s life but still someone who loved him, I asked all those questions, rewound to specific interactions, and more. I also mourned in my own little sphere. One of the people who believed in me as a musician more than anyone else, who was always pushing for ways for my music to find gatekeeping ears, for me to be more than just a dreamer, who thought I was in line to be the next Kings of Leon….was gone. By choice. That laugh that filled rooms. Gone. That generous heart, at his best. That sharp wit. The inside jokes. That willing, needling debate sparring partner. A fellow redhead.

And I also got pissed off. Selfishness. Short-sightedness. Abandoning the kids who needed him most.

But never have I been a blue, calm sea;
I have always been a storm…

My dad, asked to speak at the funeral of a different young man who had tragically taken his own life, articulated our human desire to make sense of the senseless, “Our attempts to accurately identify the factors leading to (name)'s final decision may be rational efforts to understand a decision which was at least partially irrational.”

Sense of the senseless. Reason in the irrational.

In the end, mostly I just got sad for him. How disconsolate and dark would you have to feel to …do it? How helpless? How out of control? How out of options and unloved and unlovable and untenable would you have to feel? In that choking dark, in that hall of broken mirrors, in that nightmare that never lets up, how dark did/does it get?

What a devastatingly lonely place to find yourself. Your desperation getting drenched, then drowned, in despondence. I have sunk deep into depression, myself. I have felt unlovable and even irrationally unloved. But I count myself lucky to have never once considered the extreme “option.” Never once pondered suicide. I can’t imagine the pain and incalculable depths you must feel to decide it’s the way. And then do it⁵.

We’re left to wonder. To wish. To regret. To shake fists at the sky. To shake fists towards the ground. To reason. To bargain with ghosts. To ache. To try to say goodbye after-the-fact.

So I try to say goodbye, my friend
I’d like to leave you with something warm

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I heard a story last week. Real life. A tween texting to his little junior high “friend group” told another kid, on the group text thread, she ought to consider suicide.

Really.

He was “just joking.” Ha ha. Bloody hilarious.

Per the National Alliance on Mental Illness, suicide is the second-leading cause of death among Americans age 15 to 24. Nearly 20% of high school students report serious thoughts of suicide and 9% have made an attempt to take their lives.

Kids are at risk.

And kids can be so utterly stupid. And cruel.

Their little brains not fully formed. Their thick skulls often unable to process the idea of consequences or chains of events or empathy.

One other kid on the thread (my current hero when I’m asked⁶) replied something like, “Hey, that’s not cool. You can’t talk like that.”

Kids can also amaze. They show courage and sensitivity and…they act accordingly.

The rest of the kids were bystanders. Except the ones that jumped to the defense of the first kid. THE FIRST KID.

Kids can be so utterly stupid. And cruel.

You don’t—you can’t—know what someone is going through. You don’t know what they might have going on—emotionally, chemically, spiritually, socially, any way at all, really. The kid couldn’t have known that maybe the other kid had talked about that exact kind of thing in a dark moment or where her mental health temperature might be. Had he known, I give him the benefit of the doubt that he would never have gone there. He didn’t know.

None of us know, do we?

Especially the people—ok, me—dismissing kids as utterly stupid and cruel. Oversimplifying in one direction or the other. Sinners/saints. Success/failure. Black/white.

Nobody is just one thing. I hate to break up the theme of all these Fleetwood Mac quotes (though what’s more thematic to Fleetwood Mac than “breaking up”?). But I have two non-Stevie/Lindsey/Christine quotes that tie in nicely.

The first comes from songwriter Nina Nastasia, who I looked up this week solely because she’s opening for Wilco when they come through Salt Lake next month. Something must be in the cosmos because—as I looked up her music—I found that her latest album, Riderless Horse, is all about her reckoning with the suicide of her longtime partner, just before Covid hit in 2020. The relationship had been bad and dysfunctional for a long time; he had been emotionally abusive and controlling. She had finally bravely told him she was leaving. He was dead the next day. In an interview with Alan Pedder on The Line of Best Fit, she said, speaking about mental illness and suicide and the duality of being human:

I’m just trying to figure out what the hell went on. But I do know it’s not black and white. People can be incredibly loving, but also be doing things that go completely against everything that means.

The second quote comes from Joe Henry, one of my favorite songwriters, from his song “Lead Me On.” I think about the line all the time. It seems to fit—whether you’re talking about the bully or the bullied, whether you’re talking about the influencer who seems to have it all or the dude who seems like he’s a hot mess. Whether it’s Instagram or real-life or something in between. We are complex. We contain multitudes.

No one you can name
Is just that one thing they have shown.

We can never really know. And so what do we do?

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If you’re experiencing suicidal thoughts or know someone who is, may I recommend these resources:

National Suicide Prevention Lifeline
988

1. Ironically but not surprisingly, this particular show did have one last-minute change that presented itself the night before. Luckily, it was a good change: Tyler Glenn of Neon Trees showed up to sing (my favorite Fleetwood Mac song) “Never Going Back Again.” It ruled.

2. “Sort of friends” because I met them through a now-ex-girlfriend. That kind of stuff makes it hard to stay friends in the short term. But, with the passage of time, every time I’ve seen them since has been warm and awesome. Great people.

3. Holly will often tease me for getting into the far right lane before we have to exit the highway because I’ll do it inordinately early. Like, more than a mile.

I am most definitely a Look Before You Leap-er. To a fault.

4. Who was the cruel taskmaster making me sing first in the set? Oh, right. It was me.

5. If you’re experiencing suicidal thoughts or know someone who is, may I recommend these resources:

National Suicide Prevention Lifeline
988

6. When I was in high school, I had to go to a special after-school program after I had gotten into a bit of trouble that I won’t detail. My parents, to their credit and horror, had to go with me. We had these group meetings with the kids and their parents. Sometimes some of the kids would fly off the handle, yelling and cursing and making a big scene. A lot of them had problems I’d never really had to see in person—drugs, chemical imbalances, abuse, etc. At one point, the moderator had the kids go around the room and tell everyone who their hero was. I panicked. Knowing myself now, it makes sense, how I would really want some time to think about it AND enough time to really explain it to the group. But as my turn neared, my brain was freaking out. I wanted to be cool and interesting and also relevant to who I thought I was. My head started pounding and when the moderator pointed at me, I blurted out:

ERIC CLAPTON.

My dad looked at me incredulously, like, “really?” which only made me emotionally double-down on it, even though—deep down—I knew that Eric Clapton was just a name I’d pulled out of my hat (or elsewhere) to try to be cool. Sure, I knew some songs but didn’t know a thing about the guy personally. He was a fine guitar player but, even then, not even close to my favorite. Not even top 5!