If You Cut My Heart

This is the song I never wanted to write. “If You Cut My Heart” is a goodbye letter to my brother. The writing and recording and videography kept me feeling like I’m controlling the uncontrollable, by actively stacking audio tracks on top of each other like wood, transforming one energy into another. I found a way of absorbing shockwaves.

Making this song showed me that grief isn’t just about the missing person. It’s also about missing the parts of yourself that included that person. The parts you no longer possess. The parts that outlined your sense of belonging to a specific time and space and story. You lose that chunk of you.

So how do survivors ever recover? I don’t know what recovery means. You manage the suffering, and eventually you let yourself live. For many it’s helpful, or even a compulsion to do something generative. Verbs like- fix, organize, finish, remember, talk, listen, feel, tend, move, give, connect.

Mike overdosed on Fentanyl December 17, 2021. He didn’t plan to die that day. But I suspect he was well aware of the abyss he was circling. Enter the immense power and magical hubris that coke and fentanyl pony up, peeling off any emotional or physical pain. Well who wouldn’t love that? As a bonus it muffles the inner voice that wonders where will this lead, and how can it end, especially if I can’t stop it and don’t want to. The accountable version of me is mauled to shreds by the dopamine seeking monster that now runs the circus. This wasn’t just steady beer anymore, or even recreational drug use, but it was becoming what Mike would spit the word “scumbag” at.

That disonance must be intolerable on those painfully bright and lucid mornings, when feeling yourself sober is the pendulum swing into self avoidance. So here come the drugs again and soon we are a well trained Pavlovian dog. Goodbye perils of aging, stress, shame, pain. Hello Super Me! And then when you think it’s gone far enough, and stop, you realize you can't. Nothing feels right by itself, food has no taste, colors are dull, the real you is fading fast.

My brother died in his own self induced heaven, a state of unimaginable bliss. It’s amazing what you can be grateful for, my sister recently wrote, after the worst happens, when there’s almost nothing else to be grateful for.

As with any overdose death, the word addict feels reductive. My brother was astoundingly generous in every way, viciously protective and wildly entertaining. He would do anything to help you out, but accepting help for himself, that was never on the table.

I startle myself wondering if this overdose is another act of Mike’s tragic generosity? Knowing that hiding this problem will not be an option much longer, knowing the burden you’re about to become, the acts you’re now capable of and the unbearable self reckoning. Maybe at some point, the “guilt to thrill” ratio inverts when there’s no conceivable way home to yourself. Maybe you gun it.

He once publicly shamed a person who skipped out on me financially with such a punch, the man called me in a frenzy of apologies and a large check appeared in the mail. Mike was the force of nature his boss described. Even his humor was intentionally hardcore but the delivery was so innocent, so darkly clever, you just laughed, guiltily.

He loved his guns, and was also the man in charge of demolishing the Sandy Hook school after the tragedy. He was a fireman, a first responder, the friend that drove you to the hospital and picked you up from surgery. He knew he was a handful, and shed tears of gratitude on his wedding day for finding the woman who loved him as he was, and as much as he loved her.

Mike recreated the type of community we enjoyed as kids on a farm with 40 acres of his own handworked land, a house that feels like a giant fort with an open invite to all his friends, anytime. A magic compound, his happy place as he defined it. Not for the faint of heart, taking risks was part of the fun.

Mike had no love for my incessant guitar playing as teenagers. He would hide my guitar at holidays. But I get it. He had to listen to me complusively butchering Van Halen riffs all through high school. He once set off a quarter stick of dynamite outside my bedroom window. That’s Rock n Roll.

So what does healing even mean when you can’t cure it? Healing really means a restoration to wholeness by shifting toward what actually is. You’re never cured, but you inhabit yourself wholly again. The fracture is now a feature.

I witness the wounded spirit curling itself into a something uneven and gnarled, an emotional tattoo for the missing person. What forms underneath the incisions, the scars, is a fuller vision of impermanence and grace for all sentient life. You see that all of us are on our own finite rides around the sun. We begin to relate to our missing person in that context, that the number is the number and we all get awarded one. But hearts are built to beat, the show will go on, whether we like it or not. Wouldn’t we all want that for those we will leave behind? Absolutely.

Maybe, slowly, in fits and starts, we step away from the shrapnel to work with our hobbled heart as it is, not as it was. We accept a new relationship with our missing person, from a softer angle and in a more generous light, we carry them forward. That is the healing I’m singing about. It is a song rooted in loss, but comes with a prayer for wholeness.