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Throat Punch Essays

Fawn Bone Blues

Serge Bielanko

Apr 22, 2022

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And see, people, they don't understand
Your girlfriends, they can't understand
Your grandsons, they won't understand
On top of this, I ain't ever gonna understand.

The Strokes, ‘Last Nite’

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The first bone is a rib.

It’s short and thin, and seems sort of crackable like a dinosaur’s toenail. I toss it aside because it means nothing to me. When you dig in the dirt as much as I do you hope for lost coffee cans of loot or old guns or something like that. Bones come and go. But then I push the shovel down into the little hill of rich black compost and I feel the clink of another one. On the edge of the shovel, I hold it up, flip off a rotting corpse of half a grapefruit and slowly take it in my gloved hand.

To stare at it.

To stare at her as it dawns on me.

It’s the fawn. She had died in the garden around the edge of someone else’s home in the night last year. Or maybe the year before that. It had been a hard winter; deer were probably dying all over the mountain that rose up above this town. Still, I remember thinking at the time that this one had come as far as a young deer can come. She’d journeyed away from the harsher wilds of her ancestral home and somehow followed the light in the window of a house she had likely known since birth.

I’d seen her around, we all had. The owners of the property and me, we’d seen her standing knee deep in the koi pond, water dripping off her chin, her dark eyes peering into ours whenever we’d stumble upon her. She wouldn’t run right away either. She’d just stand there in the water, the cool around her joints, the shade of the willow half covering her back/ half revealing her to sunshine.

I remember staring back at her and having no real thoughts at all. It was just us. Just two leery hearts wondering what comes next. In the ripples of the lit pond sliding slowly away from her, I sensed some foreign sliver of peace. Nothing made sense to me anymore, really. The kids. The ex. My mom. The dead band. The decades of living I had done with little to show for any of it. The fucking pandemic.

I had ignored a lot. I had gotten good at living with pain and sadness carved into my own bones. Pain like outlaws carving their names into me around some long lost campfire. Sad like seagulls. No one owed me anything; I just wished the lot of them gone.

Or me.

Suicide has been on my mind since I was a kid. Ups and downs, in and out of various states of mind and innumerable moments of fire and drama, it took me this long to drag it out here to upturn the sack for you to see.

I find the fawn’s skull a few minutes later and that hits me. Not hard or whatever. I don’t lose my breath or find myself overcome by immense grief. It was a deer and I didn’t own her. She died because she could not live. She died in the sleeping garden of some people who were sound asleep when she showed up in the middle of some winter’s night. She didn’t tap on the glass. She didn’t bleat or squeal. She merely walked out of the forest, crossed the yard, and laid down against the house. And died.

Some see it as sad, but I don’t.

I see it as something else. I don’t know what. Not everything has a name. Sometimes things are many words and sometimes they are none at all. The night woods and the fading consciousness and the sense of leaving and the solid support of the old wooden shingles against young ribs: is there a word for that?

And if there is, does it have to be a sad word?

I don’t understand that mindset. I get tired of the sad everywhere I look. Maybe that’s what happened. Her death, maybe I just couldn’t handle feeling the loss because I have known too much already. Or maybe I am just more accepting of dying than some people are. Perhaps death doesn’t shake me up as much because I know what it is.

It’s the end.

Like, for real.

Her skull was two pieces next to each other in the dirt so I picked them both up and laid them under a tree. I like that we had put her here, amongst the breakfast scraps/ in with the eggshells and the corn husks and stuff. The dirt was ashy where I started uncovering the rest of her. Instead of the fresh dark that the rest of the compost seemed to be, her spot seemed to all be this ashy gray; almost as if she had been mapped by the Earth itself. Marked. Memorialized with a monument of stone colored soil. I guess it was her decomposing body/ her meat and muscles and veins and blood all soaked into the melting cascade of blown apart vegetable remains and killed fruit bodies.

Glaring at her skull I find it almost irresistible, this closeness to death I have happened upon. Once I used to watch her in the throes of inimitable life. Once I used to whisper hello at her and she still wouldn’t run/ not just yet/ and the gleaming of the warm spring morning would wrap her up in its arms as if the entirety of existence itself would bash in the head of anyone or anything who might dare to attempt to do her harm.

She seemed protected by the season, by the sky and the air and the light and the water. By the fat koi around her hooves maybe, I don’t know. Her mom was never far off (always close if I had to bet) but never able to come and save her. And so she relied on the ancient forces of circumstances colliding to allow her to breath once more. Drink once more. Run once more. Nibble once more. Lay down once more. Watch the silly squirrels just one more time.

The ancient forces of circumstances colliding.

A god for the rest of us, if I might be so bold.

____

After a while, I pop open my thermos and take a swig. Cool coffee with milk, no sugar. The no sugar thing is recent. I’ve lost three pounds but who cares. I miss the sweetness. I think all these years I liked sugar, not coffee. Now it tastes like some kind of ghost. But I drink it anyway. For the jolt, I guess. Out of habit.

I launch some fawn bones off the side of a steep cliff. One shovel fling and then another and before long, I have more or less set her loose back into the forest where she came from. Spine bones here, leg bones there. Crows call out over the town and although I’m sure they are concerned with their own selfish needs right now, a part of me thinks that maybe they are paying their respects. These crows have been around here forever. Some of them most certainly knew her, watched her poking around in the grass as they sat up the trees. One or two of them surely saw her stumbling around the woods when she was beginning to die.

Proper burials are nonsense. Human construct horse shit. I leave her skull under the tree for now. She was such a wondrous beast.

Nothing sad over here.

_____

Pushing my way back into the corners, I get ready to tell you about all of my suicides as I jab at the dirt with the shovel and loosen all these roots that have strung themselves throughout the heap.

Too long, too long, we turn our backs for far too long. We turn our backs on the truths within us and we turn our backs on the ways we have failed. I turn my back on the true traumas I have known: as a young boy: then later as a grown man. I throw some good dirt onto the screen over the wheelbarrow and it just lays there like a solid sheet. Loose scoops of dirt held together by some weird invisible netting of capillary roots and muscly twigs. One shake of the screen and the whole thing begins to come apart. But left untouched, it has been transported and doctored and man-handled and yet here it is, one short stretch of something clinging to the final moments of that form before it is gone forever.

Good coffee?

Ha.

Seems like it, huh?

Brain on fire, for better or for worse.

I long to get it all out of me though and here seems like as good a place as any to start wandering down through the patches. I have an old plantation of overgrown suicide growing down in me, man. All of them cultivated up out of so many kisses and hugs and cruel words and punches and slaps and people leaving. People abandoning me. Walking out when I didn’t expect that. And people doing that, after a while, it leaves you thinking to yourself that you must have been so bad to be around. As a chubby kid. As a hungry twenty-something. As a youngish father. As a badly wounded son. From life.

Death owns life. Remember that. Death is way more powerful. Life is a shooting star. Death is the whole goddamn galaxy. We give death such a bad name. We blame him for everything bad. But it’s not cool. Death is beautiful and forever and irreversible and the source of so much art and magic and mystery

Blaming death for anything is gaslighting.

In this dirt in front of me, I scrape late April snowstorm off the orange peels and I prod down into the vanished caramel dust of a fawn I once knew and I try to make sense of it all.

My reckonings. My therapy. My meds, both long ago and maybe coming down the pike. I wince and strain under the weight of at least ten new emails from two different schools on a single Monday morning. This kid is having trouble with listening. That kid is having trouble giving a fuck. Those kids over there need to make sure they get their homework done and remember their iPads because they forgot them today.

THEY FORGOT THEIR iPAD TODAY.

FOGOT iPAD TODAY.

FORGOT iPAD.

iPAD.

I can’t turn it off sometimes and I don’t even know if I should want to. For years now, for decades, I’ve been running with hard anxiety which was totally undiagnosed. Except that deep down I knew something was wrong. I just didn’t know what. People I loved, they mostly told me I was crazy. Point blank. They’d plow into me with their own tortured selves, their own undiagnosed hurricanes and life would get real. Then they’d inevitably turn around and blame me/ dismiss me to my face/ say I needed to be medicated and that it wasn’t their fault. Any of it. Ever. All the chaos. All the selfishness. No one ever took any responsibility for almost anything that I have ever witnessed or experienced. They merely blamed it on me. Some still do.

Eventually I blamed myself. I thought I was weak. Truth is though: I was tough as nails. I shouldered it all, head up my ass, slowly believing that I was responsible for everything bad in the world.

But you know what?

That was bullshit.

____

Self awareness is everything. Yet seeing yourself truly and clearly is nearly impossible for most human beings. I didn’t understand so much in the past.

I understand now though.

And so it goes.

___

My trust is gone.

My ability to maintain friendships: gone.

My penchant for feeling good about tonight, about tomorrow morning: damn near gone. But I’m gonna bring it back, one minute at a time, if it’s the last thing I do.

I feel hugely offended by almost anything anymore because I have lost my sense of direction. Facebook pisses me off. I want to unfriend everyone just for knowing I exist. My shattered sense of believing in myself is car crash street glass now. I walk around after each therapy session trying to pick it all up with my fingertips. I move around like some forgotten homeless dude, pecking at what’s left, talking jive to myself/ trying to assure myself that I will gather it all back/ stuff it in this brown paper 40 bag/ put everything back together and it will be okay. But I know, man. I know. What’s wrecked usually stays wrecked. You just have to build up something new somehow.

And that is, it often seems, harder than hell to do.

_____

Some nights, TV on in front if us, Arle smiles at me down the couch.

I move her socky feet into my lap.

I lift them to my face and she laughs as she tries to yank them away but I don’t let her.

I breathe her feet in like mountain rain.

Like country sun.

Her face is horrified, every single time.

But deep down I think she likes it because she knows I really like it.

_____

The thought of suicide is a great consolation: by means of it one gets through many a dark night. - Nietzsche

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Me: The fawn is dead, dude.

Them: So build a new fawn.

Me: I can’t. I don’t know how.

Them: Whatever then. Toss her bones off the cliff. It doesn’t matter.

Them: Shoot yourself in the head.

Them: No one gives a shit.

_____

It hurts to spill some of this now, however I also I think I’m feeling some kind of immense relief. It hurts so much, I guess, because vulnerability is seen as weird and awkward. Especially in men. But that’s such bullshit. Fuck off if you think that way. Just go. Now.

Thing is, I am who I am and I can’t be ashamed of that anymore. I just can’t be. Some people were wrong about so much of me, about who I really was for most of my life. That left me thinking a lot about wanting to not be here anymore. But whatever. I’m okay. I’m coming out of a long dark closet. And listen, you don’t want to get between a very good person (me) and their penchant to live (this).

Between me and you: I don’t spend my days in some kind of suicidal fog. It isn’t like that. My thing has been ideation/ imagining an exit/ my exit/ all in the name of two precise things.

First thing. I would imagine an end to the longing. A lot of people imagine this, I think. I daydream about ways to walk out on this hurt, this confusion. It’s been so long. So long. I just want to be okay. I just want to be with Arle and know my kids love me and appreciate me a little. I just want to live outside as much as I can. On hikes or having lunch in a field or standing in the woods watching a fawn watching me back. And I just want to live up in my head where I have always lived, but I want to live there while visiting an Irish sea coast village. Outside the pub. Walking down the beach with Arle. Standing in the misty spray. To turn around and see there’s no one following us. No one chasing us. No one trying to kill me.

I have realized lately that some people never had my back.

Two: I would show all those people who never saw the real me/ who had refused to maybe help me instead of blame me. I would somehow bedazzle their cheeks and their clothes and their souls with hot gunpowder’d chunks of my head and my skull and my brains. And I would watch it all from above, in the final moments before I evaporate into thin air.

It also feels so good to imagine you reading this and maybe getting something from it, no matter what that might be. I ideate you in here walking around with me.

I ideate connecting with someone through something I once thought would kill me.

_____

Killing yourself on purpose is never the answer. Unless it is, of course. I get tired of hearing the same old platitudes about how wrong suicide is. The living are so selfish when it comes to the dead. They want them back because, above all else, death is too much to wrap their heads around. Especially a voluntary exit. Wanting to die is unacceptable they say. You must tough it out. You must consider others. Blah, blah, blah. As if we have the right to tell someone what to do with their bodies. Or their lives.

You know, you really ought to just put up with the crushing and the suffering so we don’t have to deal with your departure just yet. Okay?! OKAY!

I don’t want to die. I don’t. But I admit this much: I’m fascinated by the idea of not being here. Of not hurting so bad. Or thinking that I’m hurting people I love because I don’t understand things. Or because I don’t understand myself. I know other people can relate to that. I know they can. But I am also aware that most won’t ever admit to any of this.

For me, it took me 50 years of hiding so much overwhelming agony to get where I am right now. And where am I? I honestly don’t know. But I’m aware of things I was never aware of before. And I can see so many truths now that were simply not known to me then.

I forgive a lot of people and I hope they forgive me too if that’s what’s up. But I also won’t want to hang with most of them again. I have lost so much. And whether they know it or not, they have lost a lot too. Maybe even more. Probably more.

Still, with the help of two excellent humans: my awesome therapist and my wife/ super soulmate Arle, I have begun to understand some things about who I really truly am. And about what really happened across so many years. They are things that resonate off the echoes of a life I never really fully grasped before now. Not so long ago, I didn’t feel like I was worthy of being around. Now I mostly do. And that feels pretty good.

Don’t get me wrong: I still loathe myself. But you know.

Baby steps.

Bring it.

_____

Let me speak my truth while I have you? Then I’ll let you go.

Cool. Thank you.

I’m a 50-year-old eccentric motherfucker who damn sure, straight-up has been wildly infected with, and until recently, undiagnosed anxiety.

In fact I have been suffering anxiety for so long that now depression has become a player in my world, too. I used to think depression was my major issue, but it is not. For me, it is a byproduct of the anxiety. Inexplicable deep blues grow up from the anxiety never giving up. The old anxieties die and mold away and up sprouts new ones right away and so it becomes untenable after a while. Long ago, that happened to me. And continues to this day. So I grew deeply, deeply sad underneath all of that.

Of course, I didn’t understand. Family doctors asked me the big questions.

You ever feel like hurting yourself or anyone else?

Everyone knows how to play that one. You want the meds, don’t you?

I assured them I was murder-vibe free, which I was.

And I promised them that suicide never crossed my mind.

Even though I was thinking about it right then and there. Lying to them as I smiled through my coffee-stained teeth.

They never smile back. They told me to take baby aspirin and maybe fish oil. They prescribed me low doses of Zoloft. To one therapist after another, I would tell my story as honestly and as openly as I possibly could. I took responsibility for more than I ever should have. I made them laugh. I made therapists cry. More than once.

And still: the traumas of old violence and new abandonment rattled around inside me like two BBs in a rusty can.

Years went by.

Decades.

Almost nothing changed.

I worked so hard at jobs. I played hard in a band. I tried hard with my kids. I ran from strange love after napalm rained down on everything I had once thought or believed. In the wake of finding Arle/ after daring to allow myself to believe that I was someone worth loving/ I had to let go of others in my life, watch them blow away from me like tumbleweeds lifted by the same old hot winds that I never could stop.

Along the way, egged on by a new pain so utterly deep that I feel like I must have been born with it, I have daydreamed at times about a true mountain death. A shotgun or a pistol. Never pills, never rope. High on the rocks, in a sun-dappled place, under the swaying hemlocks in the state where I was born and on the land where I have always kind of felt most myself, I would close my eyes and cry a little.

Flooding back, all of it.

Open my mouth.

Pull the trigger.

Echo down the mountainside.

A couple deer raise their heads a mile down the ridge.

A fawn stops in her tracks, blinks her big eyes, gets back to sucking on a wad of morning moss.

_____

And then it would be over.

No more anxiety.

No more feeling like I’m dying.

No more punishing sadness.

A crow would fly over my body laying down there on the sunlit rock fields, down there in the bird shadow stillness.

My Honda just sitting back there in trailhead parking lot.

153,127 miles.

No more blaming myself.

No more trauma killing me slow.

No more love.

No more smiles.

No more holding hands.

No more pizza crust.

The high shrill call of a red-tailed hawk, but I don’t hear it anymore.

No more Saturday morning coffee and sex.

No more novels before bed.

No more Little League games.

No more feeling disrespected.

The wind lush in the treetops.

A rattlesnake slithers by, checks me out.

My head all over the place.

Dad Head. Concert Head. Husband Head. Lover Head. Worker Head. Tired Head.

My head exploded all over the State Forest rocks.

But no more blues.

And no more trout down in the stream.

And no more eagles up in that sky.

At least not for me.

No more endless pain.

Goodbye.

______

We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep. It's as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out windows, or drown themselves, or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us are slowly devoured by some disease, or, if we're very fortunate, by time itself. There's just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we've ever imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) know these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more.

-Michael Cunnigham, ‘The Hours’

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In the afternoon, the weather is whack and there are snow squalls one minute and bursting sunlight the next. I fill three beat-up wheelbarrows with the compost and take them down to the garden one by one. There I shovel out the dirt and put it in a big plastic blue container. I haul the dirt to one of the four bordered beds where it needs to go. I do this hundreds of times. I’m still doing it. It is good honest work, the kind that hurts my back and makes me feel so alive.

In the midst of the work I listen to some podcasts, some music. Marc Maron talks to Bonnie Raitt. Ologies about ADHD. Some stuff about suicide that moves me/ conversations with survivors. The Strokes first album. Cannonball Adderley/ ‘Autumn Leaves’/ over and over and over again/ haunting me so wonderfully/ like the fawn, my fawn.

At one point, down in the garden, I find another rib bone.

It’s hers.

I must have missed it before.

I pick it up, glance back at the house, back at the spot where she died once upon a time.

I smile and I mean it for once.

I remember her.

Soon I won’t. That is the way these things go. But today I do, I remember her. And with her tiny kid bones all up in my hands/ her speckled DNA in the dirt on my Dickies/ her unknown ancestry and her proof of life, fading as it is, all slipped down into my rolled-up pant cuffs/ her ashy remains on the tips of my fingers: I eat some pumpkin seeds from the lunch I packed myself earlier this morning.

In my mouth, upon my coffee tongue, I barely notice her but there she goes.

Running wild and free across the fields of some lost time and place.

Reverberating back across the light, across the watery circles widening out from her skinny legs/ her joints in the ripples/ her beating heart and her watchful eyes/ her deeply felt sensations/ the fear in her nervy twitch/ the compassion clinging to her small let-out breaths/ the water in her tender mouth and the water dripping down her sides back into the pond/ and of course, there is me/ seen/ noticed/ unjudged but watched/ I’m stood there in my spring get-up/ my t-shirt and work pants/ my old dirty boots and my armful of fallen sticks that I’ve gathered for the burn pit.

I’m surprised and she’s surprised.

I’m delighted and I hope she is too.

Two uncertain beings watching each other across so many borders.

One, she will be gone again very soon.

The other will stick around, apparently.

___

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Hello. Thanks so much for being a subscriber. Even though this week’s essay was due to be for paid subscribers only, I have taken the extreme liberty of making it public. I do that every once in a blue moon because the topic is something really important to me. And because it might help someone else. I hope my paid subs can roll with that/ as always, your support is everything.

If you aren’t a paid subscriber, please consider becoming one if you possibly can.

Thanks a lot. Have a great weekend. -SB

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