Let me just say this thing and then I’m done ’cause this isn’t about me.

The man has been dead for less than 24 hours and you wanna come on here and reduce his entire fucking character, life, and especially death to some fucking dismissive, sneering label? FUCK YOU, YOU FUCKING CUNT.

Yeah, “junkies” die a lot. You know who else dies a lot?

White men between the ages of 45 and 54.

People who live at the subsistence level for a long time or keep bouncing in and out of it.

People who experience long-term, chronic stress and/or resource insecurity.

Gulf War veterans.

People with anxiety and depression and ADHD and the damage from 30 years of untreated PTSD they’ve been carrying around, and with that array of comorbidities, good luck getting a medication that is more effective than a fucking green M&M from the goddamned VA. You’re fucked.

Oh, and you want to smoke weed ’cause it helps and it doesn’t give you brain zaps when you skip smoking it, unlike the meds we prescribe? Oh, too bad, you have to pee in a cup, and now you can’t even have the green M&Ms, but here’s your 10% disability for tinnitus. Thanks for your service. Sorry about your life.

(Oh, by the way, there’s no such thing as Gulf War syndrome, say the doctors right on cue, every six or so years when you go to the VA to have another anomalous cyst cut out of your knee.)

We are taught to fucking suck it up and drive on in the army. Eat sand and misery for breakfast and don’t be a pussy. Get back up and fight. You’re fine if you still have a goddamned bootlace, some matches, and a packet of non-dairy creamer in your pocket. Does it hurt? Walk it off, sunshine.

And we do. And we get good at it. And we pride ourselves on our ability to do it, and we’re proud of our squad, and our squad is proud of us. That kind of bullheaded tunnel vision wins wars.

But God, it makes for shitty civilians on the other side. It makes for people who bottle it up until they lash out in the wrong direction, a lot of times at themselves (and there’s a nice little cycle for you). It makes for people who will get up and walk on broken fucking legs, who would never dream of copping out and killing themselves, but somehow those mortality rates are still something else, aren’t they?

How about those unemployment and homelessness rates? How about that risk-taking behavior and self-medication? Psych profession is really only now beginning to kind of glimpse the relationships and understand subintentioned death and think about why vets die in ridiculous numbers from car wrecks. They’re just starting to see impulsivity and risk-taking behavior as facets of suicidality. But you want navel-gazing and introspection and the ability to construct a compelling narrative that ticks all the right boxes and none of the wrong ones so they can win the lottery and get a prescription and some treatment that *might* have a shot at helping?

You want this from vets whose true north was and remains that packet of fucking non-dairy creamer in their pocket while their boots are full of blood? Yeah? FUCK YOU.

No, he wasn’t Mr. Fucking Rogers before the army. He could be moody and mope. Course, he was 20 fucking years old – that’s not terribly remarkable by itself. But yes, there are still personal choices we’re responsible for no matter how we got here. I’m not saying there’s even a direct, uncomplicated through-line here where you can point to cause and effect. I’m not saying anything as simplistic as “the army did this to him” AT ALL.

But I AM saying LIFE did this to him, and if you think you understood him without understanding him as a veteran, you’re stupid. And if you dismiss him as a junkie without understanding the very long and circuitous route he took to end up dead when he was barely into his 50s, then you’re just an asshole. If you think self-medication is a cause and not a symptom, you’re a dumb fuck.

I think his mother has a weird sort of hope that there’ll be some understanding in the form of some undiagnosed illness. I’m not feeling very confident in that. But even if all they end up with is “heart attack,” I’m here to tell you it was broken into a thousand pieces already, held together with a bootlace and packet of non-dairy creamer. He held it together for a really long time.

He was not a happy man. In fact, he was deeply troubled, and over the years he went from occasionally veering downhill for a while before veering back up to aiming for the bottom of that hill with increasing speed with something that started to look to me like determination, these past couple of years. I’m not saying it was conscious. I don’t know. But he was never stupid. He knew how fucking probability worked. He knew what it all looked like from the outside, too. And he knew the slightly bitter amusement of being looked down on or sneered at by people who have no fucking business opening their mouths, but even in 2020 it’s still ok to look down on junkies and hookers, right? Shit, even wastoid brain dead party bros whose mental age peaked at 14 hate fucking junkies. It’s fine to hate junkies.

So what do *you* do when you fill out all the right forms and check all the right boxes and do all the things you’re supposed to do as best you can — though your threshold for frustration and stamina for paperwork have taken a thorough beating after a couple of decades of dancing with Veteran’s Affairs, and there’s a little learned helplessness that’s crept in there after a few rounds of promising starts that totally petered out yet again — but the entire fucking system is simply inadequate to help you? What’s your morally superior fucking answer?

Well, if you’re [him], you keep getting back up for formation. You’re late sometimes. It isn’t always graceful, and sometimes you fall down and stay there for a while. Maybe you don’t always make the best choices. Maybe your perspective gets pretty fucking skewed there after a while and your sense of what’s possible narrows a lot. Maybe you can’t see six inches in front of your face there after a while.

But there was a broken bone in there deep, and it never healed, and he kept on fucking walking on it.

If he’d chosen self-medication over *better options* that he rejected because he wanted to “be a junkie,” because he wanted to get high, this would be a different rant. But that’s not what happened, is it? He never received adequate treatment, never. Something was always breaking down in his body, and something was never healing in his mind, and it wasn’t because he ever said “fuck it, I just want to be a fuckup.” He was in so much goddamned pain for so long.

His mother said she sat with him a while before they took him away and she hadn’t seen his face look that peaceful in forever. She also said she was surprised. I wish I was surprised. I’m not. I was starting to think it was gonna take something pretty radical to alter this trajectory lately, even if half the stuff I heard was exaggerated – and I don’t know that it was. I was afraid it was going to involve something like speeding vehicles and impaired judgment and grievous injury.

So I’m just gonna grab onto that, the fact that it didn’t, the fact that he died in bed and his face was peaceful and be grateful for that even while I’m mad as hell that for him, this is how the pain finally stopped.

And if your takeaway point, your wisdom you’re gonna level on us amounts to “junkies die, he was a junkie, therefore he died,” you and your reductive fucking “insight” can go fuck off. You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.