Not A Statistic

    He’s my baby. He’ll turn thirty-five this November, but he’ll always be my baby. He entered an already crowded house (trailer) with two brothers, a sister, Mom and me. Love bounced off of those walls, and so did Timmy. He was a fast mover from the start. Quick with a smile and ready to dive into whatever looked fun to do, he usually left us all behind asking each other “Where’s Timmy? Where’d Timmy go?!” It’s been kind of a by-line for our family, even today. That kid was hard to keep up and even harder to catch. He threw himself into life with reckless abandon and revelled in it. I called him my “exclamation point”. He was God’s way of telling me “Okay, Kevin. This is the last one. That’s enough.” And he sure was.

    My baby grew up in a home with a wonderful, giving mother, who just happened to suffer with bipolar disorder, and clinical depression. I’ve written about Sam in this column in the past. She was an awesome woman. She had fire in her soul, love in her heart, and wanted to save the world and do everything good. After a decade of struggles, hospitals, medication and pain, she took her own life in 2004. Mental illness took her from us when Tim was just in elementary school.

    I’ve also covered my own alcoholism in this column. I’m nine years sober, but Tim got to live in a house with a drunk for many years. I didn’t show much of a good example to my children back then. No excuses. I regret showing my kids how to crawl into a bottle to deaden your pain. I can only show them how to stay out of it today and be there for them when they need help to make that journey themselves.

    Tim went to war when he was just nineteenth years old. He served in Iraq and Kuwait, driving trucks in convoys from Kuwait all over Iraq. He doesn’t talk much about it. He talks mostly about the people he served with, and you can tell how much love he has for them. A few things about base life and leaving his rifle on a truck bumper leaked out of him, but no nightmare stories you might expect from serving during the years of IED attacks on convoys, or mortor attacks on bases. Even before Tim left for Kuwait, he was in Fort Hood Texas when an Army psychiatrist killed thirteen people and wounded more than thirty, in a shooting on base. He pretty much kept it to himself, even though I tried to get him to talk about it or talk to someone else who’d been there. And he drank.

    It’s been over fifteen years since Tim served overseas. This past week he went to the VA and entered himself into rehab for alcoholism. His mind had wandered into the Dark Lands of contemplating suicide, and he knew he needed help. All the years of bottling things up and pouring booze on the problem didn’t make the thoughts go away. His love for his family was greater than his pride, so he reached out. It’s a simple thing, reaching out, but it’s hard for a man, the head of the household, to admit that he needs help. I know. I’m prideful, too. We get better together. No man is an island, as they say. My heart aches for him, but I know he’s going in the right direction.

    My son asked me to write about Veteran Suicide. I have written here about it before. It was full of statistics and numbers, and I researched it heavily. Over six thousand veterans commit suicide every year. During over two decades of the War on Terror, millions of Americans served this country, both overseas and here at home. They saw things we can’t imagine. Their rate of suicide is one and a half times the national average, and that’s just the people we have numbers on. But they are not numbers. They are the people you work with, go to church with, and see on the street every day. They’re not Rambo, or any mass shooting perpetrator. They walk around with memories of friends and places that haunt them. Some they want to forget. Most they can’t forget. They need us not to forget them, either. If you, or someone you know, needs help, they can text 988 for the Veterans Crisis Line. It will direct them to folks who can help walk them into finding people who can help. And you can pray for them. Every day. Because they aren’t numbers and statistics, they’re someone’s baby.

Y’all pray for my baby, Tim.

And God bless Y’all.