I don't listen to 30 Seconds to Mars, so I didn't get the reference, and I asked her about it. The answer: "It's a reference to their Up In The Air record with all the colors and stuff." O.k., got it ... although the answer doesn't matter so much as the flashback it gave me when I first saw the pic, which is what prompted me to write this blog post. I've only ever found myself participating in one balloon release, and it was 3+ years ago. I didn't even know they were a "thing" before that. Do they normally do these things at sad events, happy events, or both? I suppose it must be one of those all-purpose activities.
Three years ago, late January 2011 to be exact, my aunt (my mom's youngest sister, Amy) committed suicide. She was bipolar. Coincidentally, it's what prompted me to start this blog ... because I was having many thoughts swirling around in my head about it that I needed to get out of my head somehow. So instead of doing the healthy thing and saying these things to my family, I barfed them all out into the semi-anonymous ether of the interwebs. As a result, I still get hits on my blog regularly via people using the search term "pros and cons of suicide". It's extremely depressing and disconcerting. But, also out of my control, unfortunately. At the very least, I feel fairly certain that my writings on the matter are not going to provide these folks with an argument for the "pro" side.
It happened on a Thursday. We found out in the early evening hours. She had done it around 11am or noonish, I believe. Her husband, my uncle, found her in the garage later in the afternoon as he arrived home from work. On Friday, we all walked around like zombies, in shock ... and, well, horror, as you'd imagine. Saturday morning, we picked up and drove down to Oakhurst, where they live. Or was it Sunday morning?? God, I don't even remember anymore, it's all a blur. I just know that that weekend we all sat around at their house together, in a daze, trying to piece together the clues of how we had arrived at this horrendous moment.
It was late January, which, in San Jose simply means temps in the 55-65 degree range, jacket or light coat weather. But when we got to their high-elevation place in Oakhurst (3 hours away, near Yosemite), it was snowing a little bit. I didn't expect that. The family cat Tiger lounged around stoically like it was any other lackadaisical weekend. She didn't seem to realize that anything at all was amiss.
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| This cat is actually kind of a badass, truth be told. |
God, it's actually weird thinking back on it now, because a LOT more of it is a blur than I even realized before trying to write this. It's like, whatever your brain does to protect itself from the worst parts of traumatic experiences. EDIT: I actually wrote nearly this entire post before realizing that this happened over TWO weekends, not one. What I just described above was the first weekend, but then the next weekend we went down there again, and some different family members flew in from a couple other states. Both my aunt (Amy) and uncle's two kids (my cousins) were there the first weekend, and then her daughter was back up at college on the second weekend, but her brother was still home. That would explain why I have pics on my phone of Tiger in a snowy backyard (as seen above) right next to pics of Tiger sitting in the exact same spot surrounded by a perfectly sunny and green/dry backyard. Apparently I did not take any pics in the work-week between them. Holy crap, I really wasn't kidding about that blur, was I?? Yeesh.
All I know is, out of those two sequential weekends, the few very vivid memories I have - other than snippets of our various conversations - are the cat, and the snow, and the balloons.
Around noon-ish on Saturday of the second weekend (no snow this time), we went down into town for a bit to get some Subway sandwiches for lunch, and brought them to the park nearby to eat them at some picnic tables. We sat and ate and tried to explain to my then-11-year-old cousins (triplets) exactly what the fuck had just happened to their aunt Amy and why. We had just been on summer vacation with her in Tahoe 5 seconds ago, for Christ's sake. These explanations involved painstakingly careful wording that did NOT include the word "suicide", and resulted in extremely confused looks on all the kids' faces. I can't even imagine what must have been going through their heads. I didn't experience any major tragedies till I was 20. I don't know how on earth I would have even attempted to comprehend any of these at age 11, especially this one.
Now, here's where this already bewildering experience gets a bit weirder. Let's start with bit more background: About a week and a half before Amy committed suicide, this had also happened in their little town of Oakhurst:
Community Mourns Carbon Monoxide Victims - "The Oakhurst community is united in its reaction to the carbon monoxide poisoning deaths of Diana Montoya, 60, her granddaughters, Alexis Montoya, 10, Jayden Montoya, 8, and her son, Bruce John Frederick Hargett, 35."
Can you even imagine!? Four people from the SAME family, including TWO KIDS, all wiped out at once. It's unfathomable. My uncle had just told us about this incident too; it came up in the conversation because of the awful coincidence that another family had died in their same small town of carbon monoxide poisoning, shortly before my aunt died the exact same way. Only with them it was on accident, while sleeping, due to a faulty generator setup, and with Amy it was in the garage, with her truck, on purpose.
While eating our sandwiches at the park that day, we sat near a large crowd of people who had also gathered at the park. It became clear fairly quickly that it was a memorial service/gathering. We sat several yards away from the crowd and kept to ourselves while we ate, but then after we ate, we felt a little awkward hanging out so near to the gathering without participating in any way. So some of us wandered into the crowd and looked at the memorial pictures that had been placed on a table.
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| That's my cousin Megan in the grey sweatshirt in the forefront of the pic on the left. |
This had to be the same family who we had just talked about with my uncle. My uncle didn't come with us to lunch so we couldn't verify, but it had to be them. Oakhurst is a very small town and tragedies like this are NOT commonplace. While we milled around the perimeter of the crowd awkwardly ... people started handing out balloons. Some nice folks walked up to us and handed us several of them. We took them without question and said thank you. At that point we joined the crowd and listened to the speech being given. I have zero memory of what words were spoken, or how many people spoke; it's fallen victim to the blur. But I'm fairly certain that the words confirmed that this was indeed the family who had suffered the tragedy I mentioned above.
When the speeches were complete, we were instructed that we were to release our balloons when they gave the "go" signal. Music was turned on via a soundsystem that had been set up for the event. A song ... again I have no clue what, but I couldn't have named it even on that day if you'd asked me. It was something I might hear at a coffee shop or something and pay no attention to, but for this moment, I recall it being very appropriate. It's one of those songs that gives you those uplifting types of feels. My mom and my aunt Sue immediately marveled at it ("What is this song?? I love it!!"). Damn, I wish I could figure out what it was. Anyway, as the song started, the "go" signal was given. And then as the song played, it was all just balloons, balloons, balloons.
We stood there and went with the flow of it along with the rest of the mourners ... while exchanging a few glances at each other like, "Uhh, whoa." I suppose you can't find yourself in surreal-as-hell moment like this without stumbling onto it ... getting slammed in the face with it by complete accident. It's the antithesis of a planned situation.
We continued to stand there and watch as the balloons slowly disappeared into the sky. Not long afterward, we gathered up our stuff and made our way out of the park, while exchanging a few comments about how nuts it was that we had accidentally stumbled onto this.
But in a sense, the most bizarre thing about all of it is that we never actually spoke to the people who were holding that memorial service. We were completely anonymous because we were out-of-towners, and my uncle and cousin (Amy's son) had stayed back at the house. For all the mourners knew, we were just a random happy family who happened to be having a picnic that day. Like maybe we came for a game of touch football and wound up at a memorial service instead. But in reality, our paths intersected a HELL of a lot more than just the fact that we were all at that park at the same time.
We didn't have the formal memorial service for Amy until mid-March. This park experience was on February 5th, according to the timestamp on my pics. I can't even imagine what this family and their loved ones were feeling with such an unthinkable loss, and I'm not sure if they even knew about Amy at all, as I don't know how it was reported in the paper there. We were like two totally separate entities, each traveling around on our own different (and yet eerily similar) crazy tragic paths, and then suddenly we merged together for a bit, riding the same wave. And then we broke away again, and that was it. And these mourners had - and presumably still have - no idea that their memorial service and balloon release inadvertently became ours, too, for those few moments in time.
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