You matter
Transcriber: Delia Cohen
Reviewer: Peter Van de Ven
It was a Monday,
the Monday after the Super Bowl,
to be exact, and there was a snow storm.
Schools were closed.
Everyone was stuck inside.
I was two hours away, visiting a friend,
and I was driving home.
It took me about four hours
to get home in this weather.
As soon as I walked into the house,
I saw my mom;
she was putting her boots on.
And I asked my mom what she was doing.
And she said that she was going
out to the shed to check on my brother.
He and his wife had been arguing.
She walked out.
I was putting my things away.
And then I heard the most awful sound
I have ever heard in my entire life.
I heard my mother scream my father’s name,
and in that one word,
there was unspeakable terror
and uncontrollable panic.
I ran out to the shed as fast as I could;
the snow was literally up to my waist.
I stumbled, crawled,
and when I finally got there,
I stood in the doorway,
and I saw my brother.
He had hung himself.
My mother was screaming;
she was begging me to help get him down.
So I’m looking through shelves,
opening up drawers.
I couldn’t find anything.
Finally, I stood up on a table,
and I tried to lift my brother.
And as he turned towards me,
I noticed that his face was blue
and that his tongue was hanging
out of his mouth a little bit.
And that is an image
that haunts me to this day.
My father finally made it
back out to the shed
and used a pair of hedge clippers
to cut him down.
My mother was smacking
my brother in the face,
hitting his chest, yelling at him.
“Jacob, breathe, please.
Jacob, breathe.”
Finally, she looked at me, and she said,
“Jessie, make him breathe.”
So I started CPR.
I honestly don’t know
for how long I did it,
but at one point,
I made eye contact with my father.
I shook my head, and he nodded.
It was a silent agreement.
We both knew that my brother was dead.
My father then told me
to take my mother into the house.
I took my mother in.
State troopers came,
and they stayed with my father in the shed
because my father didn’t want
to leave my brother alone.
My dad watched his only son,
his youngest son, be put in a body bag.
My mother watched her child, her baby,
carried from the shed to the driveway
and put in a van, in a body bag,
and carried away.
Phone calls had to be made,
and despite the weather,
our home was flooded with people.
That night, when I went to bed,
I stopped in my brother’s room,
and my mother and my father
were in his childhood bed,
and they were holding on to each other,
wrapped in just a nightmare,
unspeakable grief.
But in that moment I knew that my parents
would be the anchor for each other,
and I knew that my sister and I
would have to anchor both of them.
The day of the wake,
we were in the kitchen.
My dad was polishing my brother’s shoes.
My brother always liked to dress up;
he liked to look nice.
So, my dad was muttering
that he needed the shoes to shine.
My mom holds up two shirts:
a blue one and a plaid one.
“Jessie, which one should we put him in?”
I’m like, “Mom,
you can’t use the blue one.
It’s going to make him look bluer.”
In hindsight, it’s absolutely ridiculous,
but that’s what I was thinking.
And then I thought
about my brother in that shirt,
and all these memories came flooding back.
And in that moment, I realized
that that’s all my brother was:
he was just a memory.
The day of the funeral, I gave his eulogy.
After having the house full all week,
of our family, our friends,
and what meant the most to my parents
was that my brother’s friends were there.
And they told us stories
that we hadn’t heard before.
So on Sunday, the next day,
the house was silent.
The phone did not ring;
the doorbell did not ring.
And we realized that that nightmare
we had been living all week
was now our new reality.
I was talking to one of my girl friends,
Nikki. She’s my best friend.
And she had seen something on YouTube,
and it was a story about people
who had survived suicide attempts
by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge.
And one man said that the millisecond
his hands left the railing,
the millisecond they left,
he absolutely regretted his decision.
He regretted it.
So then I start thinking,
“Okay, he regretted it; he survived.
Did my brother regret it?
Do other people have that regret?
Because once you do that,
you can’t take it back.
It’s done.”
Why am I sharing this story with you?
Holidays? Horrible.
My brother’s birthday is Christmas Eve,
and every Christmas Eve,
my mother gets a birthday cake, still,
and we sing happy birthday to him.
My father hates that we do this,
but it’s my mother’s way of grieving.
This isn’t something you get over.
It’s something that you have
to learn to cope with.
So my message to all of you is this:
You matter to someone.
It does not matter if you are an inmate;
it does not matter
if you are administration.
It does not matter if you are a civilian;
it does not matter if you are security.
It doesn’t matter if you’re
a middle school student getting bullied
or a teenager struggling
with your sexuality.
You matter to somebody.
People love you.
People care about you.
And people value you.
Value yourselves.
Think.
Don’t do to your family
what my brother did to ours.
And I truly believe that had he known,
he wouldn’t have done it.
Ask for help.
Reach out to somebody.
Talk to a friend; talk to a co-worker.
Talk to an Employee Assistance
Program member.
Call the National Suicide
Prevention Hotline.
It is open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
There is no shame in asking for help.
If anything, it shows courage
and it shows bravery.
Do not be the shadow in the room.
Be the light in the room.
People want you to live.
So please, choose to live.
Thank you.
(Applause)