Two weeks before my oldest cousin’s twenty-third birthday, he shot and killed himself. It scarred our family. The kind of jagged, gnarled scar, like a poorly-filled pothole, that — even though it’s been nearly twenty years — you still run your fingers across from time to time and feel the sting of a fresh wound.
We weren’t all that close, but as a 14 year old, sorting through my own perceptions …
At 3 a.m. last Saturday, I was feverishly devouring medical journal articles on subarachnoid hemorrhages (which I now know are a type of stroke caused by bleeding into the space surrounding the brain), trying to determine just how much I needed to be panicking about the health of a loved one. With every text message update from the rural hospital he …
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