Fuck you.

[trix]

Fuck you.

"It's not your fault."

Were you there?  Do you read minds?  Fuck you.

"You can't blame yourself."

Do you make the rules?  Of course I can.  Fuck you.

"You couldn't have known."

But I suspected.  I thought about it, considered it, and did nothing until it was too late.  I couldn't have known, but I could have acted.  Fuck you.

"She wouldn't want you to blame yourself."

You know that for a fact, do you?  Maybe you're right.  Unfortunately, she's dead, and therefore can't forgive me for failing her.  Fuck you.

"You have to move on."

Yeah?  Please give me the instructions to accomplish this.  Where is the fucking map?  Move on to what, anyway?  Fuck you.

"Time heals all wounds."

No, it doesn't.  The one-armed man isn't going to grow that arm back.  Some wounds are too big to heal, time can only teach us to live with them.  Also, I don't want to heal.   I'll pick that scab right off every damn time I catch one forming. Fuck you.

"You're lucky to be alive."

Maybe.  Maybe not.  Yeah, he only succeeded in killing her, and I was "saved" at the last minute, gasping for breath.  Lucky though?  That depends on how I feel about surviving it.  Right now, I don't feel lucky.  My life has become a nightmare.  "Could have been worse" is always true in all cases and not sufficient to feel Lucky.  Fuck you.

"You are a good person."

I know what I am better than you do.  I know everything I've done, as well as my mindset while doing them, and you do not.  You are not qualified to overrule me on this.  Fuck you.

"Life goes on."

Not for her.  Fuck you.

"She loved you."

...and I loved her.  That's the fucking problem.  Fuck you.

"I am here for you / anything you need."

Your obligatory execution of what you think you are supposed to say offends me.  Enrages me.  Makes me hate you.  What I need is a Do Over, but murder and death don't work that way.  In fact, you didn't even *like me* before this, so Fuck you.

"How are you doing?"

I fucking hate this question.  It drips with insincerity and banal pointless ritual.  It forces me to lie to make you comfortable, because the truth is not what you want to know.  Fuck you.

Fuck everyone.

[Faust]

Im struggling for what to say, perhaps nothing is best, but I dont want to leave what you've said unmarked.

This is the phrase we use, everything else is redundant and deminishes. Its formal, but I mean this truly.

I'm sorry for your loss.

[Doktor Howl]

This sounds pretty heavy.

Although I have not had to deal with the sort of thing you're talking about, I agree with your sentiment in every. Single.  Detail.

[trix]

It's just, maximum fucked.

And everyone tells me they can see the despair and grief on my face every day but they're wrong.

There's probably a huge pile of emotions underneath but on top of all of them, overriding them all, drowning everything else out, is heavy powerful rage.

The calm, slow, considered, depressed appearance is not sadness, it's control.  Because what is inside of here is murderous.

I've never ever considered revenge justified.  I've never believed in it, and viewed it as petty.

I have changed my mind.  If a certain scumbag murderer were not already locked away and safe from me, I absolutely would kill him and I would take my time doing it.

I know it's not healthy to fantasize about torturing another human being as often as I do, and it kills me that I have let him change me so completely, and I recognize that my thoughts these days would have horrified the innocent fucking moron I was before, but there is nothing else in life I want more than for that one specific piece of shit to suffer horribly and then die.

Unfortunately, Wisconsin does not have the death penalty.  Which is something I used to be proud of, and now really regret.

[trix]

Though the death penalty isn't enough.  I want to do it myself.  I want him to see my face and know I am the one hurting and killing him.  I want him to know that it is me, who considered him a brother, who protected and carried him for 30 fucking years through his endless stupidity and irresponsibility, who always had his back no matter what it cost me and what I had to sacrifice for him.  I want him to fully understand that the only person in this life that was always on his side, that did more for him than I've ever even HEARD of one person doing for another, is the person ending him.

I have learned that nobody, literally fucking nobody, can truly be trusted.  That the person you are the most absolutely sure of can, for no fucking reason at all, do the most utterly evil fucked up heinous shit to the ones you love.  I have learned that karma is a bullshit concept invented by idealistic fuckwits that lack perspective.  I have learned a lot from that fucking worm, and I desperately want to show him what I've learned.

[Doktor Howl]

Though the death penalty isn't enough.  I want to do it myself.  I want him to see my face and know I am the one hurting and killing him.  I want him to know that it is me, who considered him a brother, who protected and carried him for 30 fucking years through his endless stupidity and irresponsibility, who always had his back no matter what it cost me and what I had to sacrifice for him.  I want him to fully understand that the only person in this life that was always on his side, that did more for him than I've ever even HEARD of one person doing for another, is the person ending him.

Jesus, what happened?  A murder?

I have learned that nobody, literally fucking nobody, can truly be trusted.

I feel that.  My reasons for agreeing with that are trivial in comparison, but I stand by my motto:  "A friend is someone who is not yet sufficiently motivated to fuck you over."

However, for the sake of your stomach lining, I'd advise finding something to keep you busy with other people.  I say this having myself been unable to do so when I got dumped on.  That happened only with time.  Lots of time.  I also do not say you should not be thinking about what you'd do, given the chance, because that's not going to happen and I don't really think it should.  I'm just saying diversify your available attention.

Nowadays, I don't care if the people involved live or die, but that took a few years.  And again, what happened to me is not even in the same ballpark as what I'm guessing happened to you.

[trix]

Jesus, what happened?  A murder?

Yeah.  Ok, well, hold on to your butt, this is a lot.  I've had to tell it so so many times by now that it's easy, but it's a lot.  And of course, there's way more context than I can type here, but I'll try my best.

My mom, who was one of the absolute most thoroughly kind and generous and compassionate people on earth, lost her job and income during COVID (she was a live-in nanny, awesome with kids).  Because her declining health, she was mostly disabled and probably shouldn't have been taking care of kids anyway, but she is a person that cannot say no to such.

When that happened, I took her in, because I am lucky and have a good job and easily can.  I lived in a one-bedroom shithole though, which was not comfortable for two adults, so I decided to repay my mom for a lifetime of kindness and taking care of me and my brother and most of our friends (we had ELEVEN foster siblings growing up, because she couldn't see a kid in a hard place without taking them in).

So in 2020 I bought a big fancy suburban palace on a golf course next to the country club, the kind of fancy nice place she always dreamed of while always living in ghetto apartments, and I gave her the master bedroom so she'd have her own bathroom and could really enjoy it, and let her do all the decorating (her favorite hobby) and make it hers, since I worked all the time anyway and was pretty neutral as far as decor.  It was a really nice time, after her health issues and lack of income and struggles this change really turned her mood and demeanor around, and her health suddenly got significantly better too.

A year later we took in my friend Joe.  My oldest and best friend, who we've known for most of my life and was one of the foster siblings my mom took in when I was young.  I've taken him in several times over the years, "loaned" him thousands upon thousands of dollars with no payback ever (not even once), and was always his safety net.

Since it was a 4 bedroom house with two living rooms and a massive finished basement with a theater and everything, we had the room for him and his 3 sons (who came every other weekend) easily.  The ghetto apartment he lived in before was in a dangerous area where his kids weren't allowed to go outside to play and there was constant drug and alcohol drama in his building, so this was a major upgrade for them all.

He lost his job almost immediately, never paid any rent or brought in any food, and kept trashing my house.  At first it wasn't too bad, but it got worse and worse until even my mom was wondering what his deal was.  That plus a weird sound we kept hearing regularly, that at first we suspected was him hiding in his room maybe blowing up a blow-up doll or something weird but kind of understandable for a single guy I guess, but later discovered was him filling balloons with NOS and huffing them.

After his behavior got more and more strange and erratic, I did some research on the Internet into NOS and we sat him down and delivered an ultimatum.  Showed him that constant NOS use causes brain damage and psychosis, and told him he had to stop or we would have to ask him to leave.  He agreed and threw out a bunch of NOS tanks. Which to my surprise were MASSIVE, like the size of my mom's oxygen tanks, and he had a crazy amount of them.

So things got better for a bit, and I even got him a job where I work (had to argue with HR, they didn't like him, but I have an awesome reputation at work and they took my advice in the end and hired him).

After about a year, things got bad again.  He didn't have a vehicle so I had been driving him to work every day (he was on a different shift, so I'd wake up at 5am, drive him in, come home, nap, wake up at 11am, get ready and leave by 1:30pm for my shift, let him take my expensive car home even after he dinged it a couple of times, and then I'd catch a ride home at 11pm from a coworker because he couldn't be relied on to pick me up).

The last couple months (January and February of this year) it got really bad.  He quit the job and his behavior got more and more unstable and erratic, spouting weird crazy nonsense that made us really think he needed serious psychiatric help.  Unfortunately, I opted to wait and wait and see if it would just magically get better, because I'm stupid.

Found out later the NOS huffing had come back in a big way, massive stashes of tanks in his room, apparantly huffing it directly from the tanks to avoid the sound effect of the balloons so we wouldn't notice.

Anyway, I came home from an overtime shift on a Saturday near the end of February and things seemed ok, Joe greeting me and told me that my mom was asleep and he had made her food as usual, so I decided to hop in the shower before checking on her. 

As I was on my knees in the bathroom scrubbing the filth from the bottom of the tub before showering because Joe is a nasty fucker, Joe came into the bathroom behind me with a thick metal bar (about an inch thick and five feet long - no idea where he got it) and without even a word he started whaling on me with it.  He got me about 6 times full power swings before I even realized I was under attack, fracturing my spine and ribs and splitting my head open.

I stood up and shoved him out of the bathroom (so hard that there was a huge Joe-sized hole in the wall across from the bathroom door after) and slammed the door shut while screaming "holy shit what the fuck what the fuck dude" in utter shock.  He hit the handle with the bar so hard it snapped and I had to hold the door shut while he full throttle tried to shove his way inside.  Given his super strange and delusional behavior recently, I figured he had some kind of serious mental break so luckily I had my phone with me and called 911 while trying to hold the door shut.

As I was giving them my address he managed to get the door open enough to wedge the bar in there and hit me with it and then snatch my phone before I got him back out and the door shut again.

He stopped banging on the door and was silent a minute. At first I thought he was baiting me to come out, but then I heard his voice from the living room saying "No cancel, cancel, it's a false alarm" rather calmly, and realized he was trying to cancel the 911, because he is stupid.

I opened the door a bit and peeked out and saw he had left the bar on the floor outside the door. So I opened the door and grabbed it and went into the living room, holding it ready to swing if he came at me again.  He saw me and put his hands up and got really suddenly calm and cooperative, so I told him to leave and wait outside for the cops. He agreed and as we walked towards the door he suddenly turned and charged me.  I got him with the bar on the head a couple good times before he closed the distance and it became a wrestling match.

We wrestled for a while and it occurred to me that I hadn't heard anything from my mom this whole time and we were making a LOT of noise, so as we were wrestling I asked him if he had hurt my mom, not really believing he would be crazy enough to actually hurt a sweet old disabled woman that helped raise him, but worried that she hadn't started yelling and asking what was going on.  She wasn't exactly a heavy sleeper.

The look of unhinged rage on his face mixed with shame as I asked him that scared the living hell out of me, and for some stupid reason I just completely lost all strength and fight.  He took advantage and got on top of me and put the bar across my neck and knelt on it, screaming and drooling into my face with the effort as I struggled to lift it enough to catch a breath.  I was nearly unconscious when I heard a loud pounding at the door, and Joe instantly let up and backed off at the sound, allowing me to gasp "COME IN!" at the police knocking.

They came in, Joe instantly went limp and silent with his head down, and said nothing at all as the police sat me aside and helped me catch my breath and asked me to explain what was going on.

I asked them to check on my mom, they sent someone to do that and then had me go through what happened.  Joe never moved or said a word the entire time.  They put me in an ambulance as I continued telling it, but would not tell me anything about my mom.

It wasn't until the next day that the medical examiner finally came to tell me that she was dead.  They found her on the floor of her room, covered in a blanket, with several items including her flat screen TV on top of her, and the electrical cord that was used to strangle her to death still wrapped around her neck.  They said she had died a couple hours before I got off of work, and there's nothing I could have done.

From the criminal complaint I got ahold of later, it seems more may have been done to her before or after death, but we won't know for sure until the forensics comes back and apparently that takes a ridiculously long time.

Joe didn't make any attempt whatsoever to cover anything up.  He pled not guilty to the charges so far, but that's not likely to matter given the mountain of evidence.  The detective said that he believes Joe waited for me to get home because he had no car or money, and his plan was likely to murder me too and take my car and wallet and go on the run.

Joe, my best friend.

[Doktor Howl]

Jesus, what happened?  A murder?

Yeah.  Ok, well, hold on to your butt, this is a lot.  I've had to tell it so so many times by now that it's easy, but it's a lot.  And of course, there's way more context than I can type here, but I'll try my best.

My mom, who was one of the absolute most thoroughly kind and generous and compassionate people on earth, lost her job and income during COVID (she was a live-in nanny, awesome with kids).  Because her declining health, she was mostly disabled and probably shouldn't have been taking care of kids anyway, but she is a person that cannot say no to such.

When that happened, I took her in, because I am lucky and have a good job and easily can.  I lived in a one-bedroom shithole though, which was not comfortable for two adults, so I decided to repay my mom for a lifetime of kindness and taking care of me and my brother and most of our friends (we had ELEVEN foster siblings growing up, because she couldn't see a kid in a hard place without taking them in).

So in 2020 I bought a big fancy suburban palace on a golf course next to the country club, the kind of fancy nice place she always dreamed of while always living in ghetto apartments, and I gave her the master bedroom so she'd have her own bathroom and could really enjoy it, and let her do all the decorating (her favorite hobby) and make it hers, since I worked all the time anyway and was pretty neutral as far as decor.  It was a really nice time, after her health issues and lack of income and struggles this change really turned her mood and demeanor around, and her health suddenly got significantly better too.

A year later we took in my friend Joe.  My oldest and best friend, who we've known for most of my life and was one of the foster siblings my mom took in when I was young.  I've taken him in several times over the years, "loaned" him thousands upon thousands of dollars with no payback ever (not even once), and was always his safety net.

Since it was a 4 bedroom house with two living rooms and a massive finished basement with a theater and everything, we had the room for him and his 3 sons (who came every other weekend) easily.  The ghetto apartment he lived in before was in a dangerous area where his kids weren't allowed to go outside to play and there was constant drug and alcohol drama in his building, so this was a major upgrade for them all.

He lost his job almost immediately, never paid any rent or brought in any food, and kept trashing my house.  At first it wasn't too bad, but it got worse and worse until even my mom was wondering what his deal was.  That plus a weird sound we kept hearing regularly, that at first we suspected was him hiding in his room maybe blowing up a blow-up doll or something weird but kind of understandable for a single guy I guess, but later discovered was him filling balloons with NOS and huffing them.

After his behavior got more and more strange and erratic, I did some research on the Internet into NOS and we sat him down and delivered an ultimatum.  Showed him that constant NOS use causes brain damage and psychosis, and told him he had to stop or we would have to ask him to leave.  He agreed and threw out a bunch of NOS tanks. Which to my surprise were MASSIVE, like the size of my mom's oxygen tanks, and he had a crazy amount of them.

So things got better for a bit, and I even got him a job where I work (had to argue with HR, they didn't like him, but I have an awesome reputation at work and they took my advice in the end and hired him).

After about a year, things got bad again.  He didn't have a vehicle so I had been driving him to work every day (he was on a different shift, so I'd wake up at 5am, drive him in, come home, nap, wake up at 11am, get ready and leave by 1:30pm for my shift, let him take my expensive car home even after he dinged it a couple of times, and then I'd catch a ride home at 11pm from a coworker because he couldn't be relied on to pick me up).

The last couple months (January and February of this year) it got really bad.  He quit the job and his behavior got more and more unstable and erratic, spouting weird crazy nonsense that made us really think he needed serious psychiatric help.  Unfortunately, I opted to wait and wait and see if it would just magically get better, because I'm stupid.

Found out later the NOS huffing had come back in a big way, massive stashes of tanks in his room, apparantly huffing it directly from the tanks to avoid the sound effect of the balloons so we wouldn't notice.

Anyway, I came home from an overtime shift on a Saturday near the end of February and things seemed ok, Joe greeting me and told me that my mom was asleep and he had made her food as usual, so I decided to hop in the shower before checking on her. 

As I was on my knees in the bathroom scrubbing the filth from the bottom of the tub before showering because Joe is a nasty fucker, Joe came into the bathroom behind me with a thick metal bar (about an inch thick and five feet long - no idea where he got it) and without even a word he started whaling on me with it.  He got me about 6 times full power swings before I even realized I was under attack, fracturing my spine and ribs and splitting my head open.

I stood up and shoved him out of the bathroom (so hard that there was a huge Joe-sized hole in the wall across from the bathroom door after) and slammed the door shut while screaming "holy shit what the fuck what the fuck dude" in utter shock.  He hit the handle with the bar so hard it snapped and I had to hold the door shut while he full throttle tried to shove his way inside.  Given his super strange and delusional behavior recently, I figured he had some kind of serious mental break so luckily I had my phone with me and called 911 while trying to hold the door shut.

As I was giving them my address he managed to get the door open enough to wedge the bar in there and hit me with it and then snatch my phone before I got him back out and the door shut again.

He stopped banging on the door and was silent a minute. At first I thought he was baiting me to come out, but then I heard his voice from the living room saying "No cancel, cancel, it's a false alarm" rather calmly, and realized he was trying to cancel the 911, because he is stupid.

I opened the door a bit and peeked out and saw he had left the bar on the floor outside the door. So I opened the door and grabbed it and went into the living room, holding it ready to swing if he came at me again.  He saw me and put his hands up and got really suddenly calm and cooperative, so I told him to leave and wait outside for the cops. He agreed and as we walked towards the door he suddenly turned and charged me.  I got him with the bar on the head a couple good times before he closed the distance and it became a wrestling match.

We wrestled for a while and it occurred to me that I hadn't heard anything from my mom this whole time and we were making a LOT of noise, so as we were wrestling I asked him if he had hurt my mom, not really believing he would be crazy enough to actually hurt a sweet old disabled woman that helped raise him, but worried that she hadn't started yelling and asking what was going on.  She wasn't exactly a heavy sleeper.

The look of unhinged rage on his face mixed with shame as I asked him that scared the living hell out of me, and for some stupid reason I just completely lost all strength and fight.  He took advantage and got on top of me and put the bar across my neck and knelt on it, screaming and drooling into my face with the effort as I struggled to lift it enough to catch a breath.  I was nearly unconscious when I heard a loud pounding at the door, and Joe instantly let up and backed off at the sound, allowing me to gasp "COME IN!" at the police knocking.

They came in, Joe instantly went limp and silent with his head down, and said nothing at all as the police sat me aside and helped me catch my breath and asked me to explain what was going on.

I asked them to check on my mom, they sent someone to do that and then had me go through what happened.  Joe never moved or said a word the entire time.  They put me in an ambulance as I continued telling it, but would not tell me anything about my mom.

It wasn't until the next day that the medical examiner finally came to tell me that she was dead.  They found her on the floor of her room, covered in a blanket, with several items including her flat screen TV on top of her, and the electrical cord that was used to strangle her to death still wrapped around her neck.  They said she had died a couple hours before I got off of work, and there's nothing I could have done.

From the criminal complaint I got ahold of later, it seems more may have been done to her before or after death, but we won't know for sure until the forensics comes back and apparently that takes a ridiculously long time.

Joe didn't make any attempt whatsoever to cover anything up.  He pled not guilty to the charges so far, but that's not likely to matter given the mountain of evidence.  The detective said that he believes Joe waited for me to get home because he had no car or money, and his plan was likely to murder me too and take my car and wallet and go on the run.

Joe, my best friend.

Holy fuck.

Jesus Christ.

Okay, I agree with the wanting him dead bit.  No reservations.

[Doktor Howl]

I'm really sorry that happened to you and your mother.

Jesus.

[trix]

Thanks.

It's been tough.  It happened in late February and most people (especially at work) kind of assume I'm somehow mostly over it by now, which I suppose makes sense because I'm good at pretending, but I'm not.  Not even a little.

I'm staying with my brother (a Milwaukee Police officer and really really good dude) and his wife (the head nurse at a major hospital and also a really really good person) while I prep the house for sale because I couldnt go back to the house I got for my mom after all that, but I don't really sleep much anymore so work has been a real struggle.

Distraction helps, sometimes, but I still often spiral and get into bad mind states, completely at random.

I fired the grief counselor I was given because she just kept offering generic platitudes and it got really annoying and pointless.  I think this was simply out of her league.

[Doktor Howl]

Thanks.

It's been tough.  It happened in late February and most people (especially at work) kind of assume I'm somehow mostly over it by now, which I suppose makes sense because I'm good at pretending, but I'm not.  Not even a little.

I'm staying with my brother (a Milwaukee Police officer and really really good dude) and his wife (the head nurse at a major hospital and also a really really good person) while I prep the house for sale because I couldnt go back to the house I got for my mom after all that, but I don't really sleep much anymore so work has been a real struggle.

Distraction helps, sometimes, but I still often spiral and get into bad mind states, completely at random.

I fired the grief counselor I was given because she just kept offering generic platitudes and it got really annoying and pointless.  I think this was simply out of her league.

I lost my mother 3 years ago to a hideous cancer that coming back over and over again, resulting in complete physical disability and dementia. 

I'm not over that, and I had a couple of years to say goodbye, so I can imagine you not being over this. 

My father attended group grief counseling after a futile round of one-on-one.  The counselor didn't really do shit; it was being surrounded by other walking wounded that helped him.  Humans will pack bond with anything for any reason at all, and shared tragedy is one hell of a reason.  It might not help, but then again it might.

I have had some success on bad days by blasting pop music when I get feeling bad about mom.  She and I have both always been pop junkies, and it helps distract me without making me feel like I'm being disrespectful to her memory.

[trix]

Group grief counseling sounds like a good idea, actually.  I might look into that.  Less generic TV-therapy bullshit and more actual pain sharing with other hurting people might really help.

As for the pop music, our version of that would probably be our shared interest in certain shows (old doctor who was a big one) and books, but every time I try that it brings me down instead of up and I get into the spiral of crying and apologizing to the empty air.

My mom was a big believer in ghosts/spirits/etc, while I never was.  She once promised me that after she passed, she'd do her damnedest to give me some sort of sign or signal that she's around in some form, so I could know that she was right and there is something beyond death instead of nothingness.

I've been watching for it, for anything like that, but so far I've been disappointed.

[Doktor Howl]

Group grief counseling sounds like a good idea, actually.  I might look into that.  Less generic TV-therapy bullshit and more actual pain sharing with other hurting people might really help.

It worked for my dad.  I hope it works for you.

As for the pop music, our version of that would probably be our shared interest in certain shows (old doctor who was a big one) and books, but every time I try that it brings me down instead of up and I get into the spiral of crying and apologizing to the empty air.

Yeah, it kind of has to be mindless to work.  Watching Dr Who requires focus.  Listening to Elton John or Abba doesn't even require a lizard brain.

My mom was a big believer in ghosts/spirits/etc, while I never was.  She once promised me that after she passed, she'd do her damnedest to give me some sort of sign or signal that she's around in some form, so I could know that she was right and there is something beyond death instead of nothingness.

I've been watching for it, for anything like that, but so far I've been disappointed.

There's probably RULES in the afterlife. Something something about fucking with free will or outing God's troll.

Or maybe your priorities shift.  By definition, supernatural activity is spooky action at a distance.  Even in biblical days, people could only see a hint of what was going on.  Did Jesus walk on water, or was he standing on the back of a whale?  Both are miraculous, both have the same effect, but you can't see the mechanism.

So it's possible that she's signaling, but you interpret it as background noise.  Or she just knows stuff you don't know and isn't signaling based on that new knowledge.  Again, if it's supernatural, then by definition you can't see the whole picture.

I refuse to accept that there is no afterlife, because it seems very unlikely to me that the universe will stop fucking with me just because I died.  That is why the only reason I would ever kill myself is if I have some unbearable physical failure.  Emotional or mental stuff won't be improved, so why hurry?

[trix]

I desperately hope there is an afterlife, but I have a strong natural resistance to believing something to be true because I WANT it to be true.  Rather, the more I want something to be true, the more I tend to believe it probably isn't.

Especially when it comes to any form of religion or spirituality or magic.

On the other hand, my mom was older and much wiser than me.  She's turned out to be 110% correct about so many things that I was absolutely certain she was wrong about, that I can't/won't dismiss something she was that convinced was true, especially when I don't have any evidence either way.