There are some people who can identify the precise moment when their childhood innocence ended. I am one of those people. It wasn’t that I realized it at the time, but the ensuing years revealed when it exactly occurred and how it played out. It was on a Friday afternoon, and I was sitting on my brother’s bed listening to music. The door was closed so my parents had to knock. We were having our own strained relationship then, so the fact that both of them were walking in to talk to me felt like a big deal, and my instincts rushed to guard myself against what the trouble might be.
My Mom very quietly and deliberately told me that a classmate I had known since kindergarten had killed himself. I was in such shock that I could barely mutter a weak ‘Oh’ and nothing else. My parents hovered for another moment, but there was nothing more to say. I held my countenance stoically still, and even after they closed the door I remained in a hushed suspension. It would be the state I maintained for the next thirty years whenever Jeff Johnson came up. It was the only way I could make it through that period of time. Before that moment, my childhood existed safely and soundly, if a little delusionally – the way happiness and innocence usually exist – but after that moment there would be no finding such child-like innocence again.
Tomorrow I’m posting the story on how I began to finally grieve, as it marks the 30thanniversary of when my old friend took his life, snuffing out both of our childhoods in the process.
