How to Survive a Murder

 

One thing that brought me here, to this blog, was my brother’s murder. Sure, it took seventeen years, but the main purpose of this website is to share not just what I walked through, but how I came through the other side. I want others to see the positive creative work that was born, and I hope others can gain hope and strength from it.

Fair warning: I’m not a doctor, therapist, or psychologist. These guys are awesome! If you’re hurting, please use these invaluable resources. I’m just sharing what worked for me (along with lots of things that didn’t.)

Here’s the bad news…

I found that the cliches and aphorisms I’d read on death, grief and loss were bullshit. Lucio E. Fernandez killed my brother Brian Peter O’Neill on February 26, 2001. It was a senseless argument in a bar parking lot, and Fernandez carried a knife. 

It didn’t “get easier with time”, I never “got over it”. God “gave me more than we can handle”. Everyone was not “there for me for whatever I needed.”. On the day we gathered, we didn’t celebrate a life, we had a funeral. If this violent crime was part of a “divine plan” or “happening for a reason”, I missed it. It wasn’t “his time to go”, and I’m not sure that “I will see him again someday”.

Hang on a sec. Let me tell you the good news before you run over to YouTube and watch videos of Quadruplets Hugging. I have found that a personal tragedy changes you, but not all the change is negative. I had to watch for it, but within the tragedy lived grace and joy. Our family’s tragedy bore witness to ex-husbands and ex-wives hugging and staying in the same room together, it deepened many of our relationships with one another, some got busy living their lives the way they wanted, everyone got more vocal with our love, and I got to find out what was important.

I don’t comprehend where this all fits in the Kubler-Ross stages of grief, but here goes: coping mechanisms I tried in the aftermath…

 

These Things Didn’t Work

 1. Manic Exercise.

 2. Drinking Endless Coffee to Battle Depression

 3. Taking two months off of work to isolate and be alone with my sadness and my dark thoughts.

 4. Making a ton of comfort purchases. Don’t ask me what. I couldn’t tell you. Nothing I still own, at any rate. A.K.A. Battling Depression Through Spending

 5. Compulsively eating my way to twenty pounds heavier. A.K.A. Battling Depression Through Food

 6. Dividing pre-Brian with post-Brian life. I threw away all my pre-2001 journals, class notes, memorabilia, files in my cabinet, and photographs. “Let’s do this! I have a new life now! Past equals trash!” This one is my biggest regret.

 7. Cruel-talking to myself, self-loathing, and judging myself through all of this. I take it back. This is my biggest regret.

I forgive myself for all the above. It was the best I could do. To anyone that’s gone/going through loss and grief: you did/will do things that later you realized/will realize were bad ideas. It’s all okay. Be kind. Don’t hurt yourself or others.

What I was trying to do was rush the timeline. If I could have taken a pill, bought the perfect book, gotten hypnotized, or taken the exact workshop that would have rushed me to wellness, I would have done it in a heartbeat. I think that’s where people get that “time heals all wounds.” It’s the closest description we have of going from a time when you want to vomit, hurt someone, or be hurt every day, to one when you have days where you’re… pretty okay.

Six weeks after the funeral, I drove from Massachusetts back to California. I returned to work. For two months straight, everyone wanted to get the story. They wanted to hear how I had found out and who had told me. They begged to know if they'd caught the guy (they hadn’t). They wanted to tell me I was in their thoughts and prayers. A horrible thing had happened to my family, and everyone told me how horrible. It validated me in an incredible way.  But it also put up a huge, roadblock to my stability. For a decade, I was blind to the roadblock, but today I recognize it. It was this… I didn’t want the pain and shock to end. 

That sounds crazy, right? I felt terrible and despondent. Why would I crave staying stuck? My blind roadblock—it was all that empathy and attention. It fed this addictive feeling of being pitied, loved, and protected. My life stopped for a stretch, and I didn’t want it to start again.

Then something terrible happened. People carried on with their lives. How dare they? I recognize this today as natural. We can’t reside in despair and loss forever. So after they paid their dues and respect, and honored me and my family, it was back to their lives: work, family, and fun. 

But not for me. Go back? Everything was different, gone. Circumstances had rewired me into a new paradigm.

I had an important choice to make. Remember I had to force myself to watch for joy? Well, I watched and found it… eventually. First, I had to hit rock bottom. Here’s what rocks about the bottom: I no longer suffered under the delusion that my thinking or my life was working. So I could choose to continue in denial, or get up off the floor and find a different way. 

Today I respect and love that Didn’t Work list. It attempted different ways. But those were all quick fixes. I needed something deeper…

 

These Things Worked

1. Seeking help and guidance.

Too much in my life, I’ve tried to do it all on my own. Now, I had to seek others’ strength and wisdom to get through this or I would perish. For me, that meant grief counseling, group sessions, talking with trustworthy friends, my wife, and a spiritual awakening I’ll talk about in another post. The answers lay in open-mindedness and acceptance. For years I thought I  knew everything. It didn’t work. I started opening to what if everything I thought I knew was wrong?

2. Connecting with others.

I always prided myself on self-sufficiency. Since childhood, I worked best figuring things by myself. In 2001, I faced a life of uncertainty, and it scared the shit out of me. It was beyond me. I had to make a conscious choice to be present with people, places and things, and take myself out of the isolation chamber. Fun fact: I trained as an actor. "Being in the moment" is a favorite catch phrase. I didn't comprehend its meaning until meditation. Meditation has been a game-changer. More on this later.

3. Diving into creativity and story-telling

That hangover I spoke of earlier — the one where everyone moved on with their life, but I stayed stuck in pain and angst? It’s never quite gone away. But I started looking at it from a different angle:

No one cares what I’m doing with my life. This was fantastic. Because with no one keeping score, I could ask myself what I wanted out of life.

I wanted to be heard. I wanted to help others. And I wanted to write.

Here’s another acting catch phrase: “Don’t be on the nose”. It’s derogatory. If I’m on the nose, I’m unimaginative, spelling it out, literal. I wasn’t going to write about my brother’s death and my family’s story. I was too close, and wasn’t ready. (Although, I’ve finally found an entertaining way to express it. Stay tuned.)

So, how was I going to help others? What would I write?

A while back, I met with a television producer. She liked a script I wrote called In the Black. It’s about a disgraced ex-surgeon who’s daughter needs a kidney operation. He knows all too well she’s doomed in the U.S., so he flies her overseas to get a black market surgery. He navigates and eventually joins the seedy, dangerous world of illegal medical procedures. (It’s more fun than it sounds. Kind of a medical Breaking Bad.)

The producer asked me if I knew someone that had gone though this black market procedure. I told her I didn’t. She asked me if I had a daughter. I don’t. She enjoyed the family issues, and inquired if this story was about my family… No. They’re all about my family.

I know saw the grace and joy that my sorrowful agony had brought. I now knew what was important and the stories I wanted to write. Working on the black market story came easy because I knew terror and darkness. Writing about a father losing his daughter helped me explore my own loss. I wrote about the parental relationship because I knew how close our family had become in the wake of the tragedy.

As long as I have relationships, emotions, and events to work through-- and I know that I always will be working through them-- then I'm never going to lack material to draw from.

What about you? Has something changed your life? Have you seen the tiniest joy and grace in it? Any favorite creative outlets? Please let us know with a comment. 

 

Or just go to YouTube and watch those little Quadruplets Hugging. https://youtu.be/dsogSchxR4s