Adam's Gifts: Hope After Loss
You couldn't forget Adam.
Adam could teach himself an instrument, disappear down a rabbit hole learning how something worked, dream up an elaborate prank and commit to it completely, and make those around him lucky enough to witness his clever humor laugh until they cried.
I didn't fully appreciate these qualities in Adam while he was alive. Some of them I came to understand only after he was gone.
The Adam Other People Knew
Adam was my baby brother. Like many siblings, our relationship wasn't always simple. We went through periods when we were incredibly close and periods when we were estranged.
Those periods always made me sad. Being estranged from Adam felt like having an arm cut off.
Now they make me sad for a different reason. I realize that sometimes I saw Adam too one-dimensionally. He was still my little brother who didn't get very good grades and spent too much money on music. I thought I knew him because I had known him my entire life.
Little did I know, I had gotten a lot of it wrong.
One of the unexpected parts of losing Adam was discovering pieces of him through other people. Stories I hadn't heard. Moments I hadn't witnessed. Parts of Adam that I hadn't fully appreciated.
His daughter remembers racing toothpicks in the gutters when it rained, watching to see whose would make it down the street first. They made up silly songs together while Adam played the guitar. They pretended they were television news anchors. And they played "Rock Lobster," their favorite song, and sang and danced together.
His imagination turned ordinary moments into extraordinary ones, always with humor woven into whatever he dreamed up.
As his former wife put it, "Adam was the fun maker."
When someone dies, especially when they die by suicide, it's easy for the way they died to become the biggest thing people remember about them.
But Adam wasn't the way he died.
He was toothpick races.
He was music.
He was laughter.
And there was a lot of laughter.
Adam Was Hilarious
Adam's humor was incredibly clever and creative. He could invent an entire scenario, assume a character and commit completely to a joke.
The photo above captures it perfectly. Thanks to some fresh beets from the garden, Adam, without cracking a smile or saying a word, tucked one under each side of his headphones, put on sunglasses and posed for the camera.
Adam, forever memorialized, listening to some sick beets.
Our cousin Steve knew this Adam particularly well.
Steve and Adam were born just weeks apart and grew up more like brothers than cousins. Adam's prank calls became legendary.
Once, Adam called Steve's boss pretending to be the maintenance supervisor for the facility and informed Steve's boss that he had been observed throwing trash out of his car window all over the parking lot.
Adam also liked to prank Steve. He would frequently call the airport where Steve was traveling and create an elaborate reason to have him paged over the loudspeaker.
The joke wasn't simply saying something funny. He created the joke. There was a premise, a character, an unsuspecting participant and a level of commitment that made the whole thing exponentially funnier.
He gave people the kind of humor that leaves you laughing until you're crying.
Music Was Part of Him
Then there was music.
Adam didn't just listen to music. He immersed himself in it.
Completely self-taught as a musician, Adam learned to play a variety of string instruments. He was also a patient teacher to people who wanted to learn.
His musical curiosity and creativity expanded into music production and writing lyrics, not because anyone told him to do it or because he was pursuing some particular outcome. He did it because he loved music and wanted to understand more of it and create it himself.
His taste was just as eclectic. He loved discovering lesser-known artists, particularly jam bands, but also indie music, bluegrass and plenty that didn't fit neatly into a category.
Music was the connector between Adam and his people.
At his memorial in Gillette, many of the musicians he had come to know throughout his life gathered to say goodbye. They played the music Adam loved. They told stories. They revealed aspects of my brother that I hadn't known before.
I Underestimated My Brother
What I learned after Adam died is that I underestimated him.
Adam was my younger brother, and perhaps some part of me continued to see him through the lens I had formed when we were younger. He wasn't a great student, took seven years to finish college, was incredibly messy and sometimes made choices I saw as irresponsible.
Some of that was Adam. But it wasn't all of Adam, and I probably let those things define how I saw him more than I should have.
What I hadn't fully appreciated was everything that existed alongside them.
Adam had built a career and remained with the same company for roughly 20 years. He owned his home. He had no significant debt beyond his mortgage. His accounts and finances were in order.
He was managing his life far better than I had given him credit for.
That realization hurt.
Not because I wasn't proud of him, but because I wished I had seen him more fully while he was alive.
I wish I had told him.
What Adam Couldn't See
This may be the part of Adam's story that is hardest for me to reconcile.
Here was a man who was extraordinarily intelligent and creative. A talented musician. A father who gave his daughter memories she will carry throughout her life. A friend and cousin whose stories can still make people laugh years later. A person who had built a career and a life.
And yet, near the end, Adam could no longer see himself the way the people who loved him saw him.
That's one of the cruelest things about suicide.
A suicidal crisis can narrow a person's view of the future until circumstances that may be temporary or survivable feel permanent and impossible to escape. Near the end of his life, the Adam he saw in himself had become very different from the Adam the rest of us could see.
Adam's life had value.
I wish more than anything that he could have seen that in himself.
Hope After Loss
When Adam died, losing I fell into a bottomless pit of grief, anger, confusion and guilt.
How could this have happened? Could it have been prevented? Why, with so much attention devoted to suicide prevention, were so many people still dying?
Eventually, those questions led me to research, to Dr. Craig J. Bryan and to an entirely different understanding of suicide prevention.
That journey ultimately became Love You Adam.
I can't change the ending of Adam's story. But I can make sure the ending isn't the only part of his story that gets told.
Through Love You Adam, his name now reaches people he never knew and places he never went. And something that began with unbearable loss has become work rooted in hope.
Maybe that is one of the things grief has taught me:
Love doesn't end when someone dies. Sometimes it finds somewhere new to go.
Love,
Maggie
President & Founder
Love You Adam
