… I found a face unimaginably reconfigured. There were entire parts of his cranium simply missing. He’d gotten a little liquored up and gone to the home of his ex-girlfriend. Rumor was she had broken up with him a week or two earlier and he had moped around the edges of her life in a way we would call “stalking”. He drank too much. He went to her house where he pleaded with her to take him back. Of course, she wouldn’t, couldn’t, wanted to be “just friends,” etc…, and so he broke in, ran up to her parents’ bedroom, where he took the deer rifle from her father’s closet, lay on the bed with the muzzle in his mouth, and pulled the trigger with his big toe. It was, according to the ex-girlfriend, “a remarkable gesture.”
   As I considered the gesture on the table before me, it struck me, he looked ridiculous. His face had been split in two by the force of the blast, just above the bridge of his nose. He looked like a melon dropped from the cart, a pumpkin vandalized by neighbor boys. The back of his head simply wasn’t. Here was a young man who had killed himself, remarkably, to deliver a message to a woman he wanted to remember him. No doubt she does. I certainly do. But the message itself seemed inconsequential, purposefully vague. Did he want to be dead forever or only absent from the pain? “I want to die” is all it seemed to say clearly. “Oh” is what the rest of us say.