sean's story

I was fifteen years old when I first met Sean. He was a year older than me, a sophomore (I was a freshman), and he played the trumpet. We were bandmates -- we went to the WBA state championships in San Diego that year. We had several mutual friends. We even dated the same girl (though not at the same time). Yet neither of us said a single word to each other the entire school year.

It wasn't my fault, and it wasn't his. Some people just never find a reason to talk to each other.

Sean was an only child, and a military child. His father was a high-ranking leader in the United States Army. The job implied a singularly strange definition for the word "home". He'd lived in about twelve different cities, in five different countries. Now Sean was in Orange County, California, and for the time being, California was "home". His father spent most of that first year commuting to Camp Pendleton, meeting with other commandants day and night, organizing tactical battle plans for American military action.

It was 2003, and the country was at war with a feeling: terror. U.S. troops were mobilizing in the ruins of Afghanistan. The corrupt Taliban had been crushed two years prior, but insurgents were slowly gathering, pooling their resources, reorganizing the remnants of its army. Now a true test of the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan would begin -- and to withstand it, they'd need a good senior operations officer.

As the quiet summer drew to an end and my sophomore year began, Sean's father approached my mother with an unusual request.

The two had met the previous year in band parent meetings, and they'd developed a fairly close friendship. So the news must have been a bit shocking -- but not altogether unexpected: Sean's father was being called into active duty in the war in Afghanistan. Sean was to be left in California, alone and unsupervised at their small apartment, with no relatives who possessed the means to care for him.

Somewhere along the line, an idea was hatched: "Wait wait. Hold on a sec. Doesn't Iggy have a bunk bed in his room? Isn't one of his beds usually empty? After all, he's only one person, and one person doesn't sleep in two beds! Who needs two beds, anyway? So there's one empty bed in Iggy's room, right? One empty bed."

And so it was that Sean and I became roommates for the next nine months.

We developed a tenuous friendship, out of sheer necessity. I learned a lot about Sean within a matter of days. He was quiet, geeky, with a wicked dry, pitch-black sense of humor. He had a tight group of friends and didn't push far beyond it. He was extremely proud of his trumpet ability and intellect, which was enormous, but in school he refused to apply himself. He was clinically depressed, and he also suffered from mild ADD. He spent the majority of his waking hours playing Everquest on an old Pentium III we set up for him on the dining room table.

I genuinely liked the guy. I did. Because I knew his problems weren't any fault of his own. He'd had a right shitty childhood. Moving constantly, never having time to make friends or create a healthy social life. Divorce, alcoholism, drug abuse ran through his family like bloodlines. For all the hell life had put him through, he'd come out the other side as well-adjusted as I could possibly imagine. We had a lot of good times together.

Sean eventually took medication for his depression, but not at first. The diagnosis was finally confirmed about a month after he moved in. My mother told me confidentially, and also mentioned she would be paying for his treatment. I wasn't wild about the idea -- I'd never been wild about any of this -- but I let her run the show. Plus, it was about time. His attitude had become a problem, around the dinner table and throughout the house. He was consistently negative and often insulting toward every member of the family. He didn't respect my mother's authority, and he had only contempt for our new puppy, a shot-in-the-arm black ball of life named Rory.

So we started him on pills. And for a time, it was good.

But after a couple months, the pills weren't working anymore. He was back to his old ways. I didn't really mind, as I've always been somewhat of a cynic myself. I think it was hardest on my mom. She desperately wanted to help him, to heal his wounds somehow. Wounds that had been gashed years ago, wounds that had transformed and scabbed over and gnarled into ugly scars. It couldn't be done. She'd tried church -- our youth group. It didn't take. She'd tried the pills. She'd tried counseling. Nothing was working.

It was April 2004 when my mother finally gave in. We were driving somewhere, just the two of us. It didn't matter where we were going. This was an emergency meeting, a summit for a mother and her firstborn son.

She was nearly in tears. She told me what Sean had become to our family: a vortex of negative energy, a black hole of sarcasm and depression. She feared that we as a clan had been clouded with his bad juju. In a way, she was right. I couldn't remember the last time I'd had so little interest in things that used to bring me joy. We were having more arguments per week than ever before. Everyone was a little brusque, a little disgruntled, a little snappish. And she was convinced it was Sean's depression that had done this to us. She wanted him out.

I told her it would only be a couple of months until his dad returned from Afghanistan. We shouldn't be so hard on him. He was a good kid at heart, under all the layers of defense. In fact, I told her, he and I were making progress. We were becoming real friends. I told her to reschedule a doctor's appointment, find a different medication, give him another chance.

So we did.

At this point I think we could all see the finish line -- me, my mom, my sister and even Sean. His dad was coming back in a matter of weeks. The overall mood lifted as we charged ahead, through testing season and up to the end of the school year. Things were changing. He'd found a regimen of medication that was working for him, I'd fallen in love with a girl, and my sister was graduating from middle school.

It almost snuck up on us when it happened. Sean's dad arrived in California two weeks ahead of schedule -- and just like that, Sean was out. I had my own room again.

Just like that.

The dining room table almost seemed empty without him there, sitting at his old computer, leveling up his warlocks.

In the years that have passed since then, I've seldom thought about what happened during those nine strange months. But I think Sean's legacy stayed with us in some ways, and though I can't speak for my family, I know he's stayed with me.

Sometimes I catch myself in a particularly bad place, or a particularly foul mood, and I wonder how Sean must have felt, dealing with what he had to deal with on a daily basis. Occasionally I've entertained the notion that I might be mildly depressed myself. I've seen it firsthand. Insomnia. Loss of interest in daily activities and social life. Loss of appetite. Loss of weight. Loss of wonder. Loss of joy. It's like a quiet buzzing some days, white noise in my head. Other days I can barely get out of bed. I've even wondered, in the back of my mind, what pills my mom eventually found for him -- and whether I could find a solution in the same vein. Of course I don't entertain these thoughts out loud. Even speaking them here is giving me goosebumps, and not the good kind either.

If you were hoping for a conclusion to this story, there isn't one. Sean and I parted ways after that year; he went back to his friends, and I went back to mine. We saw each other around school the next year, and apart from a certain familiar understanding between us, we hardly ever spoke. He left for community college in 2005. I haven't seen him since. Our families no longer keep in touch.

If he ever reads this, and I highly doubt he will... I'd like to catch up. Maybe hang out, play some Burger Time or NES Ninja Turtles, for old time's sake. I'd like to sit down somewhere and talk about things. Maybe even get some advice. I don't really understand what's happening to me, and I think you'd understand it better than I could. And one more thing -- I'd like to know if life got better when you went to college -- or if it got worse.

I sincerely hope it got better.