When the Savior Is Damned
The First Attempt
It was his mother who found him the first time, passed out under a foot of water in the tub, the blood lazily seeping from the wounds that ran down his arm, clumsy gashes made by no more than the blade from a pencil sharpener by a boy no more than seventeen.
She’d cried instantly upon laying her eyes on the grisly scene, falling to her knees beside her son’s dying body, and she would have stayed there if his grandmother hadn’t heard her wails, rushed to the bathroom, then ran back to the kitchen to call 911.
The people who answered the call didn’t even flinch at the crimson-colored water of the tub, the sickly yellow tissue around the abrasions, or the unnatural limpness of his form. They carried him to a stretcher, then to an ambulance, and wordlessly worked to clean, stitch up, and bandage his self-inflicted injuries on the ride to the hospital as his mother wept while his father tried to comfort her and his grandmother stared, face taut and far from showing any emotion.
His wounds were, fortunately, ineptly made and pretty shallow, and he didn’t even need a transfusion to ensure that he’d live. In fact, the water that filled his lungs were more life-threatening than the wounds themselves. He was unconscious for four hours after he arrived at the hospital, and the instant he woke up he was met with a concrete slap to his right cheek. He opened his eyes and saw his Grandma Elena’s tight wrinkled features glaring at him.
“Don’t you dare try that again, Gerard Arthur Way,” she hissed, frail hand trembling as he sat motionlessly, “Or the pain next time when you wake up will be a million times worse.”
Then and there she made him swear to never attempt to kill himself again, and he promised and that’s when tears began to leak from her eyes and she collapsed in front of him, wrapping her feeble arms around him and his mom and dad joined them and even he cried as well, reeling from the fact that he’d caused pain to these precious people, that he’d hurt the ones he loved by hurting himself.
He was sent home later into the night, and they found his fourteen-year-old brother Mikey watching cartoons in the living room. When he’d gone home that afternoon to an empty house and found red stains on the previously immaculate white tiles of the bathroom, not to mention the messy state of the rooms, he immediately suspected that something was wrong.
When his family arrived some time after midnight, with tear stains on their cheeks and Gerard’s arms wrapped in bandages, he knew what had happened. Nobody told him, and the incident was carefully forgotten the next morning, but he wasn’t oblivious or stupid or whatever his family expected he was.
And he tried to be discreet about it, but from then on he kept watch on his big brother, trying to pinpoint the moment where he might fall again and taking it upon himself to be there to catch him if he did.
She’d cried instantly upon laying her eyes on the grisly scene, falling to her knees beside her son’s dying body, and she would have stayed there if his grandmother hadn’t heard her wails, rushed to the bathroom, then ran back to the kitchen to call 911.
The people who answered the call didn’t even flinch at the crimson-colored water of the tub, the sickly yellow tissue around the abrasions, or the unnatural limpness of his form. They carried him to a stretcher, then to an ambulance, and wordlessly worked to clean, stitch up, and bandage his self-inflicted injuries on the ride to the hospital as his mother wept while his father tried to comfort her and his grandmother stared, face taut and far from showing any emotion.
His wounds were, fortunately, ineptly made and pretty shallow, and he didn’t even need a transfusion to ensure that he’d live. In fact, the water that filled his lungs were more life-threatening than the wounds themselves. He was unconscious for four hours after he arrived at the hospital, and the instant he woke up he was met with a concrete slap to his right cheek. He opened his eyes and saw his Grandma Elena’s tight wrinkled features glaring at him.
“Don’t you dare try that again, Gerard Arthur Way,” she hissed, frail hand trembling as he sat motionlessly, “Or the pain next time when you wake up will be a million times worse.”
Then and there she made him swear to never attempt to kill himself again, and he promised and that’s when tears began to leak from her eyes and she collapsed in front of him, wrapping her feeble arms around him and his mom and dad joined them and even he cried as well, reeling from the fact that he’d caused pain to these precious people, that he’d hurt the ones he loved by hurting himself.
He was sent home later into the night, and they found his fourteen-year-old brother Mikey watching cartoons in the living room. When he’d gone home that afternoon to an empty house and found red stains on the previously immaculate white tiles of the bathroom, not to mention the messy state of the rooms, he immediately suspected that something was wrong.
When his family arrived some time after midnight, with tear stains on their cheeks and Gerard’s arms wrapped in bandages, he knew what had happened. Nobody told him, and the incident was carefully forgotten the next morning, but he wasn’t oblivious or stupid or whatever his family expected he was.
And he tried to be discreet about it, but from then on he kept watch on his big brother, trying to pinpoint the moment where he might fall again and taking it upon himself to be there to catch him if he did.