A Day in the Life of Olivia Newberry

I knew Olivia as a slender, white woman with long brown hair, about 40 years old. Nothing about her seemed remarkable. She had a love for animals and wanted everyone to know. She treasured her son.

Thinking less of Olivia or her son, Adam, might follow my words. I understand, but neither were nor could exist as the cardboard charcters I portray here. If we were to read these two "like a book," we need to understand that both consisted of volumns.

One day Olivia Newberry’s life changed more than a life normally changes in years. She would not and could not ever enjoy another day.

One Sun shinny day her only son and child, Adam, came home from his new busboy job and placed a plastic bag over his head. Silly as it sounds he took his own life by suffocating himself. He tied the bag tightly around his head. Silently he gave up his life while suffering a death most of us cannot imagine.

Adam hated himself we figure. How else can one undergo suffocation by their own hands? Most of us could never imagine such an act, at least not until we heard that someone succeeded in it.

We hear of “jumpers” who in one crazed instant throws their life away by stepping into air without benefit of a nearby floor or Earth. The crazed moment passes; yet the decision, possibly made in haste, has no rewind button, no second chance.

The jump-off-and-hang approach to suicide offers the same suicidal jump with a similar outcome – successful suicide. Here too the choice to opt out ends in that final crazed moment; yet the decision, possibly made in haste, has no rewind button, no second chance.  

We know too about the handguns, rifles, and shotguns used to commit suicide. These marvels of technology bring about instant death in the hands of a suicidal victim. Pulling the trigger the choice to opt out ends in that final crazed moment. An instant, hardly that long, passes before the bullet slows momentarily within the victim's skull as it ends life; yet the decision, possibly made in haste, has no rewind button, no second chance.

Until his last moment of life, freedom to escape death remained in Adam’s hands. Up until that last moment of consciousness he had the power to hit the rewind button, to give himself a second chance. All the while he knew a way out of the impending chasm of death. He chose out rather than spend another moment in among us. He chose to abandon a gulf of dark hate he did not understand.

Had Adam taken his last breath and then torn the plastic from his head at the last second, a second chance to live followed in his own bed. Saved, his near-death suicidal act may have given him that sense of awe and reverence for his own life. We will never know and neither will he.

We find it hard to believe that a twenty year-old man suffocated himself to death with a plastic bag. Our imaginations draw a blank when we try to understand how such a fate could ever happen.

It did.

Adam took his life while lying in the middle of his queen sized bed in one of a two bedroom apartment he shared with Olivia.  As Adam expired and his body released its tenuous grasp on life, his limbs went limp and his olive brown face lost its African tone, replaced by a horrid blue and gray death mask.

Adam never met his black father. In fact his mother had no stories about Adam's father, other than he was "black." A fact Adam remained keenly aware. It never occurred to Olivia that a fictional father could have meant more to her son than no father at all. Adam needed someone to dream about; someone to give discipline and reward for wrong begavior and right behavior. Some one to say, "suicide sucks!" in the dreamworld. Even, "Don't let whity ruin your life" may have came from his imaginary father's dictums. Almost anything would have served better than nothing, as it turns out.

She might have lied. She might have created a soldier-father gone off to Vietnam to kill "gooks." She probably felt in giving Adam existence a great law had been broken and twice so. Racism's battle axes remained sharp at this point in American history, 1965.

Olivia Newberry’s life became one of shame and discomfort following Adam’s birth. Adam first learned love and comfort. Then he learned about hate and becoming the object of hate. This he did not understand. He then learned to feel a discomfort in public space. An inward space became his safest place, but even this he needed to escape in the end. He had no place, he believed.

Oliva too felt discomfort in public space. With or without Adam she came to believe that for some reason she must feel shame. She disliked neighbor's children. They learned from their parents a vague idea of something wrong in this woman, mother of an only child, a black child. Their stares reflected their parent's bigotry.

In time the stares stopped and her neighbor's children accepted Adam into their tribe. They allowed Adam a small piece of their play world, nothing more.

Olivia’s love for Adam had no equal between mother and son. The weight of a fatherless past carried into a future colored by his complexion bent Adam’s perspective of the past, his present, and his future.

Only too late did Adam's friends and mother learn that he dwelled on his skin complexion. Following Adam's death Oliva quietly embraced Adams belongings, cried as she uncovered page after page of his school papers from years past. Then she uncovered an assignment, "Who am I?" and pain struck somewhere deep in her being. Her mental health now snapped because she knew before she began to read what she would find.

More of the past and present in the future did not add up for Adam. Being a "nigger" for white school bullies in a "white kids school" meant subserviance. How would a kid grow into man-hood while being subserviant to those around him?

Adam's paper said that he became a clown, a jestor of sorts, for his shool friends. Whenever a racist bully intervened in Adam's life as the school clown, his friends from the apartments came to his aid. He's "just a clown, leave him alone."

These facts arose as Olivia shared on the day of Adam’s funeral. She could not afford a funeral so friends funded Adam's burial, and she tanked everyone for helping. Olivia said that Adam started a new job recently as a busboy in an expensive restraunt by the shore. He wore a nice suit and his slender physic presented the appearance of a handsome young man in the prime of his life. Suicide did not belong to this picture.

Adam’s new supervisor kept Adam often for overtime work because of Adam’s energy and enthusiasm, his apparent pleasure when helping guests and taking orders. He rang up sells and escorted guests to their seats. He belonged among the rich and powerful if anyone did. He looked that part. Adam had a future.

When Olivia found Adam that day she turned him onto his right side. His left hand and arm pointed toward the ceiling fan as its blades slowly rotated. Rigormortis caused Adam to move like a tree trunk with limbs pointing toward the sky. Even now she tugged at the plastic wrapping in hope of saving his young life.

Once Olivia saw Adam's face, her life changed forever.

No more shame, no more guilt, only grief filled Oliva’s mind. It took the full eighteen months before she began to feel “normal.” Finally she had a real appetite. Now her thoughts of Adam merifully turned elsewhere in moments of brief reprieve from grief’s pain.

Those who knew Adam felt a sharp painful grief with the news of Adam's suicide. Disbelief had no keener audiance. All were to remark on his handsome appearance. His quick and ready smile meant those in his presence felt comfortable, Adam's wit and his drive to help and comfort others belonged to his memory. Little else would remain of his character among old friends.

No one who knew Adam would ever recall their moments with Adam in comfort. Each would question their part in his suicide. Each would go on questioning what they might have said. Did they make a mistaken quizzical gesture and Adam misinterpreted it? What gestures might eacj have cast to cause a misperceptions by Adam?

No one who knew Adam felt like they were walking on thin ice with this vibrant character. Life with Adam meant sharing and enjoying the moment and expecting the same from the future. How could Adam have felt so differently and not shown it?

Adam left no note. He left no words. The manner of his suicide screams at a painful end, but a pain necessary for Adam to end a deeper, more enduring pain, he believed.

How Adam commited suicide without that instant of craziness so many choose to act out goes beyond imagination. How did he manage the pain and anxiety those last moments? His face must have shown beads of sweat on his dark, olive forehead. Those last minutes go beyond imagination of self annhilation. It goe beyond our imaginations.

Oliva's story continued and she drifted from low-income job to low-income job. Unable to keep her attention on the moment. life became an emotional can of worms. "Adam" she would whisper and suffer as deeply as a mother might suffer.

I do not see how knowing Olivia or Adam have helped my life. I see only that their lives were somehow lived beyound my imagination. What might I have said or dune? I'll never know.