Chapter 7
Danny VanNote
Danny was not a close friend of mine. To
state anything different would be a lie. Danny, however, was a good
acquaintance and, in many ways, we had a lot in common. In a lot of ways,
we didn’t have much in common at all.
Danny and I had several classes together in
college. We shared notes on classes and talked about tests. We were both
religion majors. We were both very odd religion majors. At the
time, we both smoked and cursed ad nauseum. We talked about our lurid
pasts and about how odd our choice to major in religion must have looked to
someone who didn’t know us very well. Neither of us, at the time, were
big on going to church, but we had a spirituality in our own way.
After Rev. Cole’s Human Mind class we would hang
out outside and smoke cigarettes and chat out the ridiculousness of the class.
I called it a waste of time. Danny would routinely tell me that
while Rev. Cole often went off topic that, if I listened to what he was talking
about, I’d actually learn a lot. Granted, it wouldn’t be about the
subject that class was intended for but, regardless… I would learn. He
loved Cole’s classes and had taken many of them. I, at the time, didn’t
understand such things but accepted it anyway.
Our somewhat questionable pasts are what we
reflected on the most. Danny was still actively drinking and using drugs.
A lot. He knew my story and I had talked to him about recovery. We would
have in depth conversations about the demons we had confronted in intoxicated
states. He told me how, sometimes, he would get fucked up and see himself
doing things he didn’t want to do. On those days, especially after a weekend of
hard drinking, he’d talk about how he hated himself. More than once I
invited him to a 12-step meeting. I reminded him that while we weren’t
especially close, I totally got what he talked about and he was welcome to come
with me. No judgment.
He always walked away saying he’d think about
it. Then he’d crack some dirty joke and I’d roll my eyes and we’d part
ways. This was the extent of our relationship. In the college, our
classes together slowly dissipated and, though my school was small and I saw
him around all the time, we didn’t talk much anymore. Our common bond had
been that class. I, for obvious reasons, stayed away from people who I saw as
actively in addiction or participating in that type of behavior. In many ways,
I still found it attractive and couldn’t be around it much. Because
Danny’s interests often lay in partying outside of school, we didn’t hang out
in the same circles either.
One of the few times I made exceptions to going
to a party was on Halloween. I went to the party for several reasons but
mostly in hopes of running into my ex. He didn’t show and my cute purple
firefly wings and stockings were wasted on guys I wasn’t interested in and
others who weren’t interested in me. Regardless, the party moved from my
friend’s house down the road to a local establishment called the C & S
Club. There old and young alike partied the Halloween night away in an
epic fashion.
At some point, I ran into Danny. He was
highly intoxicated. The crowd was having a good time and so was I.
But Danny’s persistence, while hilarious, unsettled me.
“Hannah I want to buy you a beer.”
“Danny, you know I don’t drink.”
“Oh yea. Oh yea. SO SOOOOO sorry Hannah. Lets
just get you a light beer. Cause light beer isn’t even good so it’s cool.” He
slurred and stood at a tilt that only a drunk could maintain.
“Um Danny, no that’s not how it works darlin’.”
“Oh ok how about half a beer”
I shook my head no.
“Alright, ok umm.. what about 20 8ths of a
beer?”
“Danny, sweet heart… that doesn’t make any
sense.”
At this point one of his friends started
laughing and dragged him away, and I decided it was time for me to leave.
I’d had enough of the drunken revelry.
Run-ins with Danny were always like this.
Sometimes he was drunk and sometimes he wasn’t. Regardless, our
acquaintanceship went from casual to non-existent by the end of my sophomore
year into the beginning of my junior year. In the last trimester of my
junior year, we were once again in a Cole class together and I’d hoped maybe
we’d start up our conversations again. I hadn’t seen him by the ashtrays lately
and I occasionally wondered where he’d gone. He seemed distracted and was
never outside after class anymore. I saw him hanging out with a girl I faintly
knew and realized why he seemed so distracted.
Danny found himself a girlfriend. This
surprised me slightly. The girl he was hanging out with was, in my perception,
incredibly conservative. This struck me as odd because neither Danny nor
I was any type of conservative. I also didn’t know her that well so
maybe, she was an undercover liberal. Either way it was cute to see him fawn
over a girl instead of chasing the next high. He called me once during
that time asking for some answers on one of our study guides for a test.
We weren’t friends but it was nice knowing he considered me when trying
to get answers for class.
After lunch one day, I walked out to the school
terrace. It was a big round patch of grass surrounded by a brick walkway that
connected three of our school’s buildings together. On one side, Danny
was sitting with, what looked like his girlfriend, and he looked incredibly
happy. It looked as if they were holding hands and they were chatting and the
weather was splendid. Hints of cool from the winter lingered as the warmth of
spring lingered in the air. It was incredibly sunny. I had to walk
by them on the way to the library and I stopped to chat.
“Hey Danny, how are ya?” I paused to chat to get
a closer look at him and his new girl. They were definitely holding hands.
“Hey Hannah, man I am so great!” he smiled and
continued, “I stopped smoking and I stopped drinking and life is so awesome.”
Blunt. To the point, as always.
“Oh wow, Danny. That’s super awesome. I’m really
glad for you.”
“Yea, yea most definitely. Have a great day
man.”
“You too Danny” and looking over at his
girlfriend “nice to see ya.”
And then I walked away. I’d seen it all before…
probably a hundred times. A guy meets a great girl and gives up his vices
for said girl only to find that his need to act out on them outweighs the love
he has for the girl. It was addiction at its finest. Him giving up
the drugs only meant he would become obsessed with her and then she would run
and he would turn back to the drugs and the alcohol again. It was inevitable.
I shook my head in frustration and walked off. I went into the
library and got to work. The thought of Danny, his obsession, and his
addiction faded as I began my homework.
A few weeks passed and I didn’t think about it
at all. Life was in full swing. Between meetings, school work, and
friends, my time was stretched thin. I’d finally been able to go to a
late meeting with Felicity but her car broke down a long the way. A
friend rescued me from the highway while Felicity waited for a tow truck.
I returned to school to see several friends congregating in the parking
lot. I went over to complain about my failed evening. I walked over
and started talking, said my spiel and realized a bit belatedly that my friends
were rather stoic.
“Um.. what’s going on?” Everyone was quiet for a
minute. Silent. Looking at one another.
One of the girls finally answered in
exacerbation, “Well, Hannah I’m sorry you had a shitty evening but Dan VanNote
shot himself.” A pause. “He’s fucking dead.”
It was if I’d been punched in the stomach. My
world reeled. It was just a few weeks ago when he seemed so happy. What
had happened? I knew he would crash but I had no idea it would end like this.
I looked around and realized that the people holding each other in the
parking lot. A ways away, I heard someone wailing. The cool night
air had turned frigid. Slowly tears started falling and I looked around
for something real to hang onto. My friend Tungsten was in the group and
I walked over and allowed him to hug me for a very long time. We walked
over to the dorm and sat out front and chain-smoked cigarettes.
My heart cannot express the grief. It was
not grief because we were close necessarily. It was grief because I knew
the pain he must have been in to do such a thing. How many times had I
tried to kill myself and failed in my addiction? I wondered if he had gotten
high to do it or managed to stay sober. I didn’t have the heart to ask.
The rage I felt could not be expressed. The disease of addiction and the
web it weaves in the minds of those who are corrupted by it is so pervasive at
times.
I must state here that Danny never admitted or
told me he was an addict or an alcoholic. He did tell me he had problems
with it. The reason I say that Danny was an addict was because when we had
talked in the past and we connected because of our thought process around drugs
and alcohol. We had both had major traumas in our past and used alcohol
as a buffer to stop the pain. He was too much like me to assume
differently but that doesn’t mean my assumption is correct.
Within a few days, the school held a memorial
service for him. The funeral happened. The air around Bryn Athyn
was thick and full of sadness. Just a year prior another student (one who
had just graduated) had overdosed on heroine. The place was deep in grief
for two of its own. The college only had 200 students. And two were
dead in less than a year as a direct result, as far as I could see, of
addiction. How had they fallen through the cracks of such a small place?
How had noone seen it coming? How? HOW?
My rage, in the past, has often been turned
inward and pressed into depression or self-destructive old patterns of
behavior. For the first time since I had gotten clean, I did not allow my
grief to send me into a depression or into old patterns. For the first
time I allowed it to push me into action. My school was in the middle of
a huge building project, spending millions of dollars and yet the information
on how to get therapy or emotional support was nowhere to be found. I saw my
alma mater building buildings and yet their children were dying. It was
in that time between Danny’s funeral and the end of school that I came to a
decision. If no one else would step up and attempt to ensure the
emotional safety of the school then I would do it. On my own, if I had
to.
In the next few days and weeks, news began to
filter in about what happened. Danny had quit drinking, doing drugs and
smoking. He had not entered into any therapy or 12-step programs.
His relationship floundered and they broke up. Danny, for the first
time, was faced with real emotions he had not felt in years. He had a
choice he could use again to stop the pain or he could end the pain,
permanently. Danny did not want to use, but he did not want to feel.
He chose the only way he knew to end the pain without ever realizing that
the pain would pass. It was a sensation that I had felt many times my first
year clean but the support system I had kept those feelings at bay.
Danny’s death created the first opportunity for
me to look grief and destructive behaviors in the face and tell them to go fuck
themselves. It enabled me to realize I didn’t have to go down that path.
That path was a choice. It was new territory for me and I took off
with all the energy I could muster. It was about a month into my summer
and I had stopped smoking, the relationship with Jimmy and Felicity had fallen
apart and my life was in chaos. And then another suicide in Bryn Athyn
happened.
He was not a friend of mine. I had only met the
man once. But my friends from school and my church community knew him
extremely well. He had three children and a wife and his struggle with
mental illness was known in the community. I was in the position of not being
in grief but understanding and feeling the pain of all the people around me.
My life was in chaos but my purpose in my life was solidified. It was the
grief that forged my newfound purpose.
Never again, I thought at the funeral, never again will a
friend of mine die without knowing there was help for them if they wanted it.
Never never again.
On that platform, I began my senior year in
college. I needed a senior project in order to graduate and I decided on
a project that focused on the research and implementation of creating
emotionally safe schools. The research was painstaking but there were awesome
amounts of material to work with and I began amassing enough research to write
a small book. I realized that my initial plan of creating a peer-mentoring
group wouldn’t suffice. Most of the research suggested that you needed a
spiritual component, a peer component, and the help of staff and administration
for it to be truly effective.
After three months of research and writing I
submitted 30 pages of research and began a second trimester on implementing the
ideas that I had researched. There were a few things in my life at this
point that kept me motivated so that I didn’t stop moving forward with the
project. My school chaplain, who had been with the students throughout
the grieving process, fully believed in me and pushed me constantly throughout
the year. There were several friends in school with me that believed in
my mission. They supported me by being apart of every project I
implemented and stood with me as I had moments of doubt and frustration. And
lastly, I became incredibly close with Danny’s girlfriend.
She and I began a friendship at the end of the
previous school year. We all three had shared Cole’s religion class. We
had a paper due at the end of the year and her finishing it determined if she
would graduate or not. One night, as I worked at the library she came up to me
tearfully and asked if she turned in half of it if Rev Cole would pass her.
It was in her willingness to be vulnerable with me that I decided to
support her the best I could. In two hours sitting with her in the
library she gave me all the information she could on the subject and together
we finished her paper. Our closeness kept me close the pain and loss of
Danny throughout the next school year. It was her raw grief that
compelled me onward.
By the second term, the Peer Listeners and the
Peer Listening Program was launched on campus. The program involved the
administration, mental health awareness, and the chaplaincy department.
Within the first year the Peer Listeners had listened to over 15 students
on campus who needed to talk through emotional issues. The program worked
hand in hand with the administration to protect the anonymity of the students
while providing a sturdy support network. Without the first four Peer
Listeners who dedicated their free time and services, it would have never
happened.
Active Minds served to de-stigmatize concepts of
mental health and provided mental health awareness. Within a few weeks of the
Peer Listening program taking off a chapter of Active Minds began on campus as
well. The kids who took that program sprinted with it and we had one of
the largest clubs on campus by the end of the year. These people, many of
which never had met Danny, knew the need was real and identified with the need
through the services provided. It was a glorious experience working with
people who had the same drive and goal as I did. My life was incredibly
changed.
None of this would have happened without Danny.
There is a 12-step saying that goes “Some of us must die so that many of
us will live”. For me, this was incredibly true at the time.
Danny’s death enabled me to see what I was fully capable of for the first
time since I had been clean. For the first time I saw myself as truly living.
