Chapter 7: Danny VanNote

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.