Target Joy
A Search for Truth
By: Kenneth Obermeyer
Because I was engaged to be married, Valentine's Day 1984 seemed extra special. But I was moments away from having a scar carved deep into my memory.
A knock on the door interrupted the finishing touches I was applying to the card I would give my fiancée, Donna. "Come on in," I said happily. My secretary, Marge, entered, staring solemnly at the floor as she shut the door. The expression on her face told me that something was wrong, very wrong. I put the card down.
"Ken, I have some bad news," she said, gingerly seating herself on the edge of a chair. Marge maintained eye contact with difficulty.
I'd heard the tone in Marge's voice before: flat, detached, deadly. Images of every person I held dear raced through my mind as she paused for words. I looked at her, my lips beginning to tighten in anticipation.
"Donna killed herself," she said.
The sentence ricocheted around my mind, trying desperately to hear the sentence without Donna's name in it. Numb inside and out, I sat trying to digest the reality of her words as Marge finished by saying that Donna had hung herself in her basement.
My revolt and revulsion were so thorough that I practically quit breathing. I didn't realize that totally suppressing my reaction right then would exact a heavy price in the years ahead.
The third suicide bomb within 13 years, this one struck closest to home. Thirteen years earlier, when I was 21, a friend I worked and bowled with had shot himself in the head. The next suicide had come just a year ago, when an intentional overdose of drugs cut off a new and budding friendship. I began to wonder if I should hang a sign around my neck, "Beware: suicidal influence. Bond at your own risk."
But within two years of that Valentine's Day, softball practice signaled a springtime truly at hand. I was now playing on those Thursday nights without thinking of Donna being on the sidelines. By summer I had regained solid ground.
July 1986 started like most Julys in Cincinnati, sunny and warm and definitely humid. But when the month ended I was oblivious to the weather.
On a cloudless day in late July I sat at my desk staring into the deep hue of the sky, letting the sunbeams dance across my face. I was smiling when the phone rang, grateful I could enjoy the sunshine again.
I reached for the phone, unaware that my life would never be the same. Had I known what I was about to hear, I would not have answered the phone. I would have smashed it in spontaneous reaction to a searing pain digging spurs into my hide.
"Hello?" I said in a cheery voice, still looking into the sky.
"Ken, this is Kathie . . . You better sit down."
TARGET JOY
My sister-in-law's voice carried Marge's deathly tone. And something in Kathie's voice told me the bottom would be kicked out from the pit of pain. My heart started to pound, my stomach knotted, and my breathing changed into the quick pulsations fear brings when it strikes you from behind.
My quivering shook the words from my mouth. "What's wrong?"
"It's Roger . . ."
God's hand must have hit the pause button because I seemed frozen in time. The tiny pause between her words expanded into eternity as intuition spoke to me with an all too familiar feeling. My soul went into a panic reaction to what she was about to say. I began to revolt and shut down before her words echoed what I already knew.
"He's killed himself, Ken. They found him in his car this morning . . . carbon monoxide."
A searing pain tore at my heart like switchblades of death as a two-year-old scab of healing was ripped off my heart. Roger was far more than my older brother. He was my hero, my lifelong idol and my best friend. Dealing with the loss of a loved one is hard enough, but suicide pours salt into the wound because I also feel the hell of the victim's despair. It's pain on top of pain. To me, death by accident or natural causes is far more acceptable. At the time of suicide, even their murder seems palatable by comparison.
Roger's suicide brought me to an emotional crisis point. What happens inside a person when two-and-a-half years after their fiancée commits suicide, his brother, the person he tried most to be like since he was a little kid, kills himself? I can only give you my account.
I know someone turned the lights out on me. I know I grappled in the dark trying to find the switch. I can't give an adequate description of what happened. The best I can offer is to take the feelings of pain, anger, grief, disbelief, fear, guilt, eternity, hell and numb, toss them in a blender, turn it on high speed and then chug the result. The effect?
For the next twelve years my body continued to breathe, walk, talk, smile and otherwise take care of itself. It held jobs, paid bills, filed bankruptcy and performed other assorted duties. Though it fulfilled all the necessary functions to get by in this world, the lights inside were out. I wasn't home. Only a shadow of myself remained, yet the world at large considered me normal while I was away on this unwelcome exile.
These four suicides within 15 years shifted my search for Truth into high gear. Though I'm not proud of my attitudes and feelings, I can't lie about how I felt or deny that I felt them. Denial acts as a festering agent on mental abscesses like lying and minimizing. Honesty precipitates the healing process.
Nor do I apologize for my reactions to these events, because feeling sorry was a way of life for me. I had apologized myself into a state of mind where I felt God apologized when He created me. Only in retrospect do I see the pity party I threw for myself.
But in this new, earnest search for Truth, no priest, reverend, minister, bishop or pope could be a middleman between God and me any longer. Their traditional answers were not only meaningless, they upset me all the more. My attitude at this point was quite simple: I would either get my answers directly
TARGET JOY
from God—assuming there was a God—or there would be no more Ken.
My defiant reaction turned out to be a blessing in disguise, for it helped me reach my target, call it God, or Truth, or whatever you want to call Reality. I began the journey like an angry time bomb with a short fuse and returned with a peace and confidence I never knew before.
So a Pollyanna version of my experience would defeat my purpose in writing. The roller coaster of raw emotions we'll ride together are too central to the message to ignore. I'm going to air my heart with you, with the only risk that you might springboard with me to heights I never thought attainable. Today I have a new pair of eyes, and boy, what a view!
I know I don't have to tell this story; I could simply live my life dancing to my own music. But then I think about someone who's wearing the shoes I wore years ago, and what I would tell them if I had a chance; what I would say to ease their pain, to help them find light at the end of that seemingly endless dark tunnel. What would I do if I had the chance and the time? I would tell this story. So, whoever you are, wherever you may be, it is for you I share my story.
Finally, the story begins on the next page with a metaphor. Much of our exploration of outer space involves launching a space vehicle sitting atop a rocket on a launch pad. So I use this image as a metaphor in the next chapter as a symbol for an exploration of inner space. Join me on this metaphorical rocket and launch pad as we prepare for liftoff into a journey within.
