I’m amazed no one has clapped for this. It’s so powerful.
I knew a couple something like that. The guy has like a million guns. He used to take me to his shooting range back when he could still afford a membership. We’d shoot guns. It was sort of fun but a seemingly expensive hobby. I never got "into" it, have never owned a gun because I have no real need.
My wife and I knew them because Ginny was the daughter of a close friend.
Then one of their sons drowned. Weirdly I first heard about it on the radio. There was a report about a few teenagers drowning in the swollen waters of the Connecticut River in Turner’s Falls MA. I thought, "Shit I hope it wasn’t one of Ginny’s kids." When I got home my wife told me it was.
We visited them and ended up staying and fixing them meals until they got over the shock.
We were close for years. My family would visit theirs usually. The kids all got along.
The guy was emotionally abusive. We rarely actually saw it but it was kind of hard to miss. All the signs were there. To the best of my knowledge he never stuck a loaded gun in her mouth but who knows?
Years passed. The children grew to the point of not being children any more. Theirs moved out as soon as they could, the daughter moving in with an older boyfriend. The guy, let’s call him Casey, was disappointed in his children because none of them gave a shit about guns & didn’t care to learn the art of reloading bullets.
The house, always cluttered, became increasingly awful. My wife stopped wanting to accompany me on visits because she found the situation so depressing. Ginny never really recovered from the death of her son & became addicted to pills, basically a zombie.
I continued occasional visits until one time about 4 years ago. By then the place was a complete pig sty. There was always a miserable looking mangy dog moping around somewhere amid the nearly unbelievable filth. If you opened the microwave to, say, heat up a slice of pizza, the stench would cause you to lose your appetite.
As I left that day, feeling depressed as I always did when I left their house, I said to myself, "Self, why the fuck are you doing this? Coming here, hanging out in their sickening house, breathing their fucking cigarette smoke, listening to Casey talk his outrageous bullshit, and leaving feeling depressed?" The bond we once shared no longer existed. I ghosted them.