January 2013

I’d been standing onstage with my bass guitar tuned and ready for the show. My eyes were drawn to the scuff on my right sneaker, as if that was the most pressing issue for me to fix in my life. Later on, I’d go back to that moment of innocence and see it as the last time I was able to relax ever again. The sneaker, the scuff, and the crowd waiting in rapt attention for us to begin the set.

We started.

Kyle was frantic, playing like his fingers were on shore leave from a long voyage that they’d soon have to return to, and Winston and I underlaid his scorching solos with bass and rhythm that intensified the effect. I could already tell it was a good crowd from the way they danced in response, their bodies moving like a single, flowing entity.

Stevie tapped my shoulder, and when I turned to him expecting nothing more than a bottle of water or some extra picks, his face was tangled with a horrified expression, eyes red and haunted. He gestured that he needed to talk to me, and it must have been important for him to interrupt the show like that. Kyle and Winston could keep playing without me for a few seconds.

I followed Stevie to the wings, where he came close and turned off my mic.

“I’m so sorry, Jack. Sarah’s been in an accident. They said she died on impact.”

The weight of my bass on my shoulder suddenly dug into my flesh, pressed unbearably against me while my ears shrieked with an unrecognizable din. The whining drone rattled me so that I shook my head, trying to clear myself of the noise.

“What?” I said, not so much a question as a reaction. A word to expel from my system while I struggled to process the chaos inside me.

No.

It had been snowing.

She was alone.

No, no, no.

What about Ava? She could stay with Sarah’s parents for now, but at some point she’d have to hear the same crushing news I’d just been subjected to.

At some point, Mommy wouldn’t come home. She’d just be dead.

Dead. The word didn’t seem real.

“Jack?” said Stevie, his face such a picture of concern that I couldn’t direct my anger at him, though I needed somewhere to put it. I could feel the way it was surging inside me, the noise in my ears now a screaming ocean of pain demanding to be felt in some manner, and soon.

“Fuck!” I shouted, barrelling back onstage before Stevie could stop me.

Here. Now. This was an arena. And I needed to rage.

So I did.

I slipped my bass off my shoulders and held it by the neck while I bashed it against the stage floor. While the audience had cheered and enjoyed the start of it, my repeated thrashings started to make them murmur. I saw glances exchanged, worried looks from my brothers as well as the fans.

I didn’t care. I didn’t exist anymore, was just a bundle of anger and pain that happened to look human. The way the bass ricocheted off the floor each time I slammed it down felt good: it rattled my arms, tough against the sockets of my shoulders like I could easily dislocate something.

I flung the bass down one more time, letting it drop rather than trying to smash any further. I wheeled around to find something else to destroy, saw Kyle and Winston staring at me, and it made me scream. The sound that escaped me was nothing like an adult man, but rather a wounded, scared animal that had to chew off its own leg to escape a trap. I felt bloodied, beaten, cornered.

Stevie whispered to Kyle and Winston, obviously telling them the same thing he’d just told me. I watched as the recognition bloomed on their faces, their own crushing feelings mere fragments of what I’d felt. They didn’t know Sarah like I did.

She was my everything, and now I had nothing.

I kicked at a chair that held drinks for Kyle, reaching for a music stand to hurl against the drum set, but Kyle used his mic to ask everyone to leave.

“There’s been a family emergency,” he said, as if it were on par with a child getting appendicitis and needing hospitalization. As if the emergency could actually end.

Winston backed away from the drums when he saw me coming for them, and he rushed around them to me, arms outstretched defensively. Infuriatingly.

“Jack,” he said. “It’s just me, buddy.”

I was no one’s fucking buddy anymore.

If there was ever a good part of me, it was Sarah. Anything that I had ever achieved had been because of her polish, her drive. She’d seen things in me that I hadn’t believed I had, and now I wasn’t sure who I was, what was left of me without her there.

All I felt was the tsunami, the nausea, the rage. So when Winston tackled me with Stevie helping, I fought them both, brother and best friend alike.

Though the audience had thinned considerably, people rushing out while unable to choose between averting their gaze and watching the train wreck unfold onstage, some folks stayed where they’d been, transfixed by my outrageous spectacle.

Let them watch.

This was the end of Jack Sargent, and they might as well stay to see the way I engulfed myself in flames and let the darkness consume me after I’d burned to ash.

Stevie held my arms behind my back while Winston tried to restrain my legs. I thrashed against them the entire time, almost convulsing with the rage I gave voice to freely.

“Fuck you, you fucking goddamn pieces of shit!”

In retrospect, I knew that they were aware I didn’t mean it. It was the blind anger of sharp, agonizing pain. That they let me rage without trying to stop me except in a physical sense meant a lot.

In the moment, though, I was infuriated that they would get in my way. Stopping my outburst felt like a betrayal, and I was quick to tell them this.

“We love you, Jack,” said Winston, his eye swelling from a knee I’d landed in his face. I saw Winston raise his eyebrows at Stevie.

“Yeah, we love you, buddy,” said Stevie.

I didn’t care.

“So what?” I said. “So fucking what.”

Winston and Stevie wouldn’t be there at night to cozy up to me under the blankets. They wouldn’t send me loving text messages each day, describing what their morning had been like or asking about how mine was going. They wouldn’t steal the breath out of my lungs with a subtle smile, and I didn’t want them to.

I only wanted Sarah, and now I’d never have her. I’d never see her eyelashes frosted in the Minnesota winter again, never kiss her shoulder while she was sleeping next to me. The scattered, intimate details I remembered while they held me down finally broke me.

I transitioned from inchoate fury to a piercing, unimaginable sadness. Stevie must have felt my muscles slacken beneath his grasp, because he let go. Winston followed suit a few seconds after, though they both knelt watching me.

What they saw was the redness leave my face, only to be replaced by stillness and pallor. Tears began streaming down the sides of my cheeks, pulled by gravity. Soon my neck was damp.

“Fuck,” I said, slowly exhaling the word. Winston settled down to sit at my feet, nursing the bruises that were starting to show on his arms where I’d kicked him. Stevie stayed kneeling at the ready in case there was something he could do for me.

“I’m sorry I told you that way,” said Stevie. “I just…You had to know.”

Maybe someday I’d be able to thank him for that. If it was possible to be thankful for whatever way you found out about your wife dying. I knew that Stevie didn’t mean to cause a spiral. It’s just that the descent was inevitable, given that Sarah was gone.

My whole body ached to see her, to tell her how sad I was feeling. To have her hold my hands in her small, delicate palms and look into my eyes with a half smile. I knew that she was the only person who could help me feel better about this gut-wrenching news.

That made it all the more painful.

I don’t know how long I lay on the stage, weeping. What I recall is that Winston and Stevie stayed with me until I was ready to stand, shaky as a newborn deer, and helped me back to the dressing room. I tried not to look at the destruction we left behind onstage, shards of wood and broken drum skins scattered around where I’d raged.

Kyle had done his best to disperse the crowd, which included a shocking number of photographers and journalists. Once he saw that the damage had already been done, he met us backstage where we sat in the kind of silence only brothers can have: weighty, emotional, and totally undisrupted.

“To Sarah,” said Kyle, as he took a swig of his beer. The others clinked their bottles together while I sat, unresponsive, staring hazily at the bottle I hadn’t had the energy to open.

The next morning, headlines glared back up at me from my phone. Breakdown. Outburst. Tantrum. That one, in particular, stung. My raw grief was being packaged as clickbait for the public without an ounce of mercy. Though some of the articles mentioned that Sarah had just been killed, it was a passing line near the end of their gawking. Hardly contextualized my behavior.

After the fourth article, I flung my phone across the room with a grunt.

Fucking media. Worse than vultures.

It wasn’t long before the phone buzzed constantly with calls and messages, likely some of them from well-meaning friends and loved ones. I assumed, though, that mostly it was reporters trying to reach me for comment.

Well, they weren’t fucking getting one.

All the comment they needed was that Sarah just died. Anything else was a self-absorbed travesty, and they were delusional to expect it.

I buried myself in blankets and slept through the day, ignoring repeated attempts by Winston, Kyle, and Stevie to wake me by banging on my hotel room door.

* * *

An unknown amount of hours later, I emerged from my restless sleep and booked a plane ticket home. I needed to be there. With Ava.

At the funeral.

I realized I didn’t even know if Sarah’s family would be arranging the funeral or if I needed to.

It was all such a surreal, unwelcome blur. When I landed at MSP, my phone had countless more alerts from missed calls and texts. Though the idea of answering them filled me with dread, I typed a single message to Steve:

“I can’t do it anymore. I’m done, sorry to the guys.”

There would be no band with this news. We couldn’t play if there was nothing left of me. Might as well acknowledge that.

I didn’t know then how much I still had to lose.

I rented some mid-sized car and drove directly to Sarah’s parents’ place, expecting them to greet me with teary eyes and hushed voices around Ava.

The eyes, they were teary all right. But Ava wasn’t there.

“What’s going on?” I asked them, after they told me she was gone. “Where is she?”

“I’m so sorry, Jack, I know this is another blow you don’t need right now,” said Nancy. Then she tried to continue but dissolved into sobs, unable to speak. Roger continued for her.

“A social services agent came by, said that you weren’t allowed to see Ava. Obviously, Jack, we disagreed, but that meant they took her from us.”

I hadn’t thought there was anything left of me that could still be lost. Hadn’t realized there was any part of me still clinging to hopes, aspirations. Obviously, some small part inside of me desperately depended upon my daughter right now.

And that part of me was crushed, unceremoniously, by the news from Nancy and Roger. I’d thought there was nothing to live for two days ago, but I’d been wrong. Just setting myself up for another catastrophic fall.

Because now, I was truly lost, tumbling down farther and farther into a pit of blackness that threatened to consume me entirely.

So be it.