RIP Michael J.C. Murawski, 1975-2020

[content warning: mental health, depression, suicide, evangelicalism]

...

My friend Mike died in February of this year to suicide. He was a good friend of mine for a long time, since we were kids.

The Beginning

I remember this sweatshirt very clearly

My first memories of him were about fishing. Mike loved fish, and fishing. It was his hobby before I even knew what a hobby was. Along with another friend, Dean, we all bonded over Transformers and video games. Mike was weird, creative, and funny.

We would make up little games to keep ourselves amused and entertained. We would race Transformers down the shiny new metal slide on the school playground. When we realized we didn't really want to throw our cool toys down the slide all afternoon, we switched to the safety-padding woodchips. We'd each find a big one, and race them down the slide. He would take his favorite ones home and refine them for aerodynamics and whatnot .. sanding them down, painting them, naming them.

Many other boredom-fueled games came thereafter. We weren't content to just play basketball in study-hall physical free time .. we had to make up our own games. What if we played hockey with little rubber balls, but in the hallway outside the gym. What if we played dodgeball, but full-contact. What if we played hockeyball-golf outside? We had fun.

Mike took to BMX and skateboarding. I tried, but it didn't "take." I was still happy to tag along, watch my friends practice sweet tricks, and absorb the culture.

At some point I noticed Mike's home life was .. kind of uncomfortable at times. His dad seemed like kind of a grump, and I'd see them get into little quibbles, which would sometimes explode into bigger, disproportionate frustration. I found out later that he was an alcoholic, and abusive. Hell.

Teenage Years

no such thing as bad skating weather

In our teenage years, we were awkward non-socialites. Well, Mike at least gave it a try--went to school dances, asked girls out, did sports, etc. I mostly just played video games in my bedroom. But we still joked around a lot.

Mike had an amazing sense of humor. His brand of humor included a lot of absurdity, inside jokes, referential stuff, and cynicism. He was less a fan of "lowest common denominator" bodily function-type humor. I dunno why, he seemed to feel like that was ... immature? Beneath him? But not quite as harsh as that sounds. But he always had a way of making a comment that would cut right through the ridiculousness of things. His mantra for humor was "it doesn't have to make sense."

Mike's first concert

In high school, I discovered that I wanted to find some music to listen to that was different. I had grown up watching MTV in the 80s and into the 90s, but my soul hungered for something different. Mike brought some of skater culture into my musical life with lots of alternative rock. Especially Primus. They rocked, were funky, and weird.

Around the same time, we started making music together. It started out as a joke in a boring study hall period. Mike and our friend Chad were joking around, quoting the Doors movie that had just come out. "We'll make a band, call it Zero .. the album will be called Black & White." Except, what it if wasn't a joke? I had just started learning bass guitar for a jazz ensemble piece in my school orchestra, so they recruited me, along with a couple of other friends who could play some instruments.

The first few recordings we made were "viral" hits in our social circles (well, mostly theirs since I didn't really have a social circle). They included a song about a classmate who got busted for stealing lunch tickets, a heartfelt ode to Doritos, and a poorly executed parody of a Dead Milkmen song about Chad's "Bitchin Ford Ranger."

The other guys lost interest pretty quickly, but Mike and I had found a new creative outlet. Eventually, we brought other musically-minded friends into the fold and it became a real band a few years later. Zero turned into Sub-Zero, which turned into Circle-F Zero Jarts, which turned into Omega Supreme. The music we were getting into got heavier and angrier. It was ironic at first, but eventually death metal and hardcore became part of our musical vocabulary.

College and Beyond

Focus. show, 1994

Then it was time for college. We were in different cities, but we found ways to stay in touch. Snail mail, and the internet, which in 1993 was just beginning to enter into common public use. Mike had planned to pursue engineering, following his passion for tinkering and invention, but soon discovered that the math was a bit too much. He switched to technical writing as a way to exercise his creativity in technological settings.

We still spent lots of time together during breaks, holidays, and random weekend home visits. The band starting taking shape. Our friend Mark had joined us on guitar the year before, and while Mike and I were at university, Mark and his friends (who were still in high school) started their own band. We recruited Sam, that band's drummer, for our own band, and went from there.

I started noticing that I had emotional problems. I was depressed and had social anxiety. Any friends I had were because someone reached out to me and "adopted" me (introverts know this dynamic very well). I was also very ... well ... I was terrible with girls. I hated it and I hated myself. I attempted to open up about things, but no one was really able to help. I also got hooked on internet chat rooms and games (MUDs). I think Mike (and other friends) knew it was .. problematic? But I felt mostly on my own.

We had discovered the local punk rock/hardcore/indie scene, and dove into the whole thing. We loved the Straight Edge concept. Middle fingers to substance abuse and drinking culture and all that. We also became more socially aware -- of issues like sexism, racism, homophobia. I think I was more interested in those things than Mike, but most of us moved politically left regardless. We incorporated punk/emo/hardcore styles into our musical vernacular.

At some point, too, we discovered anime (it was just starting to become a thing in America). In addition to record stores, we started making anime shops part of our regular weekend rounds. I enjoyed it, but it didn't quite "click" with me like it did Mike. 

The band, then called Focus. (with a period--it's very important), was moving along. We had done some real actual recording of some songs, played a few shows, and had a small presence in the proverbial scene. But the four of us felt pulled in different music directions. We had some blowups, and Sam astutely pointed out that it felt like breaking up with your girlfriend.

We were all still friends, though. Still went to shows and hung out and kept in touch. We all had musical projects, sometimes with each other, sometimes with new folks. We all supported each other.

By that time, I had found a girlfriend (or, she found me, really), and I was spending a lot of time with her. I noticed that sometimes when it was just Mike and I in a car on our way to or from a show, he'd be very quiet. Distant. Kind of uncomfortable, but ... whatever. Just put on some music and drive.

But of course still joked a lot. There was plenty of absurdity to be found (and mocked) in our college and social lives. Inside jokes and references continued to pile up. By the time we graduated, though, we weren't quite as close. He found work in the Chicago area, and ended up spending his whole 20-year-plus career at that company.

Mike sang for a few other Chicago-area bands

We did stay in touch though. We still loved music and sharing cynical thoughts about everything. Now we were mocking corporate culture and the suburbs. Mike had bought himself a guitar, a drum machine, a four-track tape recorder, and started writing more of his own music. I helped him out with bass and other occasional instruments. We tried to follow the "Zero" model and recruit other like-minded musicians, but nothing ever took hold. But we still made recorded plenty of songs as VOTAR (a reference to The Idiot Box, an Alex Winter-led comedy sketch show we loved in high school), and that name followed us off and on for the rest of Mike's time on earth.

It was becoming clear that Mike wasn't a very happy person. A lot of his cynical humor seemed to be coming from a place that was actually pretty angry and dark. The same was true of his musical tastes. While I was getting more into prog-rock, Mike was getting into heavier stuff--doom metal, black metal, noise.

He still loved anime, though. Especially the stuff that was ... I dunno how you put it. "Girly?" Like, not for girls, but with cute female protagonists or cute female love interests. Ah! My Goddess was his favorite series for quite a while. K-On! was one of his favorites later on. I think he liked the cute anime girl aesthetic, both because it was cute, and because ... well, Mike had romantic longings too. (Sadly, the kind of "waifu" thing Mike liked would eventually be co-opted by alt-right jerks, which I'm sure annoyed him to no end.)

Pokemon was something where Mike's interests and mine intersected. He loved the cartoon, and I liked the game. We were exchanging emails weekly, if not daily, and I noticed he was punctuating a lot of them with "Pika!" and "-kachuuuu." So I watched a couple episodes of the cartoon, and I was hooked. We both loved the cute critters that did cute friendly battle against each other. At one point, I tried to learn the theme song for VOTAR to cover, but that effort didn't get very far.

So Mike had this trichotomy going on. Angry music, cute anime, and isolation. I and our friends were meeting girlfriends and future wives, but Mike remained unlucky.

I started realizing though, Mike's cynicism was taking over his outlook. Everything was flawed. We'd go see a show, and he'd be annoyed at the popular guys being scenesters. He'd talk about how he was interested in a woman, until he found out some minor thing that would be a deal-breaker. He hated his job, hated Chicago, but couldn't find anything better anywhere else.

Some of the frustrations he'd share, though, seemed like typical corporate-world nonsense to me. Co-workers being inconsiderate, engineers being space-cases, managers being clueless, etc. Things that would be minor annoyances to most of us were psychological torture to Mike.

Personal Aside and Upheaval

At the turn of the 21st Century, I was going through some personal upheaval. I was spending more time with a newer bandmate, John, and a some of his aggressive personality was rubbing off on me. I started snapping at Mike more over email. I remember clearly, writing to him one Friday, when he was waffling about joining us for a weekend get-together at Dean's house in Iowa, "quit being a ____, come to Iowa and play video games." Mike's graciously deadpan response was, "Gosh, well now that you put it that way, no."

That's a dynamic where, knowing Mike, I get, but I have a hard time putting into words. But I'll try.

So, back to skater culture. In the 80s and into the 90s, in our small-town Wisconsin hometown (and I'm guessing elsewhere, too), there was a rift between skaters and metalheads, and lots of mutual disdain between the two. The skaters had a reputation for being obnoxious punks, and the metalheads had a reputation for being burnout losers. Certain aspects of their culture became a proxy for this conflict -- drinking, smoking, cruising up and down Main Street, macho attitudes, etc.

And I think that's the key -- the macho "f- you" attitude, which was very different from the punk "f- society" attitude. It's the difference between "let's fight" and "let's burn down society." And in the world of punk and hardcore, the macho attitude was something Mike especially hated, and I can see why: Punk was supposed to be counter-culture, more "woke" (before that became a thing), and yet there were the same social dynamics -- people being alpha males who just wanna act tough and pick up chicks.

But, that phase of my life didn't last. Not giving a f--- and being a red-blooded male didn't really suit me all that well. Mike confronted me over email about my rudeness toward him, and I apologized. we kept in touch.

Then, more personal upheaval. John and I tried to make the Band work, but it failed pretty unremarkably. We had moved to upstate New York, and after a year of very little activity, John was moving with his new girlfriend, and I was moving to California to pursue a change of scenery and a woman-friend.

The few years that followed were some of the most consequential of my entire life. Briefly, my woman-friend and I got married, and we terrible for each other. We had major conflicts between each other, and I had major internal conflicts as a result. Over the course of a year or so, it all grew to be too much, and I tried to kill myself.

I ended up scrambling for a solution, and ended up in therapy, on medication, and eventually, deep into an evangelical Christian lifestyle. I made a big show of my "redemption story" during my journey through therapy and recovery, and I ended up trying to evangelize to Mike. He (wisely) ignored my spiritual-preachiness, but we confided some things in each other, and I understood more about his inner struggles.

As it turned out, Jesus-worship wasn't the cure for me, and my marriage ended in separation, and then divorce just a few years later. In the meantime, I was .. a different person. Evangelicalism does that to a person. It lures you in and whisks you into a different reality. "Holy" literally means "separate," and they take it seriously. I stayed in touch with my back-home friends, but barely.

Back to the Midwest

new ride

I ended up moving back to Wisconsin and rebuilding my life, but it got harder to stay in touch with Mike. We visited each other regularly, and kept up on social media, but regular emails and other base-touching faded away.

Sadly, Facebook was really the last venue where we were in regular touch. Mike's posts tended to be pretty unflinching, and increasingly dark. He still listened to a lot of heavy, dark music, and added horror movies to his repertoire. Of course, just consuming "dark" media doesn't necessarily mean one is a "dark" person, but in Mike's case it was as much a reflection of his inner world as much it was an escape or release. He continued to balance this with the optimistic escapism of upbeat anime fandom.

Emblematic of his inner conflict: the success of Babymetal. When they first came out, it was basically tailor-made for Mike's tastes. Heavy music with "idol" J-Pop frontwomen. But then they got mainstream-popular and landed a slot opening for Lady Gaga. (In general, anime started becoming a cultural touchstone of "gamergaters" and the alt-right. I'm not positive what Mike's thoughts or feelings were on that, but I can't imagine they were positive.)

At one point, Mike did find a girlfriend. He seemed happy about it, until suddenly he broke it off. I don't know what happened or why. As far as I know, he never had any success dating after that. It bothered him, and he felt like if only he could be happy if he had romance in his life.

The End

Mike and Abby

From what I can tell, the beginning of the end was when his father passed away, around 2016. It seemed to hit him really hard, and I don't think he ever recovered from that grief. His Facebook posts became consistently dark. There was lots of self-hatred, pleas for the hurting to stop. Donald Trump's election shook a lot of us, and Mike was no exception. For his psychological well-being, though, it was just another log on the fire. The human race was tragically and fatally clueless, and doom was imminent. Of course, this included himself. Especially himself.

Another log on the fire: his relationship with his sister. She had problems of her own, and family get-togethers were difficult, and often contentious. I don't want to get into specifics here, out of respect for the family. Suffice to say, it was another source of frustration for Mike, to put it mildly.

A year or two later, Mike reached out to some of his closest friends, myself included, about some specific personal struggles. We all voiced our support and well wishes. His Facebook posts alluded to some of these struggles, and it seemed like he was doing better. Not great, but better.

That didn't seem to last, though. The last couple years were a whirlwind. There were frequent, increasingly desperate Facebook posts. It was really hard to watch, and I didn't know what to do. It was especially frustrating, because I've been there. I know the pain of self-hatred, of being stuck in negative patterns, of having childhood stuff to work through.

At one point, I believe in 2019, Mike went on short-term disability leave from work. He started some kind of treatment program, or programs. Sometimes (again, based on his Facebook posts), it seemed like some things showed promise. But as anyone who's been through any kind of recovery knows, it's often one step forward, two steps back.

A few things seemed to keep him going: his friends, anime, music, horror movies, and his cat. He had tried adopting a cat a few years prior, but that cat wasn't a good fit. Abby was much better. She had special dietary needs, but Mike seemed happy to provide for her.

One other thing that continued: St. Anna's runs. Dean would host semi-regular trips to a supper club in St. Anna, a village in the middle of nowhere in eastern Wisconsin. Friendly staff, old fashioneds, relish trays, and huge cuts of meat. Great for guys-nights-out kinda things. Mike always seemed to be in a decent mood when he joined us for those. We would also have semi-regular weekend get-togethers. Video games, junk food, movies, etc.

One time, though, Mike declined an invitation to St. Anna's, so it was just Dean and I. We talked about Mike, and his state of being. We knew that he was hurting, that he was in a very dark place. I remember telling Dean, "If he had a gun, he'd be dead." That's when I found out, from Dean, that Mike's dad had been abusive. Dean figured it should have been something like a relief when he passed, but from what I've read, sometimes the opposite can happen--the passing of an abuser can re-open old wounds. I don't know; I never asked Mike about it.

Soon after, in February of 2020, I got a Facebook message from Mike's mother. It was over, Mike had passed on. I relayed the message to our mutual friends and acquaintances. We were shocked and saddened. But I wasn't surprised at all. I confirmed later that it was suicide.

The funeral was bittersweet. I got to catch up with friends that I hadn't seen in a while, and I got to reconnect with Mike's mother and sister. A group of us made a memorial St. Anna's run.

In the following months, I helped Mike's mother sort through some of Mike's stuff, like technological and musical stuff. I "inherited" a bunch of it, and I plan to make use of it (and/or sell it off and donate the proceeds to charity). I'm Facebook friends with both his mother and his sister, and some of Mike's other friends that I hadn't met, but knew through his Facebook rantings. It feels like a way of maintaining a bond with him.

Thoughts of Jack's

I try not to let myself fall into the "I shoulda done something" trap, but it still feels awful that I had a sense of inevitability about Mike's suicide. I could have given him a phone call, fired off a text or a DM or an email. Would it have helped? Well, it certainly wouldn't have hurt.

I think my biggest worry is, did Mike at least understand that people actually cared about him? Like a lot of suicidal people, he was convinced that he was a terrible person, that the world would be better off without him, etc. He knew he had friends, though. Did he get that his friends actually cared about him? I think so? I hope so? Honestly, though, I don't know fore sure, and that bothers me. Maybe that's just playing into the "I shoulda done something" dynamic. I don't know.

I was talking with my sister (who also knew Mike, and was Facebook friends with him) about the whole thing. We agree that what Mike needed was a long leave of absence from work, and long-term, intensive therapy and psychiatric treatment. He had a lifetime's worth of baggage to sort through, and I understand how difficult it is to do so while being productive at a challenging job in an often unpleasant work environment.

Soapbox

Mike's reaction to the 2016 US election (and many of ours too, of course)

Getting a little more abstractly political, this is a failure of multiple American systems: capitalism and healthcare. Capitalism doesn't care if Mike lives or dies. His employer will just hire someone new. Our healthcare system doesn't care about Mike unless he can pay. And he can't pay if he doesn't have a job. But he can't do his job if he can't function, and he can't function if he doesn't get the care he needs.

It's a terrible cycle. In another system, maybe he could just take some disability leave, maybe he could get financial assistance from public safety net programs, maybe he could get the care he needed via public health services, and maybe he could come through it all a better person for it.

I don't know. I do know that I lost my friend. A lot of my personality is informed by the time I spent with Mike. My absurdist and sarcastic sense of humor, my taste in music, my creative drives, my cynicism toward mainstream society, my appreciation for anime and Japanese culture. A lot of who I am is because of him. I miss him terribly.

Insight

So here I am, trudging the proverbial road. I've backed away from my addiction, and I'm experiencing the downs and ups of sober life. Mostly downs, but I'm getting glimpses of ups, and it's kinda cool.

I'm finding there are (at least) two distinct sides of me with little overlap. There's the despair, lonely, frustrated, depressed, terrified, unmotivated, doom, gloom, etc. part of me. Everything seems hopeless, frustrating, dark ... And then there's the more even, lucid, positive, open, "free" side of me. Things seem more "sane," possible, surmountable, manageable. When I'm in one or the other, it's hard for me to see the other side.

Kinda like the "light world" and "dark world" from The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past for the SNES, if you remember that. In the game, there was the normal "Hyrule" world, and a dark, gloomy, decaying "dark world," that was similar to the "light world," but, well, darker. More dangerous, treacherous, etc. While he was in the dark world, he faced monsters, dungeons, etc. strictly belonging to the dark world, with no interaction with the light world. And vice-versa. Link had a mirror that he could use to magically transport himself from the dark world back to the light world. I need something like that.. when I find myself overwhelmed in my own dark world, to magically transport myself back into "the light" of sanity and manageability.