Byrd

My mother's boyfriend after I moved to Arizona and beyond.

He was highly intelligent. Part of two different clubs for vain people with excessively high IQs. You know the two. He was a formidable swordsman too. Sounds like my mom finally picked a winner, no?

He'd been living with his mom for the last 25 years. Doing NOTHING for a living. You see, when he was fresh out of high school, with all the prestigious colleges jocking for him, he chose a girl instead. Shortly after their joyful marriage, she was murdered. He fell into a depression he never recovered from.

Decades later, my mom took him on as her latest fixer-upper. At the time, he was hooked on morphine. She nursed him off that, only to have him fall into alcoholism. The alcohol raced through his already ravaged body, sending him to the hospital with liver damage. Upon returning to his mother's house, he cashed in the alcohol for pills.

One night, Asterisk, feeling lonesome and sorry for himself, paid Byrd and my mother a visit. Byrd punched Risk (terrible idea) and Risk jumped in his truck and used it as a weapon.

Back from the hospital, Byrd added pain-killers back to his repertoire of addictions. He overdosed, leaving my mom to cart him back to the hospital for the umpteenth time. This time, doctors were more concerned than my mother. And Byrd's mother? She said: "I don't care if he dies."

I can understand her disappointment, but if you don't have the parenting skills to get the kids out and keep them out, even under his special circumstances, it's YOUR damn fault.

He took the message to his already fractured heart. He told my mom: "Sorry I put you through this, that I'm leaving you like this," before slipping into a three day coma and, ultimately, death.

That was October of '07. Right when I was reeling from having failed my midterms. The fact that I was 3,000 miles away from helping my heart-stricken mother started my own slide into the deepest depression I've personally ever experienced. Life got worse from there...