Everything is Always Over

Over time I will dial in this blog more – fonts, templates, photos, etc. But for now, I need to get some things out of me. First: this blog’s namesake.

My maternal grandmother lived until she was 105. My mother was her oldest child; Grams had a son with her second husband, who was 21 years younger than my mother. My great grandfather had a saying that my grandmother repeated often, and always in this deep voice, as if her father was speaking through her: Everything is always over.

Grams employed this phrase when she was instructing a person to just let it go. The past is past, and there’s nothing you can do about it now. Best to look ahead, toward tomorrow, and trust that you learned something valuable from the days streaming like contrails behind you.

I heard Grams imitate her father’s basso profundo voice so many times over the years, but I never truly understood what that phrase really meant. It wasn’t until my mid-40s that it started sinking in, and if a long life is a sign of a good life, then this adage works wonders. Grams was also fond of saying that attitude is everything. This too I have taken to heart, and it’s become one of my north stars. When waves of crankiness threaten to drown me, I push to the surface and remind myself that being alive and safe and loved are not things to be taken for granted. Ever. I try to be kind. I insist on honesty.

There’s another twist to the name of this blog, and it has to do with feeling like things really are over. There is no light visible anywhere, just haloes of hazy fog that you can’t wipe from your vision. Days are endless, jarring in their brightness, and most are spent in bed, willing yourself to sleep, sleeping so much that your body begs you to move. You’re sore from not moving. Your stomach is constricting from very little food and you feel lightheaded when you have to get up to go to the bathroom. You spin out an idea that involves a catheter for depressed people that’s just a tube leading from a bedside commode to the actual toilet. You wonder why there isn’t just a simple all-nicotine pill, even though you quit smoking years ago. Your partner leaves for work every morning, and on those days when you can’t rise from the place you feel most safe, she frets all day, tries to distract herself from the thought that you could do it today, you could choose to take your own life while she’s lecturing on Emmanuel Kant.

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I have long been a fan and follower of the craft beer phenom in the U.S., discovering it with gusto in Missoula, Montana around 1995. After leaving (willingly) a 19-year career in law school communications, I ended up as director of communications at my (then) favorite brewery in Denver. It was a job I’d dreamed about for a long time, and I jumped in with all appendages.

My time at the brewery was wild: intense, fun, challenging, exasperating, enlightening. People outside of the beer industry love to romanticize it, and I understand why. Being “on the inside” of the Denver scene was a hell of a good time, and the camaraderie is authentic. The familial feeling is real (in most instances). But my experience also exposed the hard and exhausting and super competitive underbelly of an industry that has grown into an untamed, ego-driven beast in the past decade (not all beer haha). By the time I quit, in June of 2020 in the midst of the pandemic, I was beaten down by the persistent, unending task that is managing social media, and sick of dealing with narcissistic, selfish personalities. I will never forget those two years and one month, though. I came out of that job with more confidence in my skills than I’d had in a long time, and I came out with friends I keep up with, invest in, some of whom are now like family.

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Providing this backstory on my life in beer is necessary in order to understand this: It was excruciatingly difficult to hear that a brewer at Trve Brewing here in Denver died by suicide earlier this week. I did not know him well. We’d met, and I’d hung with him in groups at beer events.

When you hear that a person in your industry made the decision to leave this earth, it shakes you, no matter if it was a stranger or a friend. Hell, I consider every brewery employee to be a friend. Every maltster, hop grower, brewer, bartender, cellarman — they are my people.

Suicidal ideation is a mind fuck, but you don’t need me to tell you that. It’s the closest thing to having voices in your head telling you to do something really really bad. Actually, it IS voices in your head telling you to do something bad. And that bad thing is to leave, make the exit, say sayonara and don’t expect a call back. I don’t mean to make a light of it, but those voices and I, we have an agreement. If I hear them, I tell someone.

It wasn’t always like that. The first time I wanted to take my own life I was 15. I carried around a bottle of pills that I’d collected from my own medical procedures (good old Demerol), as well as my parent’s various drugs. I wasn’t sure when I would take them. I ended up taking half of them after a fight with my parents. I never told anyone. I puked about two hours later, then slept through my alarm the next morning. 5:30am comes fast when you’re a teenager.

Did I want to die? Not really. I wanted to change something, anything — I wanted someone to tell me why I felt such pain. I wanted make my father pay for hating me, or so I thought. I wanted so many things that I could not have. Mostly I wanted to run.

This is not about me. Not now. It’s about a man who chose to end his life who was also working for one of the most successful and popular breweries in Denver. He was a hugger. (I am a hugger.) His smile could light a stadium. He had talent and passion and compassion and heart. And now he is gone. He had a choice, as we all do, and he took it. I will not judge him for that. Compassion is all I have. Empathy. Disbelief.

I have spoken with a few people already about organizing a fund that will help beer industry employees access therapy/counseling resources. Help for individuals is what is needed, imo; each person has his/her/their own struggles, and the trick will be finding therapists who can take on a few clients right now. We’re Code Red here. Suicide is another contagion with which we must deal.

This is just the beginning of the conversation, but the fire has been lit beneath me. I have the will, and the time, for this. Lives are at stake. Wish me luck. And welcome to Everything is Always Over.