The Demon of Despair
- Michael Gaston

The bridge wouldn’t protect them from a direct hit. But, it did shield them from the concussive force of the bombs exploding around them, and it served as shelter from the falling debris. Nora and Johnny, the oldest of eight siblings, sat under the bridge, each clinging to a pillow case half full of food that was both tasteless and filling. They had to get home safely. There grandparents and six brothers were counting on them. The rations they held were enough to feed the family for three days. They would make the food last a week and be thankful.
With her back to the embankment and her knees drawn up against the pillow case she hugged close to her chest, Nora could feel warmth where her shoulder touched her older brother. That contact was her only comfort. Her teeth chattered, biting at her fear. Her eyes, burning from the swirling dust and black powder, were denied even a blink, her fear keeping them wide open. The whole time her ears were being assaulted by the two sounds she hated more than anything: air raid sirens and the whistles of falling bombs. There was irony in the similarities of the sounds. Starting out as slow, low noises that didn’t evoke much urgency, they would rise in pitch, grow in volume, and increase in intensity. The noise of the bombs began as the steady simple sound of an object cutting through the air; that sound would soon become the scorching whistle of a kettle boiling gasoline over an ever increasing flame. The noise from the sirens mounted high on their perches began as a monotone humming that would morph into howling wails, decrying the tragedies that had been wrought and bemoaning those yet to come.
Whenever Nora and Johnny were away from home, unable to get to the basement shelter at their grandparent’s house, the bridge was the next best choice. The decision to seek refuge under the bridge always seemed like a good idea at the onset of the sirens’ wail, as the rumble of approaching aircraft began to shake the ground, and when those rumble of approaching aircraft began to shake the ground, and when those first whistles passed between Death’s lips. But every time Nora sat under the bridge, she remembered just how bad of an idea it was, remembered what she had thought the last time, and the time before that. The bridge could be a target. It could be the very thing the bombs were meant to destroy. That thought always increased her anxiety and her longing to be safe at home in the basement shelter with her family.
Nora didn’t know ho long her and Johnny sat under the bridge. But finally, their possible last breaths weren’t held for as long as the frequency of explosions lessened. A couple of errant whistles crescendoed in far off explosions, the sirens wound down, and there was silence. Except for the ringing in her ears.
Nora and Johnny stood. First, they checked the rations. Then, they checked each other. Something had nicked Johnny’s cheek. Nora wiped the blood away with the slack material at the top of her pillow case. After dusting each other off, they shared a tentative smile spawned by the triumph of survival.
It was a two mile walk home. Hours later, they were still walking. Nora thought the reason it was taking so long was because they weren’t able to take a direct route home. They had to take numerous detours due to the many impassable streets. She couldn’t see what it was, but it was small enough for him to close his hand around. The weight of the object didn’t correspond with its size, for Johnny stumbled and swayed under the burden of what he held. After losing the struggle to maintain his balance, Johnny fell. He landed sprawled half on the street and half on what used to be someone’s property. When Nora saw his face twist in anguish and the tears begin to flow, she asked him what was wrong. He unclenched his fist to reveal the answer. The door knob from their grandparent’s house rolled off his palm. Nora forced her eyes beyond the sphere of etched brass her and all of her loved ones had touched. The pillow case fell form her embrace, joining the debris on the street, as she gazed into a crater half full of the rubble that represented her life and marked her family’s death.

The first time I heard that story I was trapped in my family’s home in northeast Texas unable to go outside and play due to the cold weather. The weight of a sky the color of dirty snow pressed down. The roof of the house held, but I was defeated under the sky’s severity, left feeling restless and uninspired to do much of anything.
I turned off the TV and went into the kitchen, where my mother was baking a cake. I know spending time with her would brighten my day. And, I figured I could find the inspiration to lick the bowl while I was in there.
As I walked in, my mother was holding onto the counter and looking out the window over the sink. That noise, which is somewhere between a bark and a cough, the one a chair makes when a child is too small to completely lift it and one is left to drag, allowing the plastic foot at its end to reverberate against the linoleum floor, that noise startled her. She jerked her head around and faced me. She looked at me without really seeing me. But then, I wasn’t really seeing her either. Her features were twisted almost beyond recognition, and behind her pained expression there was a presence I didn’t recognize. When recognition lit her face, I saw her relax a little. She acknowledged me with a smile that didn’t reach her eyes and turned back to the window.
When tragedy is too much, when its agony can’t be purged, can’t be washed away on a year’s long running river of tears, the pain takes on a life of its own. The pain becomes an overwhelming presence that won’t be pushed down. That presence, that demon of despair, refuses to be locked away. The demon won’t be denied as it makes the person it has possessed review the tragedy over and over in their mind. Each viewing, each recalling of the pain, causes the person to shut down, to stand in a slack-jawed stupor as the debilitating horrors are relived, shattering the heart anew and bringing a fresh scarring of the soul.
There were many times my mother didn’t quite seem herself. I figured she was deep in thought about items needing to be added to a grocery list, bills needing to be paid, or what she was going to cook for dinner that night. Sometimes we would be outside and even though she wore glasses and I knew her vision wasn’t better than mine, she would gaze off into the distance to see things I couldn’t. On those days, I noticed there was a droop to her shoulders and a slackness to her features. There was also a feeling emanating form her that pressed down on me like a dark gray sky. It was one of those days while she stared out the kitchen window, that she told me the story of her and Johnny under the bridge.
I was eleven years old.
At that age and with the sweet, heavy scent of the cake filling the house, I couldn’t begin to understand the scope of the tragedy she spoke of. In the selfish mind of the child I was, my thoughts were more concerned with how clean she was going to get the icing bowl before letting me have a go at it. When I did focus on what she was saying, I thought how her story would make a good movie. A good movie that needed to be on TV right about then.
My lack of sympathy for the pain my mother had experienced wasn’t due to a lack of caring. I loved my mother. It’s just that the impact and significance of her story was lost on me. I had yet to personally make Death’s acquaintance.
For the next three years, she would continue – on occasion – to tell me that story. She told it more frequently toward the end. An end to bowls being licked. An end to having someone around whom I needed and who needed me on those days when the sky was dark and dismal and the TV was as well. An end that saw to it that Death and I were properly introduced.
My mother was smoker. She said she had started soon after losing her family. She was intelligent and informed, thus well aware of the risks. But, after the things she had survived – there were other stories – the danger posed by a cigarette, understandably, was laughable. No one was laughing when she was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer.
My father and older brother worked; their jobs taking them away from the house. I was young with plenty of spare time on my hands. Time that used to be spent playing, became time spent taking care of my mother and doing the household tasks she could no longer do.
At twelve, I was still a child, but my responsibilities had become those of an adult. My mother’s stories took on a whole new meaning. I began to understand a little of the pain she had felt that day she lost her family. I felt the unfairness of it. I felt how she hadn’t deserved to go through it. I felt her life should have been easier. At times, I would stare out the window of her sick room. Gazing into the distance, I began not seeing what was there as my eyes focused on the dark gray cloud of pain approaching just off the horizon.
Sometimes, when I brought her meals, cleaned her room, or just sat with her, it felt like we weren’t alone. I could look in her eyes and sense another presence. A presence I knew I was going to know one day. A presence I could feel was trying me on like a glove.
At first, we had faith that my mother would get better. The chemo treatments battered our faith as bad as they battered her body. What we had called faith was just hoping for the best. Before long, the demon of despair reached out to pluck away the last of our hope, turning it into denial and exposing our true faith, our real but unspoken belief: that she was going to die.
A couple of months later, my hope for her life was almost renewed. One morning before school, with a load of clothes already washed, dried, and folded, my breakfast made and eaten, and my mother’s plate waiting in the microwave to be warmed upon her waking, I feel for one of the demon’s cruelest tricks. It was getting close to time for the school bus, and I was beginning to think I was going to have to wake my mother so she could eat before I left. I rinsed the last of the dishes and put them in the rack to drain. As I dried my hands on a dish towel, she called for me. I wondered how long it had been since she had awakened without my immediately being informed of it by her racking coughs.
I entered her room and if not for the bald heads, the shrunken body that was barely a bump under the covers, and the love in her eyes, I would have thought the person I was looking at was someone other than my mother. She was sitting up, had color in her cheeks, and there was a beautiful smile lighting her face. After stumbling at the door, I quickly went to her and asked what was wrong. She told me nothing was wrong, that she felt great, and believed she was coming out of the worst of it. She said she was going to beat the disease into remission.
For close to a year, her appetite had been waning. That morning she was quick to tell me how hungry she was. I brought her plate and a large glass of orange juice. She took a healthy drink, set the glass on the bedside table, and patted the bed next to her. I crawled up beside her, and she told me a story while she ate.

Nora and Angela were nurses. But they hadn’t been trained by doctors or professors at university. Their training had come by necessity at a non-bombed-out structure that had been converted to serve as an improvised hospital. The curriculum had been: Learn as you go.
It was Saturday night. Nora and Angela had drawn the thankless job of transporting bodies form the makeshift hospital to the still functional morgue that was located underground beneath the mostly dilapidated building that used to be the city’s best hospital.
Nora longed for the normalcy of a teenage girl’s life that wasn’t bombarded by the destruction of war. She wanted to talk to Angela and a bunch of other girlfriends – she didn’t have – about clothes, dances, and boys. Instead, she talked to people about how they would be okay in spite of amputated limbs, burns, and lost loved ones. She wanted to know what it was like to have fun, to go out on a date. The closest she ever came to a date was riding around with young men while she was on morgue duty. Young dead men.
That Saturday night, she decided, was going to be different. She and Angela were going to have fun. She was going to see to it.
A panel wagon was used to transport the bodies. There were two bunk bed-style shelves mounted on the side walls in the cargo area. The bodies were put on the shelves and secured with a belt strapped across the waist.
The road was bumpy and impassable in places. Numerous times they were forced to abandon one route for another. With a couple of slow miles behind them, Nora silenced Angela’s nonstop complaining by producing a bottle of wine from under the seat. Nora had been saving it for a special occasion. Had been saving it for close to a year. When the bottle was half empty, Nora and Angela were having fun. Everything they said brought on bursts of laughter. The laughter itself would bring on more laughter. Detours were no longer a problem. They were on an adventure. For awhile, they escaped pain and death, forgetting they were carrying both inside the panel wagon.
One detour took them down an extremely rough road. Pocked with potholes and buckled by the seismic force of bombs that had exploded close by, the detour itself was almost impassable. They slowly bounced forward as if the panel wagon rode on four flat tires. Nora took a drink and passed the slashing bottle to Angela. Nora gripped the steering wheel with both hands and focused on the road, laughing at the absurdity of the task at hand, not giving passengers a rough ride.
They came to a place where the road’s surface was so broken up there was avoiding its roughness. Nora slowed the vehicle to a crawl and everything quieted except for the lulling hum of the idling engine and the rhythmic thump of tires hitting bumps as she inched the panel wagon forward. Suddenly, the deadened thump-thump-thump coming from outside the vehicle was drowned out by an echoing KHAA-KHAA-KHAA coming from the inside. Nora released the steering wheel and Angela clenched the bottle in a two handed grip as by the pressure of trapped gas, appeared to be trying to sit up. With each bump, another moaning cough was expelled from the corpse, lessening the pressure. When the body quit coughing and once again lay flat on the shelf, Nora turned to Angela. The passenger-side door was open, the seat was empty, and the bottle was still falling on its way to crash on the floorboard. Angela was nowhere in sight.

My mother’s laughter. I had forgotten how sweet its music. Sitting tall with life sparkling in her eyes, her laughter was beautiful song composed of lyrics that promised a happy ending. Her feeling better restored my hope. Tears of joy soothed my eyes and caressed my face as I joined in her laughter. The wonderful music of our dust didn’t last long. Soon, her part of the song consisted of hacking sour notes that lacked melody and were out of time with the easy relaxed song of laughter. The dirge of her coughing wasn’t a song. It was the noise I hated most.
She turned away from me and fell forward to lie on her stomach. With her head beyond the side of the bed, she reached for the doubled grocery sack, half filled with shredded newspaper that was always kept beside the bed. As she continued to cough, I instinctively reached out my clenched fist planning to help her by gently hitting her on the back. I was paralyzed by the understanding that it wouldn’t help. She wasn’t coughing because she had swallowed something wrong. My gesture would have been wasted, as futile as hitting the back of the man who had been coughing in the panel wagon.
So, I sat beside her as the color in her cheeks, the strength to sit up, and the belief she was going to beat the disease was purged, along with the drowning fluid in her lungs. Knowing the cancer would continue to fill her lungs beyond her ability to purge them, I opened my small fist and placed it on her back. I moved my hand in circles trying to comfort her, and myself. We’d never sing the duet of laughter again.
When the service was over, my classmates passed by one at a time as they filed out of the funeral home chapel. Those who were my friends hugged me. Those who, prior to that day, had only spoken to me in passing, or had only spoken to me in an adversarial manner, or hadn’t ever spoken to me at all, shook my hand in an awkward attempt to offer condolences. I cheated myself out of crying with my friends as I willed myself not to cry in the face of the others’ insincerity. I hated the painless normalcy; the blissful ignorance had no right to offer me their hands. I hated their feeling good about doing what the teachers must have told them was their duty to the school and the class. I hated that they could be so close to my pain, yet so far removed from it. I hated them. But, I didn’t say it. My restraint not to lash out at them meant the demon of despair hadn’t completely possessed me. At least, not yet.
That happened at the funeral. There in the graveyard, I was buried by the finality of my mother’s death. As I stood in the weeping rain staring at the hole in the ground, a void opened within me that could never be filled. Tears burned my eyes and scorched my face. My body convulsed with the desperate powerlessness of my sobs. The pain of my mother’s life had somewhat became mine while she was sick. But, that day, at her grave, my mother’s death became my tragedy.
The demon of despair could have died with my mother. But, as I, through gritted teeth, cursed the demon for the unfairness of my mother’s life, as I cursed the shape-shifter for the cancerous form it had adopted in her, as I cursed the slow agonizing death my mother had suffered, I kept the demon alive, unknowingly cursing myself as I invited it inside me.
From that day onwards, of course, my life wasn’t the same. I grieved the best way I know how. But, I didn’t know how. I’d had no practice. All I could do was accept the fact that life wasn’t fair. And accept that there was nothing I could do to change that fact. I never accepted or got over my mother’s death.
The loss of my mother was as hard on my father and my brother as it was on me. We grieved together for a few days before falling back into the routines that had occupied our time before her death. My father went back to work with a vengeance, working even longer hours than before. My brother went back to high school and everyday after class he worked full-time at his part-time job. I went back to junior high until mid-afternoon until the bus brought me home. Since the demon had ultimately taken care of my mother, all that was left for me to do was spend the rest of the afternoon and long evenings taking care of cleaning, doing laundry, and washing dishes. Without my mother to talk to, or her love to inspire me, the lonely household tasks quickly grew arduous. My work didn’t take me away from the oven she had used to bake cakes, or the kitchen window that some days had claimed her gaze, or the sick bed where my hope for home and family used to lay. My home had become simply a house where, with only my pain to keep me company, I reluctantly toiled, working for the shattered ideal of a family that no longer was.
My father and brother’s way of grieving worked for them. They continued to work more and more while seeming to grieve less and less. Both went on to be productive, successful, and to lead relatively normal lives. Because they were able to face their despair and work through it, they were only brushed by the wings of the demon.
When I was fifteen, my father remarried. We all moved to the tumbleweed of a town in west Texas where he had grown up. Leaving the house where I had taken care of my mother, the house that had become a mausoleum of memories, made me come out form under the dark gray cloud to see, smell, and fell the warmth of the sun for what seemed like the first time. I made good grades, excelled at sports, and for the most part, stayed out of trouble. All of which gave the impression that I was living a normal life that was going to turn out okay. But, the demon wasn’t finished. It was just biding its time, feeling me out to see what identity to assume.
It wasn’t long before I started drinking alcohol at victory celebrations after games and track meets. Soon, the drinking became less about wins and more about my loss. The demon was coming into its own.
The occasions for victory celebrations were too few and too far between for my taste, which was the taste I had acquired for alcohol. I got to where I didn’t need anyone else to be around. If I had something to drink, I drank it and called it a party.
When I was sixteen, a new girl moved to town. The first time I saw her, I felt a tingle, life beneath the numbing scars, deep inside the dead husk of my heart. She became the small high school’s only majorette. I was captain of the football team. She did routines at pep rallies and dedicated them to me. I scored touchdowns at the games for her.
Her love was genuine. But, I wasn’t open to receive it. My heart was a clenched fist still holding onto the pain of my mother’s death. Fear kept me from truly returning her love. I was afraid that if I were hurt again, if any more pain were added to the amount I already carried, I would be swallowed in the depths of despair where I could no longer keep my head and continue my flailing attempt at living.
The pain I was trying to avoid did come. But, it came from a source I never expected. Football. I was playing in the first regular season game of my junior year. The running back from the other team was running down the sideline about to score. He was bigger than me, but I was faster. As I closed in to make the tackle, I realized he was faster than I had thought. I was going to have to dive to make the tackle. As I left my feet, he increased his speed a little more. I kept my head up, true to the form that had been drilled into me. But when I saw that the facemask of my helmet was going to slam against his hip, I lowered my head, hoping to avoid a neck injury. The crown of my helmet hit his center of gravity. It felt like I had banged my head into the goalpost. While the hit was just enough to knock the running back out of bounds, it was more than enough to knock me out of consciousness and out of the game.
The doctors woke me from the dream of continuing to play football. The force of the hit had compressed my vertebrae, causing cervical number four to crack. The prognosis was that I’d never play football again.
After a week in the hospital with a neck brace in place, I returned home and to school. Even though I was still on the roster, I was no longer part of the team, or part of the life I’d known.
I was hurting, and the doctor’s prescription did nothing for the kind of pain I was feeling. So, I self-medicated. I drank. I rebelled against the pain of life. I pushed those closest to me away. I refused to open up and let anyone know what I was feeling.
It wasn’t long before people were telling me they had seen my girlfriend on a few late night occasions with my best friend. I confronted her, hoping it was just small town gossip. She didn’t deny it. She told me she had been trying to glean information from my friend about what was going on inside my head, figuring I had to be sharing more with him than I was with her, which was absolutely nothing. It seemed like a lame excuse. But, the underlying truth of it stood strong. I was the lame one, broken of heart, body, and spirit. A whole person had caught my girlfriend’s eye.
About a month later, I came home to find my girlfriend and her family visiting mine. The greetings I received were as serious as the pinched expressions on everyone’s faces. My father told me to sit down. Then, my girlfriend’s mother told me her daughter was pregnant. While I labored under the shock and possible implications of that information, she turned to my father and began asking him questions concerning my heritage. When I was growing up, I had asked the same questions. The white skin and straight hair of my family had made me wonder about my dark complexion and curly hair. I asked my mother about it many times. She would go on about how easily I tanned and how certain foods caused my hair to curl. I loved my mother and trusted her completely. So, her answers had always been good enough. Until that day when my father told my girlfriend’s mother the truth.
I was adopted.
Without family as a reference point, the person I thought I was died that day. More painful was the realization that, on many occasions, my mother had lied to my face, while telling silent lies of omission behind my back everyday of my life prior to her death. A little part of her that I had been keeping alive inside me died that day as well.
All the way to the alter I argued that the baby might not be mine. No one heard me. They were no longer listening to what had only a month ago been the talk of the town: my girlfriend’s late night meetings with my friend. The only thing they were hearing was that I was the father.
My girlfriend’s father wasn’t around. But, since it was my father’s hometown and it was the credibility of his family name that was at stake, he insisted I take responsibility. If there was anything left of mine and my girlfriend’s relationship, the shotgun wedding my father packed and loaded blasted those remains into nothingness.
The baby was born. A girl.
The papers were filed and finalized. A divorce.
Summer vacation ended, and I went back to school. A senior.
A senior with a failed marriage in this past, the lie of a family in his present, and someone else’s daughter in his future.
My ex-wife and the daughter everyone said I had fathered moved away. I still wasn’t sure if she was my daughter, but without a blood test proving she wasn’t, my name on the birth certificate, and the marriage – even though dissolved – were enough for the judge to say she was and ordered me to pay child support.
I went to school, I worked, and I stayed out of enough trouble to graduate. My senior year was the quiet before the storm that was about to be released from the dark gray cloud that had hovered over my heart for what seemed to be my whole life.
My life spiraled into a litany of bad choices as I reacted to the despair that was needling me from the inside. One of those bad choices got me started needling myself from the outside. As sure as a bunch of white masses show cancer’s possession of lungs on an X-ray, my life of dysfunction showed drug addiction’s possession of me. I was as powerless to the demon in its assumed identity of addiction as I had been to the despair it had wrought at our introduction.
I used drugs to deaden my pain, denying the fact that every time I did I was killing myself. Soon, I couldn’t deny what using was doing to that dark presence inside me. My drug use was feeding it, giving it sustenance to grow, giving it power to reach out and hurt the people trying to be close to me, the people I should have been holding close to.
After high school, there were good jobs, suicide attempts, and many multi-month bouts with sobriety that ended with longer binges of drug use. There were also some great times spent with my daughter. Through sporadic visits, our relationship evolved to the point where I believe she was mine. I began to see myself reflected in her expressions. Some of her gestures were small reminders of some of my own. Time together made it where I couldn’t deny there was a little of me in her. More time together made it where I couldn’t deny there was a whole lot of her in me. Inside my heart.
It was a decade of dysfunction. For ten years, after high school, I battled the demon, never facing or accepting the despair of my life’s experience. My love for my daughter and her love for me was my only hope. But, the demon’s drugs blinded me to that fact. When I bottomed out, I drove a concrete and steel, razor-wire-topped wedge between my daughter and I. Losing her love, her respect, and the light of her smile – all while I never deserved – was the final heartbreak that broke my soul.
I’ve spent the last twelve years in prison. My release is still too far away for me to grasp. Suicide, stagnation, and self-realization are the choices here. If a person doesn’t commit to one and can break away from the destructive sameness of the other, he can learn a lot about himself.
Despair is a natural ingredient of life. My belief that I had experienced it in an unfair measure manifested in a feeling of entitlement much like how surviving war’s pain and destruction had influenced my mother’s decision to smoke cigarettes.
I haven’t used in twelve years. The demon doesn’t live inside me anymore. But, it doesn’t have to. Living here is like living inside the demon. I haven’t seen my daughter since before my arrest. She wrote me for a couple of years after I came here, but it didn’t last. Her anger put a stop to our correspondence. She feels her life isn’t fair. She lost her father who was never much of one to begin with, but she loved him. He hurt her by going away. She’s angry at him and at life. She’s living under the dark gray cloud of despair.
Many times during my incarceration, I’ve reviewed my life through the correcting lenses of maturity, experience, and an emotional distance that can only be acquired through the passage of time. I now see the demon for who he truly is.
Me.
By not taking control of despair, I created a demon that controlled me. Wiley and always one step ahead, the demon became my worst enemy, eventually bringing me here, to prison, where I’m still alive but have no life. For me, the damage is done. But, while time is running out, there is still hope for my daughter.
The demons – mine in the past and hers in the present – have severed the ties between me and my daughter. I haven’t spoken to her in over a decade. Yet, through the despair she’s hanging onto, her demon speaks to her everyday as it decides what identity to assume in her.
Prison has silenced my voice and crushed my credibility. It hasn’t changed the fact that I have something important to say. I need to warn my daughter. Tell her what I know about the demon. Tell her we only weaken ourselves and empower it when we hang onto our despair. I need to tell her that she is my legacy, not the demon’s.