Two Effing Lines?! Really! Come on!

I’ve been sitting on this for a long time…

“Adam was born on August 4, 1963 and passed away on Monday, January 25, 2010. Adam was a resident of Hydesville, California.” That’s all the online obituary reads.

Are you fucking kidding me?! Two friggin’ lines meant to cover 46-years of life.

Bullshit! This pisses me off and I won’t stand for it!

Adam is my brother, and I can tell you, there was much more to the man than what this paltry piece of crap obit has in it!  Goddamn it, I find it disgusting that his children and widow care so little of him they’d allow this to stand!

Okay — now  that I’ve calmed down…

They got his date of birth right, but let me add, he was born at Mather Air Force Hospital in Sacramento, California. Adam, like me, was born a military brat.

The following year we moved to Klamath, California. Adam attended and graduated from Margaret Keating School.

Adam also attended Saint Robert and Ann’s Catholic Church in Klamath. He received first communion in 1971 and often talked about being a Priest, like many young boys his age.

Eventually he outgrew the idea of becoming a priest, focusing instead on acting. Adam was talented, doing impressions of famous people like John Wayne and Groucho Marx and telling jokes at the drop of a hat and everyone had to beware of his sharp tongue.

He eventually acted in a couple of plays during high school, but found he loved weight lifting and boxing more than being on stage. It was from that discipline he would draw strength to push through the disintegration of our parents marriage.

At first he moved to Fortuna with our mother and two sisters. Eventually, though Adam chose to come live with me in Crescent City and return to Del Norte High School, where he graduated in 1981.

While attending school he maintained a steady job as a busboy, dishwasher and a sometime line cook. In speaking with Pete Kaufman, who managed Rowland’s restaurant, where Adam worked, he said he had no one else who could laugh and carry on with employees and customers and get his work done as well as Adam could.

In short Adam busted his ass.

Adam joined the U.S. Army and after completing basic and advanced infantry training was assigned to Pusan (now known as Busan,) South Korea. He finish two years of duty overseas and was transferred to Fort Irwin in the Mohave Desert, where he continued to work as a dental technician.

There is more to this part of his life that’ll be shared at a later date.

He left the service in early 1986, taking a job as a security officer with a lumber company. He held this job for over a year as he completed the basic requirements to enter college on a full-time basis.

He also got married, adopting his wife’s daughter, Jasmine, from a previous marriage. Together Adam and Sonja had two more children, Jayce and Lynda.

At first he couldn’t settle on a major, first attending the law enforcement academy at the College of the Redwoods. After graduating from the course he discovered a desire for nursing and proceeded on a path towards his degree in that.

He was sidelined unfortunately after being accused of participating in the murder of a man who  was harvesting a pot field. Initially he was sentenced to two-years at San Quentin, but due to overcrowding, served his time in the Mendocino County jail.

By the time he completed his sentence, Adam was well on the road to depression. It took him a year and a half to finally seek help from the local V.A. clinic in Eureka.

Adam was never the same though. His mood swings were wild and often times caused him to seek the self-medicating path of alcohol and marijuana.

Adam suffered another setback when he and Sonja divorced. By this time he was talking about taking off to Europe and getting lost once his children were all grown.

However, he appeared to be on the road to recovery by the time he married his second wife, Kelly. It was  “a dream come true,” he would tell me the day of the wedding.

Sadly, that dream wouldn’t last very long.

Near the end of January 2010, he checked himself into the V.A. hospital in San Francisco, suffering from severe depression. It was while there he self-administered a mixture of prescribed medication that ended his life.

While I haven’t his all the points in Adam’s life, I have shared enough so you’ll know he was far more than the two-lines given in the only obituary I’ve been able to locate for him. Meanwhile, his death has had an effect on not only me but his sisters as well.

Furthermore Adam’s friends from throughout his life are coming forward, wanting to know about him. Slowly and painfully I’ll give out all I can recall despite my desire to keep a part of him for myself.

That would selfish — and no better than he’s been given by others closer to him than me.