Three phone calls and a wake

DAVID SILVA

The papers carried a story recently about two kids -- a boy, 16, and

his 20-year-old female cousin -- found dead in a pool in La Puente. I

read about it shortly after getting in to work one morning, and found

the details of it so disturbing it troubled me all day. The two had

apparently inhaled Freon -- a coolant used in air conditioners --

either before or after getting into the pool. Freon, I learned from

the article, causes temporary paralysis when inhaled, and the two

young adults apparently were unable to keep above the water, and

drowned.

By day’s end, the story was everywhere, on the wires, the radio

and TV. What gave it its legs was the detail -- a revelation to many

-- that Freon had become a popular high among teens. I drove home

that evening thinking about my teenage nephews and nieces and

wondering if they knew this, that kids their age were inhaling a

chemical that freezes the lungs and paralyzes the limbs -- and had

never mentioned it.

“Can you imagine what those parents must be going through?” my

girlfriend, Sharon, said later when I mentioned the article to her.

Sharon has a 25-year-old son who’s doing well now but as a teen had

given her a lot of cause for worry.

I shook my head and was silent for a long moment.

“You’re thinking about your nephews, aren’t you?” she asked.

I nodded. “It’s just that I never heard of this,” I said.

“Inhaling Freon. How do you protect kids from things you don’t even

know about?”

The next day was Mother’s Day, and I called my mom to let her know

Sharon and I would be over in a couple of hours.

“Mijo, you heard about those poor kids who drowned in La Puente?”

Mom asked.

“Yeah, I did,” I said. “Wasn’t that just terrible?”

“You know they were related, don’t you?”

“Yeah, I heard they were cousins.”

“No, Davey,” Mom said sadly. “They’re related to us. They were

family.”

Sharon walked in just then to see me cover my face with my hands.

My mother told me the 16-year-old was my brother-in- law Hugo’s

nephew, his brother Jesse’s youngest child.

“How ... How’s Hugo doing, Ma?” I’ve noticed I always call my

mother “Ma” after she tells me someone has died.

“Diana says he’s taking it really hard. We need to go over there

today and pay our respects.”

Mom told me I had met the boy, Jared, on more than one occasion,

but for the life of me I can’t recall him.

I’ve written many times that I come from a large family, and I

wasn’t kidding. I have five brothers and sisters. All but one have

children and all but two are grandparents. My father’s mother had

nine children; my mother’s mother had 13. Most of these children

survived to adulthood, and married and remarried, and since many of

my uncles and aunts were born before World War II, their children’s

children have long been producing children of their own.

So my extended family is enormous. It’s a rare year that goes by

without me being introduced to someone who later turns out to be

related by blood or marriage. Sometimes these chance meetings are

hilarious, stories to be laughingly repeated at family barbecues.

Other times, I’ll read some terrible story in the paper and later

discover that the tragedy was, in fact, a personal wound.

My sister’s house that Sunday was filled with food and Hugo’s

relatives. Diana had planned a big get-together for Mother’s Day, and

after the deaths decided to hold the event anyway as a kind of

informal wake. She put out plates of pasta and meat and salads and

desserts, and the guests arrived and hugged one another and the food

sat on the tables mostly undisturbed.

One of Hugo’s nieces had brought her infant son with her, and Hugo

picked him up and held him against his chest and would not put him

down. Every time I tried to talk to my brother-in-law, he would just

nod and walk away, holding the baby closer. I remarked on this to

Sharon later, and she said it was as if Hugo had been “clinging to

life.”

Anyone who thinks tragedies of this sort happen only to bad people

doesn’t know Hugo and his family. They’re as good as they come --

thoughtful and God-fearing people who place a premium on education

and do their best to teach their children the value of hard work. So

it’s a mystery why some of these children have prospered while others

have withered from substance abuse. There’s a random quality to it,

like Death picking over a box of chocolates.

Jared and his cousin, Pearl, were memorialized together the

following Thursday, at a service held at a mortuary near Jared’s high

school. I didn’t go, but my mother called the next day and described

it to me. More than 200 people had attended, most of them students

from the school who made the short walk over to the funeral home when

their classes let out.

Among the speakers was the emergency room physician who had worked

on Jared and Pearl the night they were brought in. He spoke

passionately to the young audience about the consequences of

“huffing,” which I learned was slang among teens for inhaling

chemicals like Freon.

The doctor was merciless, my mother told me. As the teens in the

audience listened and wept, he described in vivid detail the violence

Jared and Pearl had done to themselves, how their skin had turned

black and how their frozen lungs shattered like glass when the rescue

workers tried to resuscitate them.

The doctor read aloud a letter written to him by a woman whose son

had died at 16 from abusing Freon. The woman wrote of watching her

son pass through the stages of life, of her deepest hopes for him,

and of watching him slip away.

“I wish I had a copy of that letter,” my mother, who works at a

Los Angeles public school, told me over the phone. “I’d pin it on the

wall at work so all the kids could read it. Maybe it would make a

difference.”

But would it make a difference? I wondered. How could a letter

accomplish what the very thought of inhaling a green refrigerant

could not?

I called one of my younger nephews Sunday and asked him if he was

aware that teenagers were abusing Freon. He said that he was, that

kids at his school had been doing it for years.

“Why didn’t you ever say anything about it?” I demanded.

“Because you never asked,” he replied.

I swallowed the comment that immediately sprang to my tongue,

which was that I had never asked him if his friends were chewing on

power lines either. Instead, I asked him if he had ever inhaled Freon

himself.

“Of course not,” he replied angrily. “Do you think I’m stupid?

When you ask me questions like that, you make me feel like you don’t

trust me.”

I thought about the importance of feeling trusted, and then I

thought about Jared and Pearl. And I told my nephew that I didn’t

give a flying hoot if he felt like I didn’t trust him, and that if my

questions upset him, he had better start getting used to it.

* DAVID SILVA is a Times Community News editor. Reach him at (909)

484-7019, or by e-mail at [email protected].