I need to talk about something bad and I don't have anywhere else to put it.

Casey's dead. My mentor and friend from school. He took his own life while being held in a cell after federal park authorities arrested him because he was in a park after dark, looking for his lost dog. He had schizophrenia, perceived the police in a state of psychosis, and led them on a low speed chase that ended with him being tased a half dozen times and imprisoned in solitary confinement. The whole story is so much more than that and so much more awful than I could possibly imagine. I almost can't describe it here. It's so unfair and heartbreaking and fucking god, so painful. I know that the type of schizophrenia he had was almost universally fatal - usually because of suicide, but I'd also always worried about police, especially with his habit of roaming around the woods. It sounds like those two things combined. Everything about the justice system failed him. 

I just started to type out a bunch of nice memories about him, particularly from before he was sick, but I just feel so empty and sad and miserable. I can't make the words come up. I could tell you about how the orange mountain lilies in my yard are from old farm sites in the National Forest adjacent to his farm that we dug up together one muddy April, 15 years ago, or driving around in his old truck with beers balanced, his funny story about grabbing the wasps and pretending they didn't sting him, how in the many times that we were traveling solo together for poetry readings or panels, he never once made a pass at me or was anything but platonic and deeply kind, despite the "older professor and young ingenuine" stereotype that was almost sickeningly commonplace, or when I couldn't write my grad school submission letter so he wrote it for me and then made me read the part where he'd said "she has all the flaws of any 21-year-old" which hurt my feelings but was so funny and true in hindsight, or later, much later, drinking fancy beers in breweries after readings and him paying with his book money, insisting on splitting it with me like I'd done anything,  god, his books, he signed every single one of them for me with different messages ranging from "to the white witch of Staunton" to "if this book was the future, then I walked where you used to live," going to Hatteras all together on vacation in 2016 and Sven and Apple playing, stupid Sven rolling in some dead dolphin and the way he laughed it off even though it was a huge mess, he was like a fucking father figure to me and he shouldn't have had to fucking die like that. I'm just so, so, so sad.