Early Tuesday morning, in his bedroom in his Admiral’s Hill townhouse, a good friend for many years who made Chelsea his home since the early 1980s, picked up the telephone and called the police station.
“There’s a medical emergency at [such and such address] on Admiral’s Hill. You’d better send an ambulance,” he said.
At that point, he put down the telephone, walked over to his bed and ended his life.
The ensuing scene on Admiral’s Hill startled many of those watching it unfold.
First the Chelsea Police arrived and secured the townhouse and made sure it wasn’t a homicide. Next came the State Police, who have jurisdiction on these types of scenes and then the ambulance people came to remove our friend’s body – but not before his daughter and immediate family came by to identify him.
Those of us who knew him for more than 25 years were shocked that he took his own life. We knew he was a complex guy who had been there and back in his life, but none of us expected the worst.
He did leave a note – but we weren’t privy to it, and frankly, the note was for his family.
We write this, not to highlight the dismal end to this good man’s life, but rather, to recall him as the man we knew for almost three decades.
In his prime, he loved the party and the bustle of being in business and he was an athlete, a better than good hockey player at Boston College, a tall, lean man who was always spit and polish about how he looked.
He loved fast, expensive cars. He loved playing 18 holes on a nice course. He enjoyed good food. He liked the nicer things in life and tasted a bit of all of them.
Like many of us who went broke during the go-go 1980s, he suffered some financial setbacks, but he came back and he prospered. And he loved and took care of his children, who loved him.
The past few years he had been battling the stuff that comes from being in your 60s, from being a former athlete who was almost always in pain with some type of new injury.
When those of us who knew him so well think about him today, we recall that he wasn’t always happy and carefree. There was a side to him that was serious and almost unhappy, and that the unhappy side probably overshadowed the happy side.
Now, just like that, with the snap of a finger, our friend is gone.
We’re sorry he left so suddenly and that he didn’t come to us for help. There were many people living on the hill who would have jumped out of bed at 2 a.m. to give him a hand.
The sad ending he chose was not what this man was all about.
He was all about being one of the guys. He was a man’s man. He struggled with personal pain. At one point last week, he was done with it all.
The townhouse lays empty now. The police and ambulances were gone in two hours from his townhouse on the hill.
All is quiet again for a longtime friend who left without saying goodbye.
