Chapter XII: The End
(August 2005 - October 2005)

"Note the many moral judgements that are necessary to make any diagnosis according to this definition: “actively defies�E “deliberately annoys�Eand so on. These are not deemed to be disease symptoms when a child does them to an intending kidnapper, or to the parents' political opponents at a demonstration, for example. These states of the child's brain become diseases only when a certain condition �Edisapproval �Eexists in the brain of another person �Ethe parent or other authority."
-Setting The World To Rights

Several months went by and only a few articles were posted to the "comedy" website. The "staff" of the site was spending most of their time fighting with each other and as usual Zion was skulking around behind the scenes hoping that someone else would take over to do all the work for him.

That was when the you-know-what hit the fan.

I hadn't talked to Zion in months and had even started ignoring the "comedy" website for the most part. I had noticed that the updates to the site had stopped almost completely and his current "staff" was about to implode in a vacuum of their own stupidity. I had also done a whois search on the domain name and knew that the current registartion was going to expire at the end of October. My hope was that Zion would forget about that perticular detail or that he wouldn't be able to find a way to pay for the registration which would result in the domain being shut down. When that happened my plan was to register the domain again for myself as soon as it was available so that I could put the guild website back online and begin the long process of rebuilding the guild again. Sadly, this was not to be.

One late night near the end of summer I was pondering going to bed when I got a phone call. That late at night I figured it had to be an emergency and I was correct. But I never would have expected the person reporting the emergency to be Zion's mother! She was worried about Zion and wanted to know if I had seen the letter he posted on the website. I had stopped watching the website and I was suprised she even knew it existed so I was taken totally off guard by this. I indicated that I hadn't seen any letter as far as I knew and asked what was going on. She said that Zion had posted a long letter on the "comedy" website claiming he was about to commit suicide THAT NIGHT. I was obviously shocked by this but was a bit confused as to why she was calling me about it. She explained that Zion wasn't anwsering his phone when she called and she didn't know anyone else who could get through to him. She wanted me to call and talk to him. I was reluctant being that I wasn't exactly trained to talk to people about to commit suicide, but she had a point. If Zion wouldn't anwser his phone for anyone else, he might anwser if I called. It was worth a try I supposed, so I agreed to try.

So I call Zion's cell phone not even expecing him to anwser. He does and the first thing out of his mouth is "why would YOU be calling me?" Probably not a good start.

I explain that his mother called me and was saying something about a letter which I hadn't read or even seen and she seemed to think he was going to kill himself, so she was understandably concerned about this. Zion confirmed that she had a point and he was indeed planning to kill himself that night. Not knowing how else to proceed, I asked why. And oh boy did Zion tell me. On and on and on the list went.

If you have read the entire story up to this point you probably can guess what most of his complaints were: All the problems he had at Amherst, the fight, the repeated trips to the mental hospital, the fact he couldn't hold down a job, his old girl friend getting the restraining order aginst him, most of his friends breaking off contact with him and so on. But what he said really broke the camel's back was what happened AFTER I had last spoken to him. He said that he had to break up with Ari because he just couldn't stand to be with her any longer. Apparently for some reason her parents had changed their minds about him again and now they were back to not liking him. In the past where Ari would defy her parents and continue to sneak off with Zion, this time she changed her tune and started ignoring him instead. She wouldn't talk to him when he called and she even stopped visiting the "comedy" website. Zion felt betrayed by her actions because it seemed like she was slowly breaking off contact with him like many of his other friends. And with everyone abandoning him like this he just didn't feel like he could go on anymore.

It surely seemed like Zion had put a lot of thought into this and I wasn't quite sure how to reply. I've heard of people who killed themselves for much less logical reasons. So I think I asked Zion if there wasn't anything he thought was worth living for or if he thought it would be worth trying to get his life back on track or something else lame like that. Somehow that question lead into a conversation about the old days and all the fun we had messing with people over the internet, playing pranks on our friends and disrupting the hell out of every class we had in every school we were sent to. Many funny stories were told and retold. The conversation went on for hours. For the first time in years Zion sounded like the person I thought I had known for most of my life.

Eventually we ran out of things to say to each other. I thought maybe I had atleast succeeded in cheering Zion up somewhat and I told him that if he wanted to talk to me again later he could call me. He thanked me for that but right before he hung up he said "Goodbye" in a way that sounded very, VERY final. That was the last time I ever talked to Zion.

Although it seemed at first that I had failed to talk him out of killing himself, I did atleast buy some more time. Somehow while we were talking someone else who knew where Zion was called Zion's parents and his parents sent the police over to get Zion. Unfortunately, history simply repeated itself once again and when the police found him they arrested him and took him directly to the mental hospital yet again. That made four trips to the mental hospital in less than a year.

And history continued to repeat itself. The mental hospital held Zion for approximately one month and then released him. Once relesed, the first thing Zion did was purchase some over the counter medicine at a pharmacy and then checked himself into a hotel room in a rather nasty part of Denver (Aurora). There he overdosed on the drugs and his body was eventually found in the hotel room.

Zion "The Book" Cao Cao was dead.

Go to Summary of Part I: What the hell happened to Zion?