Shane Hulstyn
September 23, 1992 ~ March 31, 2023
We were somewhere in Utah when the gas began to run out. It was almost noon, and we still had hundreds of miles to go. It was April 13, and Shane had died 14 days before in Denver, where he had been living for the past two years with his dog, Thompson.
Shane’s ashes were in a biodegradable canister in a hiking backpack in the van, an accusation and a monument to our despair. None of us had the emotional bandwidth to think of practical needs like drinking water, let alone filling a 20-foot camper van with gasoline. We had three sleeping bags, four pillows, two lanterns, a kettle, various sizes of Tupperware, and forks and knives, none of them the same, and a stuffed animal chinchilla named “Cracklin’ Rosie” who we had adopted as our mascot. All of this had been rounded up the day before in a frenzy of gear-fueled grief. Nothing mattered anymore, so we might as well buy a $200 sleeping bag, firewood, and a camping pillow covered in mushrooms.
We were about 30 miles outside of Moab when it occurred to us that we might not make it to our next stop. I had just emerged from a 40-minute stare out the window, listening to the wind blowing through the fan in the top of the van. We were tracing the itinerary of a trip we were supposed to have been taking on those very days with Shane, and we were now scattering his ashes in Arches and Zion, places he was supposed to have walked on his own two feet. I asked Ryan how much gas we had left in the tank. Two carrots. Maybe 60 miles on the top end. A quick search revealed that the closest gas station was 80 miles to the West. Before we lost cell service, we routed ourselves to Emery, UT, putting all our hopes into a fill-up station called “Randy’s” in the middle of nowhere. It was our last chance, and as we took the detour into the desert, we turned off the music and started to sweat.
*
When we could physically stand it, we had been listening to the music that Shane loved, especially Ramshackle Glory, an anarchist punk band, and their lead singer, Pat the Bunny. Maybe it’s just the grief talking, but his voice sounds a bit like Shane’s. He sings movingly about addiction, alcoholism, depression, anti-capitalism, and how hard it is to be sober.
I always wanted to die young.
Now I feel younger every day
And I just hope I die younger than I am.
The song “Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of Your Fist” from the album Live the Dream was something of an anthem for Shane. During lockdown in 2020, he sketched out drawings and typed out lyrics from the album into a sort of make-shift coloring booklet.
Your heart is a muscle the size of your fist
Keep on loving, keep on fighting
And hold on
Hold on for your life.
Two days prior, Emma, Shane’s girlfriend, had tattooed his anatomical sketch of a heart from the booklet and the lyrics onto us: “hold on for your life,” the banner stretched across our three arms.
It should be noted that Shane also liked songs that are not considered anarchist folk punk, like Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers’ “Islands in the Stream” and Men without Hats’ “The Safety Dance.” We made the mistake of including the full range of his musical preferences during his water cremation ceremony; it’s hard to evoke the sheer and bottomless despair of mourning your brother’s body and listening to “I Got My Eye on You,” a song he once danced to like a chicken. I think in some alternate universe, Shane might have thought this was funny. Right then, I could only think of how mad he would be to have left all of us behind. Surrounded by family and the people closest to him, we shepherded his body at the end of this form, holding his tattooed hands, twisting his hair, kissing his handsome face. We stood there as his casket was loaded into the tank. We were touched that his playlist would play through the night.
Shane was a loyal and fierce friend. Sometimes unaccountably fierce. “If you fuck with my friends, you fuck with me,” he liked to say. And most of the time no one was “fucking” with his friends, anyway. He would swoop into a group and quickly become the center of gravity. We wish he knew what a gift that was, how we envied the ease with which he connected to other people, saw them, and showed himself to them. It just about killed him to lose many of his friends to overdose and to suicide, and he mourned these lost lives for the remainder of his. He merged with the suffering of the world and carried other people’s pain right up against his chest. This connected him deeply to other people, and he wanted to help take that pain away. Oftentimes, he did.
It makes sense, because when Shane was excited and would talk to you, it was like being flooded with light. Everything became exciting in turn, like you knew you should go to sleep, but you didn’t want to turn away. At his best, he was like this as a friend, a boyfriend, a son, a brother, a cousin, a nephew, a grandson, and an uncle. Dying so young, he is survived by so many who loved him.
A shock of blonde hair announced Shane’s presence as a baby. He grew into a tornado of a kid, a ball of unstoppable energy. He started eating a lot of buffalo wings and singed his taste buds with hot sauce. His eyes would flicker mischievously when he knew he was pushing your buttons and it was working. At some point, he developed a “fang” character: two fingers that would hop on the table and pierce you with their venom. There were different “fang” subtypes, a whole taxonomy of fang. It was mostly deployed to torture Katie. It is superfluous to say that he was extremely funny. Emma says she had never met anyone like Shane before. Neither have we.
Of the four of us siblings, he was the most authentic, the loudest, and had the most tattoos: a spiderweb on his elbow, a corkscrew, a bird of paradise, a gumball machine with a hot dog in it, a guy holding a hot dog. He loved hot dogs and somehow adopted them as a way of life. He brought so much comedy to the seriousness and the sleepy bureaucracy that characterizes most things in life; some years ago, he inscribed a copy of The Day my Butt went Psycho, a book for middle schoolers of questionable literary value, to Matt, his brother-in-law: “This reminds me of the time my butt went psycho. Love, Shane.” When the darkness is too much to handle, we try to think of these moments, try to look at videos of him dancing at weddings with Hadley and dinners with Emma, ice-skating in a blizzard with Ryan, thumping Thompson’s sides at Katie’s apartment as Thompson furiously wags his tail. And laughing. So often, Shane was laughing.
*
By the blessing of Cracklin’ Rosie, the van heaved into Emery (population 300) on fumes. The van had long since stopped giving us updates and reminders to fill up. We were a lost cause. We sighed a relief as we filled up the tank and then looked around as the adrenaline wore off and the real problem came back into focus. “Nobody had learned anything—or at least nothing new.” Our brother was gone, and we would never be the same again.
It’s unfair that it’s us and not him telling his story. I’m sure we’ve gotten it wrong in some places, or that he might tell it differently. To quote Shane’s favorite author, Hunter S. Thompson, from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which I’ve been (not-so-subtly) ripping off in writing this, “History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of ‘history’ it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.” If you have loved someone who’s struggled against the demon of addiction, you know too well the desperation of trying to figure out what happened, the constant attempt to decide what it all meant.
Shane’s unique, singular life hurtled headlong into the crosshairs of the twin threats of the opiate and mental health crises that continue to take more and more of our generation. (It should be stressed that he also happened to hurtle into the office of the world’s most wonderful therapist, Jess Quick, who is an honest-to-God national treasure, a true friend, and who has delivered us so much love in the face of all this.) The record in the player, the laundry in the wash, the Narcan sitting on his coffee table together are, to quote Mary Oliver, a box full of darkness; they are painful evidence that his death was a mistake. At the same time, they are a gift. He didn’t want to go.
We don’t know what it all meant, but we know that we want Shane to be remembered not for the way he died, but for the life we know that he wanted for himself. He wanted to be sober; he wanted to write a book; he wanted to camp and sleep under the stars; he wanted to be a part of his family; he wanted to be a good partner; he wanted to take care of his dog; he wanted to love himself. If you look at the photo of him smiling, we hope you can see him as we do, in a parallel life, in another possible history, embracing the sense of victory over the Past and Evil. His energy would simply prevail. He had all the momentum; he was riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave…
We humbly ask that you keep Shane alive in your hearts when you laugh hard, read a moving poem, listen to a great record, or maybe when you eat a hot dog, like we did at the last gas station on the last stop before the end of the van trip, facing down the terrifying prospect of the rest of our lives without him.
Donations
In lieu of flowers, we ask that you consider making a donation to the Harm Reduction Action Center that does amazing work to help the people of Colorado who do drugs create a healthier future for themselves.
Harm Reduction Action Center Donation Link
Shane’s Playlist
We invite Shane’s family and friends to join us for a celebration of life in Rhode Island, where Shane grew up.
Celebration of Life
Thursday, June 15, 2023
5:30pm – 8:30pm
Kinney Bungalow
505 Point Judith Road
Narragansett, Rhode Island 02882