David Davis' search for a baseball and more

Our favorite Los Angeles writer about sports has a poignant story up at SBNation — "a lovely, lovely piece," says a friend via email — that on the surface is about the missing home run ball off the bat of Kirk Gibson that famously won a big game the last time the Dodgers were in the World Series. But like the best sports stories, it's really about life. Davis had tickets to be sitting in the same section of the right field pavilion at Dodger Stadium where Gibson's sky ball came down. Instead, he was in New Orleans with his mother. Two years earlier, his sister had killed herself. A sample of the story:

My sister and I were two years apart and very close. The one difference was that Margot appeared to have won the genetic lottery. She had long black hair that she parted in the middle, and played a mean game of basketball (and field hockey and lacrosse). She was pretty and smart.

Mental illness is none of those. It is wicked and merciless. It preyed on my sister until, on the morning she was scheduled to enter a facility for treatment, she ended her life. She would have turned 26 the following week.

I was 24 and living in a strange city far from my family. Here's a news flash: I was unhinged for a while. I drank to forget everything and drank to remember every detail. I ingested a variety of illegal substances that numbed the mind. I slept 12 hours a day, but was always exhausted. When people spoke to me, their words sounded like they were coming from underwater.

I didn't recover so much as endure, one step forward to three staggers backward. I read everything I could in a futile attempt to comprehend her death, from "When Bad Things Happen to Good People" to Emile Durkheim's classic, groundbreaking treatise on suicide. I memorized the so-called five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.

"Stages" implies a beginning and an end. Grief after suicide — and, I imagine, after other types of death — does not parse so neatly. A year passed, then more, and the pain didn't diminish. What I was left with was unrelenting sadness and a slew of unanswerable questions: Why? How did we not see her extreme agony?

In the spring of 1988, I found myself living in Echo Park, a rough-and-tumble neighborhood in northeast Los Angeles that was years from hipster gentrification. I could walk from my rental to Dodger Stadium in about 10 minutes....

Go read the whole thing.

Davis has previously written for LA Observed and is the author most recently of "Showdown at Shepherd's Bush: The 1908 Olympic Marathon and the Three Runners Who Launched a Sporting Craze."