The Power of Words. Bob Kerr: This journal tells of a man's life never understood

4/9/97
This journal tells of a man's life never understood

By BOB KERR
Journal-Bulletin columnist

        John Cinquegrana kept a journal. He filled 30 notebooks, maybe more, with poetry and wonderful drawings that showed his imagination and skill as an artist. And, as he neared the time last month when he would walk onto railroad tracks in North Kingstown and wait for a train to take his life, he wrote more and more about losing the things that made him who he was.
        "I miss myself," he once wrote.
        And:
        "The lies become the truth."
        "The lies sit upon my soul like a cancer."
        John's younger brothers, Rob and Marc, want to publish the journal. They want to show the promise and misery that made John's life such a sad, maddening mix of competing forces.
        They also want to reveal the dark, ugly secret that is in those pages and which, they know, is what really killed their brother.
        "Everybody in the state read the paper," says Marc. "They read that somebody got hit by a train. I want them to understand why."
        They have no doubt that their brother died because he had been sexually abused when he was very young, by someone close to him, and he never came to terms with it.
        It is in the journal. John talked about it with his brothers. They would urge him to deal with it. He would say he had already done so.
        Marc and Rob, their cousin Lynn Rodolewicz and their friend Paul Rayta sit around a table at an aunt's house in West Warwick. The notebooks are stacked in front of them. They read them and put things together. They remember John. They remember how he loved the singer Annie Lennox and funny movies, and how he was the "class devil" at Narragansett High and had tons of friends.
        "Me and him were athletic," says Marc, pointing across the table at Rob. "My brother was artistic. I remember he made his own Christmas cards."
        Marc and Rob say everything changed in their brother's life when their father remarried, in 1989. John went to the wedding, came home and said he shouldn't have gone.
        He saw the person who abused him there, they think, and it triggered memories long suppressed.
        After that he would take showers over and over, never feeling he was really clean. He drank water until it made him ill. He would say he smelled like smoke.
        There were suicide attempts. John was in and out of hospitals. In 1995, he said he felt he was possessed by demons. He went to Massachusetts for an exorcism.
        On March 18, he walked onto the tracks in North Kingstown and stopped. The engineer of the Washington-bound train sounded the horn but, he later said, John didn't move. The train couldn't be brought to a full stop for another mile. The speed limit on that stretch of track is 110 mph.
        John David Bartholomew Cinquegrana was 29.
        A few days later, Marc Cinquegrana went to the site and brought back a stone. He says the stone is reality.
        Lynn Rodolewicz went to the site and erected a small cross.
        John had left a note next to the sink at his home, in Narragansett. It was read at his funeral.
        "I have become but a shell, an apparition of my very self," he wrote.
        "I cannot stay here anymore.
        "I love you all. Love eternal. John."
        Rob picks up a book called Light in the Darkness. It's for "survivors and healers" of child abuse. It points out that 15,000 male victims of abuse commit suicide every year.
        Rob says he feels he's been "robbed" of his brother. He and Marc want to talk to people about what happened - maybe help others to avoid the mistakes their family made in not admitting that John was in terrible trouble.
        Rob can be reached at 274-0529.
        Marc can be reached at 783-1168.

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