The phone call

Destiny McHale picked up the landline phone at about 11:30 a.m. on Sept. 16. 

“Hi, Matthew’s mom. Just checking on him. What’s going on? What’s happening?” 

“Yes ma’am. Matthew’s here with us. He’s in our care,” the nurse practitioner on the other line said. “Now he’s here with us in the ICU, and we are caring for him to try and get his blood pressure to come up.” 

“Yeah, okay, but he’s okay, right?” Destiny remembers asking over the phone from her cubicle in Tampa, Florida. “I mean, we can visit him?” 

“Ma’am, this is very, very, very, very serious.” 

Destiny asked if she needed to come to Indiana now. Yes, the nurse practitioner said. Destiny asked if her son would make it through the night. 

“He may not.” 

Destiny’s coworker drove her home in his truck. She called her daughter, Madeline McHale, after she was dropped off at her apartment. “Are you sitting down?” 

“Is this the call?” Madeline asked. 

*** 

Matthew McHale was born in Bloomington. He won his fifth-grade spelling bee by spelling “taciturn.” He loved Britney Spears. He made cherry pie for his sister when his mom was too sick to cook. He played football and basketball and tried little league baseball — it didn’t stick; too boring. He loved “The Office” and laughed so loudly his family had to press pause on the remote.  

He never let anyone bully his little sister. He put up a picture of his mother and sister on the wall of his jail cell. When he and Madeline made promises to each other, they would hook their pinkies and kiss their thumbs and say, “I brother-sister swear.” 

He was her first antagonist, Madeline said. But he was also her first best friend. When a girl at the bus stop made fun of Madeline’s hair before picture day, he marched straight to her house after school and knocked on the door, asking for the girl’s father. 

“I just wanted to let you know that your daughter was being mean to my sister,” Madeline recalls him saying. 

He was lionhearted, Destiny said, smart and brave and fiercely loyal. If drugs had never been present in his life, she always thought he would be a comedian.  

In 2013, Madeline found Matthew, in his early twenties at the time, slumped over in the bathroom in their family’s home in Kansas after using methamphetamine. She remembers slapping him to try and get him to wake up. Destiny said Matthew had been to behavioral health facilities and a rehabilitation center, but he continued to hide his substance use. 

In 2014, Matthew moved back to Bloomington and started working at Five Guys and other quick-service restaurant positions to sustain himself. Customers would come into the restaurant to see him, Destiny said, and his bosses loved him and made him team lead. But by 2021, he stopped working. 

“When the substance abuse came in, it derailed everything,” Destiny said. “Including the jobs. And he left some very good jobs, and he left some very good people that supported him in those jobs.” 

Once a month, he would check in with her, Destiny said. Then it became once every three months, and when it got to be once every nine months, Destiny started to call the Monroe County non-emergency line.  

“‘Oh, yeah, I know your son,’” she recalled the resource officers on the other line saying. “‘I talked to him three weeks ago,’ or ‘I put him in jail yesterday.’” 

The only lifeline Destiny started to have to Matthew was his friends, and it was always through Facebook Messenger or on somebody else’s phone. Whenever an 812 number would pop up, Destiny would answer right away. 

She didn’t know where he was eating or living. When he was incarcerated for trespassing or disorderly conduct, she sent him commissary money. She wanted him to have a six-dollar bag of ramen noodles; she wanted him to have briefs and shoes and slippers. 

Destiny came to visit Matthew in Bloomington in September 2024. 

“I was watching my adult son — who was supposed to play for Coach Bobby Knight, and who was supposed to host Saturday Night Live — dumpster dive,” Destiny said. “For whatever IU students are willing to throw away.” 

There are families that raised the men and women who live on the street, Destiny said. Families with visions for their future. 

“He was so smart, and so he could have graduated alongside all of the people that don’t look at him,” Destiny said. “He could have been right there with them on that beautiful campus.” 

*** 

After the phone call, Destiny flew to Indianapolis to see Matthew at the IU Health Methodist Hospital. When she entered the room, she had to hold on to the rail of the bed for balance so she wouldn’t fall down. 

Matthew had cut his radial artery punching through a window of a house on West Cottage Grove Avenue, which caused severe blood loss.  His family isn’t sure what exactly happened. At the hospital, he was intubated and hooked up to pumps and machines, Destiny said. 

“Come on, Matt. It’s not time. It’s not time. It’s not time yet,” Destiny remembers saying. “You got to come on now. You’ve got other things to do right now than this.” 

But she understood what she was seeing.  

Destiny stayed with him all through the night. She read him his favorite book, “Guess How Much I Love You.” She read “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” and parts of “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.” 

Madeline arrived at the hospital a few days later. She took a pair of wired headphones Matthew had gifted her and put one earbud in his ear and one in hers. She played “I Miss You” by blink-182, a song they used to listen to together on the school bus in middle and high school. 

She stood next to him and held onto his arm, which was completely black with necrosis, the death of body tissue. She told him it was okay to go. 

“‘I know you’re tired. I know life was not kind to you,’” Madeline told him. “I just remember him still breathing on the intubator. He was still warm. His heart thumped. He had a good heart. That was the organ that was not gonna ever fail, was his heart.” 

Matthew died at 4:28 a.m. Sept. 19, surrounded by his loved ones. 

*** 

Madeline went to Bloomington the next day to look for pieces of her brother. She visited the place he had been keeping some of his possessions, a community on the west side that people called “Tarp Town.” It was just tarps and lawn chairs in a circle, with no beds.  

She left with his checkered IU shirt and watch. On her way out, somebody asked, “Is Matt really dead?” 

“I just looked up, I looked at them, and I said, ‘Please call your family and go get clean.’” Madeline said. “I said, ‘Call somebody, and get help. Because you don’t want your family to see what I just saw.’”  

Matthew's family will remember him for how much he loved Bloomington. He told Madeline if he ever had a daughter, he would name her Indie, and her middle name would be Ana.  

They’ll remember him as the man who biked two miles to a gas station to help a woman after her car ran out of gas and the person who never forgot Madeline’s birthday. He would make sure his little sister got a call, even though he didn’t always have access to a phone. 

They will remember him for carving his nickname, “Chubbs,” into the top bunk of Cabin 11 at McCormick’s Creek State Park, where his family used to visit every summer. They’ll remember him as the class clown whose goal in life was to make everyone laugh. 

Madeline started a GoFundMe to help pay for Matthew’s funeral services, which has already raised over $5,000 as of Oct. 14. It’ll pay for a walnut urn and a weekend inurnment service in November. 

Madeline has been reciting her eulogy. She knows how she’s going to end it. She’ll say that she will remember him, that she won’t stop sharing his story. 

“I brother-sister swear.”