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02.05.10
In Memories, In Finality
I struggled with my words, tripping and slamming into walls. “You know he loved you, right? And that in doing what he did the last thing he wanted was to hurt you?” She nodded yes, my youngest cousin with whom I’m closest, her lower eyelids barely preventing waterfalls of tears. I don’t know the right things to say. I’m struck by the disconcerting fact I cannot articulate anything I feel – everything is just a color, a feeling, a hybrid of the two, names of feelings for which the English language is woefully inadequate. I feel grey and red and cornflower blue. Muted, while frenzied at my core. I’m a fraud, I thought to myself. And I repeated that in my head over and over and over again.
I’m a fraud.
How can I be in the funeral room and stand among the grieving when I have attempted suicide, to get out of my smothering, exhausting life? It makes me feel fake somehow to grieve, like I’m the devil’s advocate for committing suicide. That my past actions have somehow exempted me from grieving for loved ones who made that choice for themselves.
“Maybe he just honestly felt so depressed that he thought he was doing the right thing for everyone by leaving,” I offered hesitantly, stumbling yet again as words fell out of my mouth.
Fraud. I’m cribbing from my own handbook.
**
The more I fretted that I was a fraud in there, the more I felt it seep into my bone marrow – it should have been me, not him. Not someone who brought so much joy to so many people, who was young enough where he could do anything he wanted.
Being suicidal is a bit like an addiction in that you may recover completely, but you’ll always be a part of that group, you’ll always remember, you’ll never be immune to thoughts in the future, of what They call “ideation.”
It strikes me that I’m an honorary member of many clubs in which I’d rather not have membership. It’s like making a political donation. You give something once and they fucking follow you everywhere, forever relentless in their reminders that there are things larger than you, things more important. Don’t forget me, the fliers shout through printed, carefully chosen language.
Suicide is similar in its insistence, just less articulate.
How am I not a fraud when I (sometimes?) view suicide differently than others, when, for me, it really was the best option to stop the daily struggle to maintain myself? That I, when thinking those thoughts, considered it brave and courageous to make such a decision – it’s not an easy action to carry out. But I’ve been on the other side of suicide before, too. I have grieved, cried, tormented myself with guilty thoughts that I could have done something if I’d been given the chance. I *was* given the chance once, when I was 18 and my close friend and college dorm suitemate dropped by my room one night for no apparent reason. I was studying, my back to the door. “Hey,” she said from the doorway, “what’re you doing?” “Studying,” I replied, likely cursing our shared math class and the TA who taught us.
And I never fucking turned around.
I never turned my head or body to look at her. Her voice was normal; I’m a pretty good detector of sadness and pain and I didn’t hear anything to suggest she was in a state. FAIL. I either did not sense it or I ignored it stupidly, but I didn’t smell the stink of her determination to end her life when she closed the door behind her. FAIL.
I never looked at her.
Fail.
I’ll never know whether she had tears streaking down her face, experiencing her pain by expressions and not vocally. I’ll never know if I could have prevented her suicide by inviting her in companionably, closing my book to watch a movie or go on a Sour Patch Kids run together. I will never know, because I never bothered to look.
It haunts me. I was given the chance and I failed.
A friend later dropped by after I had given up my valiant attempt to study. We watched stand-up comedy and clutched our stomachs with laughter as Jessica worked out the details. We were laughing when she knotted her sash and kicked the chair out from under her feet. It seems that such intent should be detectable somehow. Instead, she died hanging from our bathroom door, willing herself for long, painful minutes to stop fighting for breath as she suffocated.
I could have stopped it, at least for the night. I might have helped her live another day. Would it have made a difference? I don’t know.
But I was given the chance and I failed.
**
I was in the bathroom, my head in my hands, talking to Boyfriend. “I need to come home,” I said shakily, internally picking up on a curious buzzing feeling of uselessness. I was being molested by unwelcome, unanticipated thoughts that made my skin crawl with revulsion and my stomach in anxiety. I knew they were wrong and invading a space entirely my own, a space that was supposed to be free and safe, but a strange, soothing feeling washed over me, quieting my worries. Ephiphanies are epiphanies, regardless of whether they’re so-called healthy or not. And mine were not at all helpful or healthy as I sat there anxiously in the funeral home bathroom.
But no one could argue I didn’t have a point, that, while my thought may be stupid and unhealthy and NOT an option, my supporting thesis claim was not inaccurate.
It consumes me and yet remains unspeakable. But I feel the buzzing. I cannot say it out loud, but there’s a dais and microphone on the stage of my brain. It is embarrassing to me that I am part of something unspeakable or distateful in a her life. I have failed her, the voice booms, echoing through my brain’s auditorium. I must die now.
**
I didn’t leave Michigan early. This trip home wasn’t about me and it had never been about me. It was about Jacob, about family, about providing strength if I could. It was simply about being there, to experience in rapid, flashing memories of his life. To sop up the love and being-ness of certain members of my family.
It’s not about me, I keep reminding myself. What can I take from it, what can I give back? The morning air trembled with moisture as I exited the final church service quietly, a bit early so as to surround myself with quiet, to avoid the heaviness of saying goodbyes to my cousins, however temporary it may be. I went through the motions of returning my rental car, checking my baggage and presenting my boarding pass under a translucent veil of solemnity and quietude, and my plane cleaved through the grey sky as it transported me back to California, back to life. I wished for a thunderstorm, for turbulence to rock the plane, just so I could feel something. Wrong of me, really, but I was numb and I needed to be reminded of feeling, of life.
I got my feeling back when I walked toward Boyfriend, tears slipping free and trailing down my face toward my heart, and into his arms.
I wish for nothing more fervently than for Jacob to have reminded himself that he was forgetting how to feel, that the end to his numbness was not his life, but on the other side of a hug. And while I don’t necessarily believe in any sort of afterlife, I do hope he was there in spirit to understand how much he was loved, how much he’d be missed. It would have shocked the hell out of him. I can imagine his shy blush as realization flooded him. And he’d have joked and averted his eyes shyly to the ground, but he would have known.
And I hope he does. The pain may have been unbearable, but there is always a way out other than death. It may come in flashes or intermittently, but it’s there long enough to prove that life is more than pain and discontent. It’s about feeling, and he forgot.
Some of us forget to remember. And so life comes grinding to a pause and dark comes too soon.
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