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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.

Your comments have meant so much to me, and I plan to return every single one of them. My reaction time isn’t quite there yet, but please know how much you and your words mean to me. I love you guys.

Filed under: Daily, Family, Home, Life, Memories, Mental [In]Stability

22 Comments |

02.01.10

In Memories

His lashes were so long, like a halo over his big, chocolate brown eyes. We spent so much time together as kids; one of my earliest memories is watching on as he punched his fists into his first birthday cake, his eyes widening to the size of dinner plates when he saw his cake obliterate, bits of sweet pieces flying to a splat on the kitchen linoleum.

I was 5, maybe 6. I don’t know. My childhood remains behind a lock and key in the darkest recesses of my brain; tiny memories seep out occasionally like ghosts that float behind me but disappear when I whirl around to confront them. Jacob, though, was a golden ray of sunshine in memories I will forth with all my might, so that I can sit still, my eyes squeezed shut, remembering his eyes, his smile, his shy silence as he contented to observe rather than babble with childlike inanity. When he spoke or smiled or rested his deep eyes on you, it felt like a surprise gift, one wrapped in metallic, glinting in sunlight, and topped with a beautiful, huge bow, a present you wanted to hold and look at, appreciate and soak in, before opening it slowly and carefully so as to prolong the feeling of a soaring heart.

“Sayce,” he called me, while I pretended he was my little brother, that his beautiful mother was my own, that we were the happiest family in the world.

I can’t help but wonder what the hotel maid saw when she opened the door, expecting an empty room that matched the silence rushing out into the hallway, in flight from the air in which each particle was trapped as he lay in wait. Was there a lot of blood? Were his eyes open? Did she register subconsciously how beautiful they were in spite of the contrasted horror he inflicted upon himself? Or did she double over, gagging, as she contemplated the scene before fleeing to alert someone? Did she feel the intensity of the scene inside before she opened the door? Did her breath catch as she felt the pain radiate from his body, the unspoken words, the tears shed as he gathered the courage to put the gun to his temple?

I think of the cleaning person, no doubt marked for life having seen something so ugly. I imagine her swallowing fear before she enters every room in the future, of her pressing forward because she has a family to feed, children to raise.

What did she see in his eyes? Sorrow? Pain? Or a blank nothingness?

She was a casualty too.

***

I was in class, bored, when I reached down to my phone for the time. I daydreamed of sleep, of washing my hands of another monotonous day. Instead I saw two missed calls from my cousins – my girls – who had both left voicemails. I calculated the time in Michigan. Two calls, two voicemails, it’s late…something was very wrong. We’re unbelievably close, but we text or facebook each other, not call. “I gotta go,” I said to my friend as he looked up in surprise. “Something happened. Can I email you for the notes?” I didn’t wait for an answer. Instead I ran through the pelting rain across the wet parking lot to my car. I wanted to be sitting down. I wanted to be enclosed. I didn’t want anyone to hear the wail, the scream, I knew was coming.

Have you ever heard a 14 or 12-year old try to say, while choking on her tears and gasps for air, “He shot himself, he’s dead” before falling into a hole of silence? What can you say to that? I groped blindly for words, I shoved aside my own feelings so I could help manage theirs. They had been incredibly close to Jacob their entire lives; I knew whose pain needed soothing, and it wasn’t mine. I had memories of times long ago, a few recent-ish facebook messages. Their whole lives were intertwined.

I said frustratingly little, my words hollow. My adrenaline didn’t know what to do, where to go, so it chased its tail around and around and around in what would end up being a continuous, neverending circle.

It hasn’t stopped chasing itself yet.

**

I have to take my time writing this; it’s hard and painful. I don’t want to prolong the purging of my thoughts, but it’s too much to do in one sitting, this stream of ugly consciousness, but I want to get some of it out in the open. Please forgive the fact I need to continue this in manageable chunks. I changed his name. I want to keep him close, if that makes sense.

Filed under: Daily, Family, Home, Life, Memories, Mental [In]Stability

26 Comments |

01.28.10

Numb

I’m still reeling from my cousin’ssuicide last week and the trip home for his funeral. I’m processing and not in a very great place, but I’m organizing my thoughts so I can write through them and hopefully pull myself up from this funk.

I’ll be back this weekend. I hope you don’t stop reading because I’ve not posted in a bit.

xo

Filed under: Family, Home, Life, Mental [In]Stability, Thinking

19 Comments |

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All material copyright 2005-2010 by Jürgen Nation, unless otherwise noted, and all names have been changed unless they haven't. My photos are copyrighted with the U.S. Copyright Office and under U.S. laws. Take them at your own risk, because I. WILL. FIND YOU. And we will fight. Plagiarism will be detected as well as the illegal use of images. Just don't. If you want to use one, JUST ASK.