light outside the wolf: words after mum's suicide: boom: part 1 of 3
the phone call
the phone call haunts me. the one she made to me the night before she killed herself. the call i screened from mum. and you know the reason i screened it? i didn’t feel like it. i just didn't feel like talking. she made me tired, she wasn’t getting better. i was walking down newbury street in boston, walking to the train from work. i picked up my buzzing phone, saw it was mum calling and put it back in my bag. i put the phone in my bag, and i walked into the public garden thinking, i’ll talk to her tomorrow. i just wanted to look at the dawn redwood, my favorite tree in the park and be quiet. the next day, she was gone.
--
i thought twice about it. once i got home from work that day, i tried to call her back but she didn’t pick up.
and i think it was on purpose.
i think she knew she might lose her nerve.
she’d already tried to die twice before. she wanted this time to work.
other calls
there was a second significant phone call during that time period. that was the phone call i made to my dad, after seeing he had made many phone calls to me the morning of march 16. the morning after the evening that mum had called me and i'd screened her.
the morning of march 16, i was pulling into south station on the red line in boston, about to go to the new harpoon brewery hall with my then-boyfriend-now-husband dan and a bunch of his family members. we were sitting together on the train when i picked up my phone to look at the time and saw multiple messages and missed calls from dad. i was filled with that icy cold, the one that accompanies the primal knowledge that something very wrong is amiss. that somewhere, there is a wolf lurking in the meadow. the train squealed along the rails as we braked into the station.
i called my dad back then and he said, "i’m sorry to tell you this, but your mother killed herself last night." i asked him if he was joking.
it would have been a terrible joke, one only krusty the clown would attempt. my dad told me he wasn’t joking, and i told him i had to go.
i whispered to dan what had happened. we walked off the train, and there was the normal whirling madness and mess of bodies cramming and wedging – suitcases swinging, high heels pumping, and faceless hurrying that comes with every train disembarkment. a couple steps off the train, i collapsed like a woman in a war photo, a legless rag melting into dan’s arms. i saw his sister tanya skirt by us, her blue eyes wide, confused.
“tell them to please go, tell them to please go,” i cried into dan’s chest, referring to his family. it was all atrociously public. there were literally hundreds of people all around us. his family moved along, out of sight. the crowd settled and dan and i walked up a level of the station. i called my dad back and told him we would come over to his house in milton, south of boston. then, we took the train all the way back home rather than a cab, which was a good hour and a half ride watching the frozen river between charles mgh and kendall, and all the other stations slowly tick by. the plan was to pick dan’s car up and drive to my dad’s, so we could all be together. why we didn't take a cab, to this day, i still find unfathomable.
before i go a step further i need say this: we knew she was going to kill herself.
she'd already tried twice before. we were "waiting for the other shoe to drop" as one of my best friends put it.
but did that make it easy? did that make when it actually happened easy? "well you were prepared for it!"
no. it didn't, and we weren't prepared for it, because no one can prepare for that.
we knew it was going to happen, it seemed inevitable, and yet, when it happened, it was getting hit with a freight train. it was bottoming out. it was falling underwater and sinking, watching the surface get further and further away. it was like--boom.
how to explain?
how to explain "why did she do it?"
how does it all happen? how does a mind decide to die? and pillage me for daring to say decide. pillage me for any words you want, that’s your right, but these words and this story are mine. i’ve lived it and i’ll say it how it is for me and you can write yours because there’s room for it and we need it, dammit.
how does someone decide to die? how does someone pull the trigger, knot the rope, run the car etc.--how does someone opt out? how does someone leave this beautiful world, and how do they leave it when they are loved and precious to the ones who love them? how does someone fade away?
mum, who was occasionally aware that something was wrong "upstairs" said everything started when she went blind for a minute in college. but then it could have started when she had stomach surgery, and came so close to dying her last rites were read. family history, strange things mum said and the whole sequence of events are so foggy for me and so many details are massaged, masked, tweaked, neglected, filtered through so many people i don't know what to think but often, for me, i wonder if i was complicit. i wonder about whether or not it was the million little moments lost where mum's worries went unchallenged. if my years of just ignoring all the worries mum had, and going along with it, is what did it.
i will put it as simply as possible, but none if it is simple, i don't know everything, and i certainly never sat inside her soul: mum thought she was sick. she thought she had endless maladies--ms, als, lyme disease. she was on a crusade to prove it and get treatment for it, whatever the "it" was that month.
it didn't make any sense. she was the vision of health. she ran marathons, she went gluten free before it was a thing, doctors could find nothing wrong with her.
and yet.
she claimed tingling sensations, stinging, and above all, an incessant itch, among many other symptoms. during high school, like something out of clue, it was mum, in the family room, with the hairbrush. wielding a hairbrush, she would rake it back and forth across her skin, to stymy the constant itch.
the house began to smell permanently of ben gay, which mum rubbed on her skin. it was a cloying minty wave in the air that clung to the nostrils and made it hard to breathe.
for me, ben gay was the ultimate olfactory equalizer: steak, chicken, potatoes, artichokes – if mum was sitting at the kitchen table, and she’d lathered up in ben gay – well, that’s what your meal tasted like.
that was the era of mum thinking she had ms. like a restless missionary, mum walked from doctor to doctor, attempting to convince him or her of something that the doctors found no evidence of -- that her myelin sheath was unraveling.
for decades, she went to doctor's appointments, endless doctor's appointments, and tried to convince them that she was ill.
even as a teenager, I did not think she had ms. even in 1999 when she broke some doctor down, supposedly getting him to agree that she had ms, i didn’t believe it. after this moment, you'd have thought she won an olympic medal. and in a way, she had. she won validation and credibility through the diagnosis.
ms morphed into other diseases mum thought she had, and she would follow the same pattern, going to doctor's appointments, endless doctor's appointments to convince them of what she had and to insist on treatment.
this would become a dangerous, and then fatal, trend. mum stopped at nothing until she found a doctor to corroborate her baseless beliefs about her various illnesses—and unfortunately, there seemed to be enough charlatans out there willing to lie to mum because it was lucrative. mum was more than willing to go back to doctors who agreed with her diagnosis, even if there was no medical evidence to support it.
are you confused? me too. i still am. it was awful and absurd. a family member tells you they're sick, the first thing you're supposed to do is console them, support them, but here, comfort and support meant essentially being an accomplice to the madness. it makes me queasy to say now, that i did take that role of accomplice. for years, we kind of just let mum do mum. to argue with her, to say "ya, you're not really sick" would have caused world war III in our house, and so, i just let it be. years went by and it slowly just got worse and worse and by the time we woke up and realized we should probably intervene, and fight back "mum, you're 100% healthy, all this is bogus" she was gone. i would look for her, but she was gone.
i believe it would have gone on forever, this raging on and on for illnesses and diagnoses and treatments, but how do i know? all i know is she felt her life had become unlivable. she went all the way to india to get treated for an illness she didn't have, and when she found out the treatment didn't work, or perhaps that the treatment had never been all that legit to begin with, that was the last straw.
around the table
and so it was that we found ourselves bereft on march 16.
dan and I arrived at my dad’s house and some family members were already there. my cousin lisa came like an angel and brought my favorite beer, and I drank them with great gusto, hiccupping and swaying.
in fact, we all sat around my dad’s circular oak table and proceeded to get hideously drunk together. i would venture to say it’s what irish people do amidst great tragedies, at least, that's what my irish people do.
even the dogs knew something was amiss. una, my rhodesian ridgeback, had figured out something had happened, and she stayed by my side, the beautiful centurion. her portly sister abi had figured out something had happened and she was pleased that the something was allowing for extra food scraps.
we sat and we talked.
every now and then, there would be a lull in the conversation, and one of my aunties would say, “she’s such a fuckin’ bitch.” to mix it up, she would say, “she sucks.” and we’d nod our heads and agree. we knew what she meant. she meant fuck her for leaving, i love her so much, how could she leave goddammit? at that moment, we were shirking deference for the dead and it was our right.
at one point, after we were all grey, exhausted and molting like snakes in a state of intense dehydration, it became time for everyone to leave. so they did. my father was tanked and i shooed him to bed where he promptly fell asleep.
then, a half hour later, the doorbell rang, and an uncle walked in and we were at it once more, pouring glasses and cheers!-ing sadly. then came the only part of the day that i think back on and love, like a small white light in the darkness.
my dad, who has endless fomo, must have heard the doorbell and proceeded to crash out of bed, lumber slowly down the stairs, and stand in the doorway of the kitchen smiling widely as he saw my uncle. he seemed to have sort of forgotten what happened that day, and just stood there leggy and smiling like a heron with his boxers hiked up to his chest, happy to see my uncle, his friend, who he hadn't seen in a while. thinking of his boxers blowing a bit in the air and that smile, softens the blow of the rest of the day.
the eulogy and beyond
after mum died, there was all this movement, a flurry of activity, things to do.
i decided i wanted to do the eulogy.
the thought terrified me.
should i be honest? i wondered. should i tell people what happened? how to explain? (a question i have found myself asking over and over, along with other sets of questions, on repeat, like the endless rinse cycle). it would have been incredibly easy to lie to everyone and say she'd died of ms, als, lyme disease--any number of the maladies that most people thought she had. it would have been easy, and it would have closed the book on gossip or rumors.
i sat on the couch of my apartment with dan and wondered, what do i do?
i felt that if i lied, it would mean that i was ashamed of her. that what she had done was so shameful, i didn't want to claim it. i knew i didn't want that. but telling the truth was difficult too. then, i remembered, i'll be telling the truth at church, which made it even more tricky, suicide being something looked down upon and a sin or something. i waded through it all and made the decision to tell the truth.
i stood up at the altar of st. agatha's church, where the room was so full it was standing room only, my heart beating like a drum in my chest, my hands shaking with papers for a eulogy i knew was way too long and i told them the truth as delicately but as firmly as i could. i wanted these people to know. they had loved my mom and i wanted them to know the truth, and i was not ashamed of anything.
after i was done, suddenly, people started clapping. they stood up in their pews and clapped. this was not broadway, people, this was a church!
giving mum's eulogy was the most important thing i've ever done, and at the time, i thought it was the hardest thing i'd ever done. but i found out that the hardest thing i've ever done was yet to come. the hardest thing was facing a long life without mum, and facing a heart that was filled with guilt, sadness and self-loathing. the hardest thing was army crawling through the next five years, unpacking our relationship and memories and trying not to fall into a pit and stay there forever.