light outside the wolf: words after mum's suicide: part 3: light

Last night as I was sleeping,
I dreamt—marvelous error!—
that I had a beehive
here inside my heart.
And the golden bees
were making white combs
and sweet honey
from my old failures.
--Antonio Machado

The world has kissed my soul with its pain, asking for its return in songs.
-Tagore

I've got some words and I cannot let them die in me.
-Macklemore

And I don't care if I sing off key
I found myself in a melody
I sing for love, I sing for me,
I shout it out like a bird set free.
-Sia

This my excavation
Today is Kumran.
-Bon Iver

a week after mum died, a bird shit on my head. i was walking down charles street in beacon hill and bam, it got me. 
i knew instantly it was mum, the ultimate prankster, even in the afterlife.
i laughed, and then i cried.
mum had spoken many times of getting shit on by a bird at her eighth grade graduation.
it had never happened to me in my entire life, and then, just a week after she died, there it was.
my mum's triplet laughed like a teakettle when i told her. "definitely mum," she said.
i think mum could see what was about to happen and she was trying to tell me--hey--don't take it so seriously. stay light.
i shrugged off the experience and, as you saw, got down to mourning, grieving, and slithering.
little things like this kept happening. marvels from the universe threw themselves at me. and during my mother's eulogy i had vowed that i would see her in all the beautiful things of my days--cardinals, which she loved, butterflies, rainbows.

the weekend after mum died, my dad sat at my aunt's house outside of boston eating lunch. he looked up as they ate, and through the window, he saw a lone monarch butterfly, its orange wings hinging and unhinging in the breeze. this was a frigid march in boston, and a butterfly with its tissue-paper wings was there, a spot of orange, floating by them.
“what the hell is he doing here?” he asked the room. but inside his heart, he knew it was mum. he told me. 

a couple weeks later, we brought mum’s ashes to bermuda, our treasured place, somewhere we'd gone nearly every year since i was a child. it was dad, dan and me, and we toasted mum over rum swizzles at the swizzle inn, and rode through the rain on mopeds to see our island friends at a happy hour near fairylands. we stayed at the hamilton princess and woke up each morning a bit hung over. we planned to get up early that thursday, and spread mum’s ashes in the sea at treasure bay, where over the years mum, me and multitudinous family members had collected beach glass together (recall the era of the beach glass arts and crafts project). hearing of her obsession with beach glass, years ago, our bermudian friends had given us directions to treasure bay. we had spent hours at this little stretch of beach over the years--tossing pieces of brown glass with disgust and whooping at the ever elusive red, blue and pottery pieces.
that thursday, with mum’s ashes in the bucket of dad’s moped seat, we went over the bridge, and pulled left into the beach parking lot. as we took off our helmets, dan said, “look!” and in the sky, far off, was a rainbow, the first and last we’d see on the trip. we all looked at each other, and we smiled.
the beach was empty at first. by regulation, if we wanted to toss someone’s ashes in the sea, we were supposed to do so a certain distance off the shore. we had no dingy, nor did we attempt to seek one. dad had brought mum in a bag and our plan was to empty the bag at the shore.
we walked to the lip of the water, and suddenly a few islanders appeared. 
“oh fuck,” i whispered to Dan. we looked very suspicious—three fools with a bag of gunpowder-like substance, looking around like hungry coyotes to make sure no one was on the beach.
the family walked up and spoke with us, and a pit formed in my throat. i just wanted it to be done. finally they meandered about, getting distracted as their small children astubbed their toes on the rocks and picked up shells and pottery. it was our chance.
i forget now who released mum to the sea—maybe some me, and some my dad. the ashes hung cloudy and obvious like an oil slick around the area we’d placed them in. 
“jesus christ, it’s not washing away,” I said to Dan, my eyes rolling in the back of my head. the tide flirted with the fog of submerged ashes, but only drew the shadow larger and more obvious. “do you think they’ll say anything?”
dan shook his head.
we watched the foggy water slowly merge with the rest of the sea. then we turned to walk back up to our mopeds.
“what brings you to this beach any way?” asked the father of the family that was hanging about the beach.
my dad answered, “well, we like to collect beach glass. our friends who live in fairylands told us long ago that treasure bay was the best place to do that, so we’ve been coming here for a decade now.”
the man looked at us and smiled kindly. he said, “that's so nice."
we nodded, ya it was.
"but this isn’t treasure bay,” the man said.
we were silent for a moment. 
“it isn’t?” i finally asked.
“oh no,” the guy said. “treasure bay is about fifty meters down the road.” dad, dan and I looked at one another and cackled with laughter. 
“that is so perfect,” i said.

the signs continued.
when my cousin got married outside of san antonio in october 2014, we saw monarch butterflies everywhere – outside the dodging duck brewery off route 46 in boerne, at 103 apple rock near jack nicklauss’s golf course cordillera, and palpitating at the site of the wedding ceremony. there, the butterflies sipped nectar happily on every available floral pocket.
blissfully and a little bored, my native-texan cousins said, “the monarchs are migrating now.” science aside, to me, it was mum everywhere, clasping and unclasping her orange snow-peppered hands, waving to all of us as my cousin cried white streaks down her beautiful face, taking her new husband’s hand at the altar.

we went to the big island of hawaii the year after mum died.
we flew in to kona and the next morning, we sat on our small deck, sipping coffee. amidst the bone chattering screech of the minah bird, the warbling of the wild turkey and the spooked shiverings of the mourning doves, i heard a sound i hadn’t expected. i heard the unmistakeable call of a cardinal – the puncturing chirp, the sound of a single coin dropping. i stopped, cocking my ears like a dog, and scanned the limbs of nearby trees. a flap of wings and a flurry of leaves revealed the flash of a red kerchief – a cardinal. i shook my head with disbelief.
“what’s wrong?” dan asked.
“nothing’s wrong," i said. "it's a cardinal," i whispered. and mum loved cardinals, i thought.
i vowed that i would not research if cardinals lived in hawaii. i didn’t want to know, and i still don’t want to know. i want this beautiful secret with the universe to remain untouched, like ruins in the forest. you followed me here, mum, i thought, feeling warm inside.
on the second day of our trip, we drove the rental car east towards hilo to visit the kīlauea caldera. after we’d seen it, the gaping hole, still smoking, its tendrils of grey like shepherds' crooks to the sky, we drove north to akaka falls, the waterfalls on the eastern side of the big island.
the path was slick to the falls – we fumbled on the wet railing and gingerly dipped our toes onto the steps as we walked. the banyan trees stood on their hallowed ground, their thick tendrils ropes unflinching and beckoning. the elephant ears nodded to us as we walked by. we marveled at katuna then ascended the steps toward akaka.
then, unmistakeable again, the drop of the coin. i stopped, threw my head up. 
in hawaii, by the falls, i stood facing the undulating carpet of green rainforest, focusing here, then there. finally, the flamed handkerchief fanned itself to the next branch. i raised my hand, hello.
“are you coming?” dan hollered from ahead on the slick ascent.
“yep!” i replied, and walked on, anointed.

i was taught in school that a writer’s enemy was sentimentality but now i think sometimes the moat we build around ourselves, protecting ourselves from sentimentality, can be a buffer around deeply feeling or believing. being sentimental, seeing the signs, exposes what's haunting us, what we’re carrying around deep in our marsupial pouch. facts – i don’t care about the facts when i see the monarchs migrating a year after my mum committed suicide. i don’t care if it’s science and "they do it every year on that date!". i don’t care if cardinals live in hawaii; i don't care if they're the cockroaches of the winged things there, they're so plentiful.
i care about the small living orange and black leaves flying through a channel that still exists from my mum to me.
i was hurting, i was wounded, i was bleeding out, but in those moments, i believed in magic. 

mum, and the beautiful world, they were calling to me, together to come back. they were throwing their hands on me and trying to yank me back from the edge of the pit.  i believe this.
but i needed time.

i missed her voice. i missed calling the milton town hall where she worked and hearing her pick up the phone and saying, “good afternoon, collectors office.” every single time.
i would give any of my organs, including my heart, to hear her say that today.

this annoyed people. indirectly. they couldn’t leave messages on my phone. my mailbox was full.
it was full of old voicemails from mum i couldn’t delete. filled with the sound of her voice. i wanted them. my favorite one she’s talking abut what sheets to buy my cousin for his wedding. it’s so normal. she goes on and on for ten minutes about what sheets to buy. 
it drove my dad crazy.
“sara, i tried to leave you a voicemail but your damn mailbox was full!”
“sara, have you ever thought of deleting your messages?”
“no," i would say. and i would leave it at that. maybe sometimes i explained. the thought of losing her voice, of never hearing her voice again, of it being lost like an echo in a canyon made me choke and sputter.
after years of this, my husband helped me figure out how to download them. it wasn’t very hard, but being able to free them up from my phone, as odd as it sounds, was progress.

but i was barely holding on.
dan and my friends and family told me it wasn't my fault. "mental illness is nobody's fault" they said. and part of me believed them--the part that was bobbing above the surface, shining in the sun. but another part of me didn't, the one scraping the bottom of the mucky pond. 
but i kept going. i got up every day and i went to work. i smiled to my bus driver, i filed expense reports, i breathed, i cried, i burned.

i had thought about it so many times--mum was in a thought warp that she couldn't get out of. she fell into a rut and it was so deeply grooved that she couldn't crawl her way back out.
it began to dawn on me that i was following in her footsteps. 
i was in the shower, hot water beating on my skin, and i realized this for the first time.
i thought about how upset mum would be if she saw me fall down the same well she did.
and the thought didn't cure me, but the thought stayed with me, following me like a perfume. huh, i thought. there's something to think about, i thought.

it came to me in other ways, this question, like a feather fluttering through an open window: so was this what life was going to be now?
i blinked.
really—was this what i had decided on forever? an endless roll of a boulder up the hill like prometheus, the pecking of my own self and the endless scourge? is that what i wanted? a gauntlet i both ran through and set up?
what?

i've wanted to write since i could remember, and mum was the first person to believe i could do it, the first person to believe in me. she submitted my work to contests. we would sit around the round table she used for puzzles, reading the rules and following them exactly for the submission. 

i wrote. i wrote and i wrote. i could've walked around the world on a carpet of pages ripped from my journals i wrote so much. the idea that, perhaps, i could take the raw words i had written in my journals about mum and transform them into something structured, cohesive, tapped at my window. perhaps you could memorialize her in this way, the voice behind the tapping said. it seemed so large, so terrifying, to write about something so raw, and painful, to really stare into it, to go deep, to face it. i picked up my treasured copy of anne lamott's guidebook for writers, bird by bird, and i came across these lines:

The great writers keep writing about the cold dark place within, the water under a frozen lake or the secluded, camouflaged hole  The light they shine on this hole, this pit, helps us cut away or step around the brush and brambles; then we can dance around the rim of the abyss, holler into it, measure it, throw rocks in it, and still not fall in.  It can no longer swallow us up.  And we can get on with things.

The water under a frozen lake...getting on with things, I thought. Dance around the rim of the abyss...and still not fall in. 
Yes, I thought.
Ok, I thought.
I will write myself out of the woods. I will write Mum's story. 
Somehow, I could take something back--maybe I could take some of my life back, maybe I could give some back to Mum. 
I committed. I began.

I thought of alchemy. I thought of the transmutation and the shape shifting. I thought of pain taken and turned into beauty, into love. What i mean to say is—I thought of my writing, and the alchemy of pain and words released from a cave inside. 

In 2016, I applied to the Colgate Writer's Conference, which was put on by my former coach and professor Matt Leone. I submitted an excerpt from what I had been writing about Mum, and I found myself traveling those 300 miles west to workshop it with a group. My workshop leader, the wonderful woman and writer Joni Tevis, and I sat, getting acquainted at Frank Dining Hall.
And she said something to me that perhaps a hundred people had said to me, but that I hadn't really heard, and wasn't ready to hear until that moment.
She said, "I think you should forgive yourself."
And I started to cry.
 

I was supposed to spend that week, when I wasn't workshopping my piece, rubbing elbows with other writers, or listening to talks--holed up in my room working on the piece about Mum. Implementing the feedback I'd gotten, polishing. But I kept getting called to the hills. I had squeezed my bike into my car for the trip and I kept being called to ride it, or run. The wild was calling me.
I was riding in the back roads and suddenly, a deer came into my vision just as this thought--the thought that Mum had the gift of life--was blooming inside of me. It had popped into my head out of nowhere.
I stopped on my bike.
The deer was standing amidst tall grass and white and purple wildflowers. When I stopped, she bobbed her head this way and that--a thin wildflower stood between us. She swiveled a large ear. Black flies walked on her face. She wiggled her wet nose, and suddenly she crashed through the brush, her red hair bounding away. The earth was silent and I felt blessed.

When my mother died, my aunt and uncle sent me a card with these words written on the front: Deep peace of the quiet earth to you, deep peace to you.
The earth kept inviting me to heal--it insisted on its harsh and raw beauty and that harsh beauty shocked and filled me. The peace of the quiet earth ran through my bones and allowed me to consider healing.

Forgiveness, my workshop leader had suggested. Forgiveness. I walked away from that week with memories of a wild deer looking into my heart, with pages and pages of feedback and only one word repeating over and over: Forgiveness.
I started to give myself permission to consider forgiving myself.
I didn't tell myself, "Hey, you didn't do anything wrong--you were perfect! Shake it off!"
No.
I started to accept that I had failed, that I had disappointed myself, that no, there wasn't a do-over for some of those moments--but that maybe I could consider forgiving myself. I considered that the Golden Rule of "Treat others how you want to be treated" might even apply to me and might even apply to things like forgiveness.
Notice how I'm not saying "I forgave myself." I'm saying I considered that maybe I could entertain the thought.
It was a very long process.

I kept writing. As writers do, I would put my project aside for a while, then get back to it. I had a million drafts all over the place, and do to this day. "I'll get to it," I said. No matter how much I tinkered, I couldn't seem to get the right form.


I read a million and one self help books and started practicing the idea that I was worthy. Worthy of love, worthy of forgiveness, just worthy. I wrote it over and over in my journals. I practiced believing it. I tried to get myself into a different thought warp--into one that might actually allow me to tilt my head back and feel good.

Because I realized I didn't want to feel badly anymore. I didn't want to feel that way. I don't want this anymore, I said.
And I thought, perhaps it was within my power to decide that I deserved to be happy. That I deserved to feel good. That I made a mistake, so many mistakes, but that I was the one withholding forgiveness, and maybe I should get the hell out of my way.
I could at least try this other shoe on, I thought.

I started to meditate. 
I don't know if you've noticed, but the idea of and the praise of meditation seems to be on the cover of every single magazine in every single rack of every single store in the United States of America right now. I thought what the hell. I'll try it. And I found space shifting inside. I started to reach for a space of peace and I started to repeat that joy and peace were available to me.

I began to read books by Thich Nhat Han, a Vietnamese Buddhist monk, and in doing so, I came across an idea that burst inside of me like a star. 
The idea was that we carry with us the unresolved suffering of our ancestors, of all our family--that their pain is written into our helixes, those who are alive and dead, stretching back endless years. And he said we had an incredible opportunity to heal their suffering by healing our own. We could transform and release their pain for them by releasing ours.
We could release their pain, and bear our children without this endless despair etched into their palms.
Wow, I breathed.
My whole body was on fire.
This—I realized—this was something I could do. This allowed me to reach beyond the void and unlock the concrete pain Mum had carried, and the pain that I was carrying, and throw it like a sand bag from a balloon and float.
Everything had felt so final after mum died. This told me it was not. This told me that things could still shift, and that I could shift them.
In fact, that I had to.
Well okay then, I thought. I have no choice. I owed it to my ancestors and to my progeny and to myself.

All of this slowly brought me back into the light, slowly allowed me outside the dark dark wolf I had been inside, and into the light. 

I started to feel OK.

And then I found this, one day at my father's house: A calendar my mother had kept of all my milestones as a baby. I didn’t open it for weeks. I saw it, turned to January, understood what it was in one heartbeat, and didn’t feel ready.
I knew it would open something, i knew it would open a faucet of some kind. I knew it might hurt, it might ache, and this wound was so pink even still, so painful to touch, even though I felt ok most days. I waited. I would go to my childhood home, and putter around my old bedroom, eyes glancing at it tucked in the bookshelf, not quite ready. Finally I said “oh hell” and I pulled it out.
My first smile, first laugh, first word, first everything, dated and written in her beautiful, neat, characteristic handwriting—the writing that had sent me love and cards dutifully no matter where I was in the world—be it the Galápagos Islands or upstate New York. All of it charted like a sacred map.
And the map led to love.
Reading this calendar was like reading a sacred lost text; it was like a baptism. Reading what she’d painstakingly written, with so much joy and tenderness—something inside of me was wiped clean. It was like a gale force wind swept through my heart, sweeping away all the detritus, the guilt, the self hatred, and was replaced by mighty, mighty love. The understanding of how much she loved me, and how powerful that love was through this scripture, it clarified everything. It didn't fix everything, but somehow, it didn't matter anymore.
—
You are looking, perhaps, for something more complex, perhaps not. All I can say was the answer was always love and I simply had to find it and accept it. It would have come to me in some form, when I was ready to forgive myself and to love myself again, whether it was the calendar, a flower, a child, or all of them. The answer to the Zen koan, to the pain, to the riddle is love.
What do you mean?
Love is what I mean.
Love with no footnotes or caveats.
It hurts still, it always will, but she is everywhere. She's a sparkle in the pearl of an oyster, she's etched in a piece of beach glass, she's evaporating from the sea, she's raining down on me from the sky with love that never started and never ended, it just always was.

light outside the wolf: words after mum's suicide: part 2 of 3: so this is the aftermath

She'd outpester any pest
Drive a hornet from its nest
She could throw a whirling dervish out of whirl
She is gentle! She is wild!
She's a riddle! She's a child!
She's a headache! She's an angel!
She's a girl!
-“Maria”, The Sound of Music

So this is the aftermath
Walking over rubble
Which was once
Down to the center
Which used to be central
-Tricky

And she said losing love
Is like a window in your heart
Everybody sees you're blown apart
Everybody sees the wind blow
-Paul Simon

Ah, how frightened I have been! How dark it was inside the wolf.
-Little Red Riding Hood

i guess, before i go on, i should explain a few things.
first--mum and i didn't get along; for much of our lives together, we fought like rams.
we'll get there.
to understand why we fought, and moreover--to understand precisely why i was so shattered when she died, i need to explain just who she was. 
her baseball card would have said things like this: five feet tall, 100 pounds on a good day, a triplet and one of nine irish catholic kids, raised in milton, ma, serial marathon runner, gemini, lover of odd numbers/hater of even numbers.
that all says something, but only a little more than nothing.
she was fickle. she was generous. one moment she was handing a beggar a dollar, the next she was shouting at my aunts on the phone and adding them to what we called her ever-evolving "shit list." she loved to pull pranks: my uncle told me once that he was driving my mum and some of the other siblings in the car when mum was a teenager. from the back seat mum asked my uncle, “are you a good driver?” and—unfortunately—he said, “of course.” with that, mum wrapped a kerchief over his eyes and shouted, “are you a good driver now?!” 
when she got excited about something, she was always jumping from foot to foot like a leprechaun. she started up new hobbies with zeal, and left half-done crafts projects all over my childhood house—there was the era of the wreaths which left dried flowers poking from all beams of the basement. there was the era of making sea glass and seashell frames--there are still bowls filled with glass in the basement, sitting underneath the dried, pokey flowers. there was photography, chi running, card-making, puzzles. 
she sent all my cousins and their children and really, any child within a 500-mile radius she knew, packages and cards. her state of rest was walking up the aisles of tj maxx looking for puzzles, toys and trinkets for all of us. she remembered every birthday and milestone ever. one of her earliest jobs was as a gift-wrapper at filene's; forevermore she creased the corners of every gift she wrapped perfectly. she minded my cousins and friends' babies often since she stayed home after she had me; she made us watch her favorite movie the sound of music over and over again.
she did anything and everything for me, her and my dad's only child. she made me buttered toast, gave me a little bell to ring when i was sick to call for her, took me to the new england mobile book fair (basically my version of heaven on earth: books and books for miles) and loved me "to the moon and back" as she liked to say. she stayed home with me rather than going to work and let me play hooky from school at the slightest cough and wince.

nearly perfect
for most of my childhood, life was nearly perfect. at my parents’ second home in new hampshire, my cousins and i spent our days swimming in goose hollow, blackberry picking by the power lines, jumping in piles of leaves, catching the little black crickets to feed my dad's lizards, petting the soft noses of barn animals across the street and feeding them carrots, coasting on sleds down the three trails my dad groomed for us on his twelve acres of land, and floating in the hot tub, which sat within the greenhouse my dad had built so he could grow citrus trees and gardenia. near our home in boston, we went to red sox games, rode the swan boats, ran through boston common, watched rated r movies, and snuggled with endless pets.
perfect right?
well--not exactly. i mentioned the shit list right? 

the shit list
the shit list: the list of people that at any given time mum was in a squabble with. ever on the list were her mum and dad (my nana and my grandpa). when her grudges against family members affected me, i started to have a serious problem with mum. case in point: mum wouldn’t let nana come to my 16th birthday party. i remember my grandmother calling me on the pool phone at the wollaston golf club (this was before cell phones) and saying, “sara, i want to come to your party, but your mum won’t let me.” nana’s voice broke like guitar strings at the end of the sentence, and she began to cry. i had never heard this sound from my grandmother before, and i can hear it to this day, a voice like a buckling of the knees, a hoarseness, and brimming tears. this was the woman who had nine children, a pillar of strength, suddenly weeping violently, choking, on the other end of the line. nana may ultimately have shown up to the party anyway--i don't remember--but i never forgot that phone call, i never understood it.
there was also my grandparents’ 50th wedding anniversary. until i saw pictures of the party in a photo album years afterwards, i had no idea that the event had taken place--i had no idea that i'd missed it. everyone was there, but me, my mum, and my dad. 
moments like this happened throughout my childhood, and they fanned a kindling of fury deep within me against my mum.
mum's squabbles affected who i got to see in my family, and as an only child, not being able to see my family was probably one of the most criminal offenses she could commit.
it was, and is, hard to reconcile the person who spread joy and laughter through care packages and birthday presents, who signed us up for endless volunteering efforts, with the person who would shout and slam down the phone on her sister or mother. it drove a deep wedge between her and me. it was difficult for me to see the beauty of her soul. i allowed it to be overshadowed by these other aspects, and it’s something i regret to this day. it drove me to be much closer to my dad, over the years, which was a sore spot for mum. she constantly felt like the odd man out, and that we were conspiring against her. sometimes to be fair, sometimes she was right, and other times, she wasn’t.

and then there were things like "the shoes thing."

“where are sara’s shoes?” my aunts would ask when my mum would drop me off at their houses without shoes, even in the winter.
“i don’t want you taking her anywhere. she could get kidnapped,” mum would say before driving away. she thought if she dropped me off without shoes, we would have to stay inside. but it was an easily rectified situation—my aunts just gave me any spare set of shoes lying around and we were off, walking to the five and ten, bowling in the square, or heaving snowballs.
i overheard her teaching other parents about another shoe-related golden rule, “always remember what shoes your child is wearing when you're out with them, and have them remember yours. that way, if you get lost in a crowd, crouch down, and look at the legs and shoes. you’ll never be able to spot a lost child from an aerial view.” 
i once hid inside a clothing rack at talbots and watched as she searched for me. my glee slowly turned to terror as i saw her transform before me; when i walked out, she unleashed a fear-inspired fury that i had not anticipated. she was terrified that i'd been kidnapped.
then, there was also the time in 7th grade mum finally relented and let me go to the movies in randolph with my gymnastic friends. there was only one caveat: i had to wear a siren on my arm in case anyone attacked me. it was something from out of the terminator: an oval the size of a thanksgiving biscuit with a button on it that you pressed if a stranger approached you and asked if you wanted to pet his gerbil. it made my cheeks burn with humiliation, and I made my friend andrea wear it, who thought it was hilarious. 
i had everything--a safe home, parents who loved me, an amazing family, good friends, sports, a million pets, but i wanted something else. i wanted freedom.

the first rebellion
even during those idyllic childhood days, i could feel it--this smothering veil that my mum cast over me. the rebellion--mine--started early, back in 1990. my cousins and i were swimming in the hot tub in my parents’ greenhouse. i was five years old, and i recall contemplating doing a very naughty thing. 
i had been swimming for a couple years at this point, on a swim team. i could swim butterfly for 25 yards, and tread water for three minutes. still, my mum insisted i keep my head above the water when we were in the hot tub. it shamed me in front of all my cousins, whose mums and dads didn’t care if they put their head beneath the surface. my cousins would toss things onto the bottom of the hot tub and go underneath to fetch it, or float to the bottom cross-legged to have "tea parties". it made me crazy i couldn't join them. it made me crazy to watch them, distorted and bubbles billowing up from their underwater giggles, as i hung out at the surface of the three-foot deep hot tub.
mum would see me get the gleam in my eye – the underwater gleam, and her jaw would set firm and she would say, “sara.” meaning don’t even try. and so we come to the moment of contemplation.
my cousins and i were all bobbing along that day when i went on strike against the no head underwater decry. the dots of white chlorine jumped in perfect parabolas on the surface. i looked around, and slowly, i submerged my head, feeling the warm water around my face, the rush of rebellion, and the bubbles as they slipped out of my mouth. then, a mass crashed the water, and raised my head above the forbidden deep.
mum had jumped in, with all her clothes, to rescue me. and she was very very pissed.
this is the earliest memory i have of rebellion, which was a harbinger of things to come in the relationship between my mother and me.

i understand it, in a way, now. 
i was the only child.
i suppose if you only have one child, and there's no back-up or replacement if this one gets lost or broken, maybe you'll be extra careful, extra terrified to lose her, extra neurotic. and i wonder now if she was making up for growing up in a huge family where that attention was harder to come by. the theories are constant, the theories are ever-unproven.
regardless, it blew even more space between mum and me. i continued to side with my dad, who always played switzerland in conversations about freedom. it must have hurt.
my parents came to everything, and while i appreciate it now, i just wanted them to skip a soccer game or a swim meet. i wanted to be latchkey, or forgotten, for once. mum was everywhere, everywhere, and i just wanted some space.
i would write about it all--i would say terrible things about her in my diaries. then she read those, and yelled at me about it. at the time, it didn't bother me, that i hurt her feelings, that i'd said such horrible things. but after she died, the things i had said to her in my life, the things i wrote about her--these things began to spin in my mind. the thoughts started rumbling in my mind and other memories welled up.
as a child, i felt surveilled, squeezed, imprisoned. while my friends were hanging out at the local coffee shop, getting jobs as babysitters, meeting up at the carnival, i was stuck at home, or, come junior or senior year of high school, released with a thousand caveats. "well, you can go if i go with you or if there's a parent there," she would say. which was worse than not going at all. it seems almost silly now, but for me then, it was everything, this freedom to be out with friends, to have a job, to ride a bike down the street. she was convinced if she cut me some slack, i'd be kidnapped. every step forward towards freedom took years longer than my friends. i was a good kid, i got good grades, and i felt like i got punished for it.
between the constant drama with the family, feeling trapped and, as i got into high school, her incessant proclamations of malady after malady, it drove me to villainize her. i had flattened her out like flat stanley: she was the tyrant, the oppressor, the nutter, the militant red queen. during college and after, by the time i was really able to think of her as a three-dimensional person, not a two-dimensional enemy – even as a potential friend and ally--she was already very mentally ill.

if i hadn't gone off to college the summer of 2003, she and i would have come to blows. we'd already come very close.
one august night that summer before college started, i got invited to a friend's party. the friend was someone mum had made it clear she didn't like, so i lied to mum, and said i was going to someone else's house.
i went with the intention of not drinking since i’d driven over, but i was malleable in the face of the blue jello shots and the jovial encouragement and “come on, sara!” from my friends.
it was the noisiest, funnest night of that summer. i just remember feeling incredibly beautiful in some aqua tank top I’d just bought, and the town's star football player following me around to my delight. 
the cops showed up a few times. the noise level was mind-deafening and the neighbors knew my friend's parents were away. when the cops came, i hid upstairs in under the bed, drunkenly telling the people who were also hiding how I was going to be a famous writer.
i vaguely remember my mum calling around 1:00 AM on my cell phone saying she’d called my other friend's house—she’d had a feeling i wasn’t there and sure enough, my other friend's mother had answered the phone and confirmed that i was not there. 
mum kept calling, asking where i was. “sara, just tell me where you are and I’ll come pick you up.” over and over, i hung up on her, click. she was worried. but I was having a good time and i wasn’t going home; i was so through with being a good kid. this and the details from the rest of the night make me nauseous when I think about them now.
“sara, where are you?” my mum asked me over and over and over again. 
“i’m not telling you.”
i wanted to get my keys from the party's host and leave to go anywhere. i just knew mum would find me. i felt like she could have found me anywhere.
i looked for my car keys so i could leave, go anywhere she might not find me, but my friend refused to give them so i stayed at the party, walking around unsteadily, just waiting for my mum to show up. the world was a full-on tilt-a-whirl. 
and, as i knew would happen, mum showed up about an hour later, entering the house full of stacked keystones and slowly-mellowing kids. she beelined it upstairs. i was in the bathroom fixing my makeup, wholly unconcerned and wholly drunk.
i don’t remember the moment when I saw her; i simply remember following her downstairs.
the walk down the stairs, everything brown, the walls, the carpet, the deep shit i was in and through the kitchen should have made me feel naked with all those eyes on me and my mom, but it didn’t. it must have been the boldness of the booze because in that moment, for once, I didn’t care, and i was just really sick of everything.
outside, my mother begged me to just get in the car and go home. she was angry, bull-like, steaming, but calm enough to just ask me to get in the car. my toes go numb with shame when I think about it now.
i didn’t answer at first, just started walking. i can still hear the steps of my heels clinking icily, defiantly, on the pavement. she followed me, walking and shivering, “sara, please, let’s just get in the car and go home. we can talk about this tomorrow.”
i stopped, turned to her for a moment and for the first time ever said the stripped down thing we all say endlessly when we’re children:
“No.”
that “no” tasted so good rolling off my lips, tasted sweeter than any lie i had uttered to her in exchange for freedom. it was a cold summer night and being in a tank top in a cold night and still feeling so warm from the alcohol, and being an idiot 17-year old piece of shit, made me feel invincible.
and i just kept walking, passing under the streetlights, amazed by how bold and strong my shadow looked in those brief illuminated intervals on the concrete. it made me feel like i had an accomplice, a backup.
i started talking.
“all you do is smother me. you fucking do not let me breathe.”
“i can’t stand you—i can’t physically or emotionally stand to be in the same room as you.”
“i legitimately wish i could say i was never inside you.”
at that moment in time, I’d seen my mother cry three times in my life: at her favorite aunt’s funeral, when she got in an argument with our local priest, and that night. the night I told her i wished she wasn’t my mother.
i just kept walking and talking until finally my mom got my cell phone from me. my feet were starting to hurt a little from my high black shoes and she pounced. she called my dad, “we’re on X or Y street…” he showed up maybe seven minutes later and got out of the car. i tried to keep walking but dad wrapped his strong arms around me and wouldn’t let me go.
“call the police. she won’t get in the car and i don’t want her to start screaming and the neighbors to think anything strange,” mum said.
“sure. call the police. i don’t care. i’m not going home with you,” i said. 
dad made the call.
within maybe ten minutes, a cruiser pulled alongside us and parked. my dad’s arms were still wrapped around me and i couldn’t get them off. no matter how mad or invincible i felt i was, i was no match for his sixty year old arms.
the police officer got out. he was young, clean-shaven and fit, not like the normal donut-dunking cops of our town. he and my parents talked for a few minutes.
“take her away in the cruiser,” mum asked the officer. “it will teach her a lesson.”
he didn’t want to; he looked uneasy but i insisted upon climbing into the back of the cruiser. we were quiet for a bit as he started to drive.
“i want to spend the night in the cell,” i said. “I don’t want to sleep in the same house as them.”
“you don’t want to sleep in the cell,” the police officer said. “it’s cold.”
i knew he wasn’t going to let me, so i changed the subject. “you look young enough to have been at that party,” i ventured.
he chuckled, turning right into my street. “i was actually friends with your friend's older sister. i remember those parties.”
we pulled into my driveway and i went inside. i was suddenly exhausted. i climbed into bed and closed my eyes.

after mum died, these were the types of memories that echoed through the vaults of my mind--memories like this, of which i had several, and those awful awful words i could never take back. was it my fault? i wondered. ya, our relationship had gotten better once i grew up a little, once i'd been out on my own for a bit, but did the years of my siding with dad, my pushing her away, spitting at her, telling her i hated her, not being around for her, play the pivotal role? these questions weighed me down. 


there are so many things i wish i could take back saying, so many things i wish i could take back doing.
right before she died, she told me she found a card i’d written to my father, when i don't even know. in it i'd written “everything good about me i got from you.” as she told me this, she was sobbing.
a river of pain begins at that moment in my heart and rushes today.
“mum, that’s not true,” i said desperately. “i didn’t mean it.” her face was wrinkled and tears clumped in her lashes and fell down her cheeks.
i’ll admit, she was in the wrong for always snooping, (“snoop and thou shalt find shit you don’t want to see”) but still—who writes that?
these were the moments that seared, these burned, these wedged into my heart and would not pass. i wanted to turn my head from myself, i was so ashamed.

i went to school nearly 300 miles away at colgate university in upstate new york, and though my parents still came to visit often, there was some reprieve. for mum, amazingly, it was like out of sight, out of mind with me.
it was amazing.
i could breathe.
i could go for a run alone.
most summers in between college i spent away too--i was out of the nest and i intended to keep it that way. if i lived at home again, it was only for a few months here and there. things began to settle between us. she was still going on and on about ms but i was out from under her thumb. and i fell out of touch with what was going on with mum.

after college, i moved to ecuador to volunteer for a few months, and while i was there, my mother's mother--my nana of the 16th birthday party poolside phone call and the 50th anniversary party--passed away. i think this rocked mum. when i returned, she was different--she was more nervous, more amped up about her illnesses and it was more than ms. i don't remember the sequence or the timeline of it all. i had stopped listening about her maladies years before. it all jumbled into one long stretch of murkiness, but i felt like she was different. like something was weighing her soul down, and i think it's because mum had regrets when nana died. the irony is not lost on me.

i want to give you the precise sequence, the precise chain of events but as i said, everything seems to blur together. mum was functionally sick for a long time, but suddenly, after college and after nana died, it sped up--it got really bad, really fast. when i stopped by to see her, she would go off into the other room, googling new doctors, alternative treatments, remedies. 
"helloooo!" i would shout from the kitchen. "i came to hang out with you!" then she would putter back only to be drawn back to the computer, which dad eventually cut her off from due to her incessant ability to find new doctors and treatments.
i would spend time with her, listening to her worry, then listening to her say she was going to try to get better, then on my way home, she would call me and apologize for our terrible time together. 
she was just disappearing before me. she was completely unravelling, completely dissolving. and i felt helpless. "let's go for a run, mum," i would say. in the old days, she would have outpaced me, she would have gone for miles. now, she just declined. in the last year she was alive, i tried to get her to go for a run with me, and when she said no, i forced her to go. we descended a quarter mile down clifton street and at the bottom she said, "i can't. my legs--i can't." 

it infuriated me.
whereas i had been subtle for years, now i would shout, "it's all in your head!" and then i would curse myself for how careless i was.
she was convinced she was dying. "great!" i would shout. "you're dying--fine! we're all dying every second! get over it and enjoy your "last days on earth" with me!"
she tried. she took meds (sometimes), she received treatment (she hated it), she listened to waves while sleeping, prayed, read the bible. 
she asked me to pray for her. "will you pray for me, sazzie?" she asked.
and you know what? i said i would, i said i was, but i didn't and i wasn't. i didn't pray for her. 
it was the easiest thing she could have ever asked me.
but i believed she needed treatment, help from doctors, not help from above, and so i didn't. and don't you know, i really wish i had. i really wish i had prayed.


i gave up on her.
after a while, i just did.
it took a long time, but eventually my soul checked out.
this is what would happen:
every now and then, we thought she was getting better.
we would think mum was turning it around, like a boat. i would watch her, i would see a smile, or the glimpse of her former self. and an egg would crack inside my heart, a little baby bird of hope growing. “maybe—“ i would think “maybe this is going to be ok.” i felt warm. 
and then i would get a call that she had tried to die again, or she would start talking about another doctor she was going to see, another test she was going to get. after she had promised that the previous test was "the last test, really! no more after this one!"
and i would feel so stupid. like a fool. my feet would tingle, my belly would knot. “never again will i believe her!” i told myself. and then i hated myself for giving up on her. she got checked into hospitals, and i didn't go see her. i stopped going over as much. the day she died, i hadn't seen her for a whole month.

i realized i had been kind of a shit daughter. no one ever agreed with me, but i knew, when i looked in the mirror, that it was true. after she died, i wanted to crawl out of my skin. i wanted to unzip, and slither out, far away from the person — me — who disgusted me. i hadn't appreciated her, i'd said terrible things, i hadn't tried hard enough when she got really sick, i hadn't given up everything to help her, i had given up on her.

i was walking down the street two years after she died when i realized “oh. i hate myself. that’s what this feeling is.” and it broke my heart more.
i tried to run and run and run away from myself, but i was everywhere i turned.
i searched for proof that it had been otherwise. that i had been good enough, that i had done enough for mum. i wanted a vault of artifacts that proved to me she knew i loved her.
i didn't find it.
it haunted me.
it haunts me now.


that question spun around and around like a frenzied carousel: did she know that i loved her? 
did she know? did she know that seeing her waste away, fade away, made me want to stand in the eye of the storm and howl? did she know, when i hugged her those last few years, that i was trying to hug her so tight that i hugged the poison out of her and into me, if it had to be that way? 

before mum got really sick, before mum died, i walked into the party and i wanted to dance. i wanted to talk to everyone, i held my head high, i wanted to tell jokes. i thought i was hot shit. i thought nothing of it. that was my way.
after mum died, i walked into the party and my eyes darted around. i felt nervous. i hung out with the dog, if there was one. i felt stupid. “am i talking too loud?” “why did i say that?” “was i weird?”
my confidence was gone.
for better or for worse, my mum had always been there.
we had fought, she had driven me crazy, i had infuriated her, but she was the thing i was most solid on, the ground under my feet. the fact that she would be there, always, for me, was like a universal truth. it was like gravity. she would be there because she loved me.
when mum died by suicide, i felt rejected. and then i felt egotistical that i felt rejected.
she had chosen to leave, when she could have stayed, my brain shouted at me. SHE LEFT YOU.
this cut a piece of my heart out and left an absence like air in an empty locker. 

i dreamt of her and woke up with a wet face and a swollen throat. i had thought she was there; in my dream she had been there. "you're back!" i would say. i can still feel the golden joy swelling inside me in my dream. all was well--i would have a second chance! a chance to tell her how much i loved her like i'd never told her before! how much i missed her! and then when i woke, she was not there. she was “there” people told me, she’s all around me. but she wasn’t.

i wanted to crawl inside a little walnut.
i wanted to crawl inside and shut the door and stay there.
i wanted to never look at myself again.
everything was too much, my clothes felt too tight, my shoulders felt too broad.
i wanted everything to be quiet, and dim, and walnutty. 

i couldn't stop the endless cycle of these thoughts and emotions. i moved through my life heavy like wet sand. i looked out at the long life before me without mum, of this life of endless wondering if she'd known how much i'd loved her, wishing she would appear in a gauzy white haze and say, "sazzie, i know!" this scrabbling guilt, this belief that i was completely worthless dragged me further and further down. 

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. 

light outside the wolf: words after mum's suicide: before i go on, a note for my friends and family

throughout my mother's mental illness and after her death through today, my now-husband dan and his family, my family and my amazing chosen family--my friends--and others have given me extraordinary support and love. they showed me boundless kindness through words, action and peace after i lost mum. 
i don't talk about that much in what follows. 
there were lessons and truths i could only uncover, learn and internalize for myself by going really deep after mum died. there was a pit i maybe had to stumble in and learn how to get out myself. that's what i talk about, that's what is pouring out of me.
what i know for sure, is that the love surrounding me, from all my beloved people, made that process of healing much faster and probably much easier. i had reminders all around me, constantly, that i was loved. you know who you are. i'm indebted and forever grateful to you.

light outside the wolf: words after mum's suicide: an introduction: on writing about mum's suicide

words poured out of me after my mum committed suicide on march 16, 2013. i scrawled endless words--memories, love letters to her, thoughts, angst--onto the pages of endless journals. while i had to keep going to work, keep doing chores (though my husband admittedly probably did laundry and dishes for a year after she died) and keep being a normal human being on the outside, in my journal i could fall apart, and fall apart i did.

nothing prepared me for losing my mother to suicide, despite the fact that, at a certain point in her mental illness, my family and i knew that's where it was all heading. we knew it was going to happen. we tried to help her get better, and i know that she tried too, but she didn't get better.

i expected to be sad when she died, i expected to be lost, but i did not expect the intense self-loathing, crippling grief and completely shattered confidence. i did not expect the grief to draw and quarter me, i did not expect it to destroy me so thoroughly for a time. 

i always knew i wanted to pay tribute to my mother in words some day. she was the first person to believe in me as a writer, and, as you'll see, writing about her, sharing her story, became one of the things i began to understand would make what happened better. plus, i am angry that we lost such a beautiful person in her; i am angry that the world goes on while the person i loved, love still, is gone. some mornings i want to wake up and tell the birds "stop singing! don't you know who died?!" of course i don't want the birds to stop singing--i just want everyone to know that we lost this special, magical person. i want her to be remembered. 

and each time i've heard about someone taking their life after that day my mother died in march 2013, i've felt the growing need to share my story. this past week, the scales finally tipped when a friend's sibling died from suicide and a personal hero of mine, anthony bourdain, died from suicide as well. what follows are my raw memories and meditations after mum's suicide. it's the story of army crawling through a slurry of gray that i thought would never end. it's only been five years. having lost someone dear to me, i am aware that there will be moments and emotions that rear their heads like a vaulting horse forever--and yet, i'm still here.