Because let me tell you, an apology would be a good start.
Or an explanation.
Or an I will always love you, Rowan.
Something, anything other than this empty silence that is everywhere, all the time now, inside of me and out.
I don’t know how to live the rest of my life without you.
I don’t think I can.
Can a person actually die of sadness?
How about of a broken heart?
I’ve thought about it a lot and yes, I think so.
You did.
So maybe I will, too.
P.S.: It’s really hard to say this but I know that if I hadn’t cut school and you hadn’t caught me and had to bring me home, you would have never been anywhere near the overpass that day and someone else would have responded to that jumper call. Someone else would have lost Corey and the baby, not you, and if that had happened . . .
Oh God, if only that had happened.
Chapter 43
When my father was alive, we used to eat together at the kitchen table.
Now we eat on trays in front of the TV in the family room.
It’s not the same.
I finish before my mother, who’s settled in behind a wall of cats and has her nose stuck in another book, set my bowl on the others piled in the sink, call, “I’m going outside,” and before she can answer, head back across the side lawn to the bench under the tree to smoke the cigarette I just stole from her pack.
I could have stolen the whole pack, with how much attention she’s paying these days. Next time I will.
I glance back at the house to make sure she hasn’t had a sudden fit of conscience and followed me out to talk some more and when the door stays shut I shrug, light up, inhale and blow a few big, fat smoke rings.
My father would hate this.
Of course if he was alive, I probably wouldn’t be doing it.
“Oh well,” I say rudely, and take another drag off the cigarette. Hide it as a car goes by, just in case it’s someone we know, but it isn’t.
It never is, anymore. Not like when he first died and everyone showed up at the house to talk, comfort and console.
Everyone was here for us back then, arms open.
I take a hitched drag off my cigarette and let it out, slowly.
But time never stops ticking, and people have to go back to their normal lives.
No, they get to go back to their normal lives and pick up where they left off, relieved, guilty and on some private level desperately thankful that they’re not us.
The smoke drifts up and disappears into the tree branches.
I lean forward and glance at the overpass.
Nothing, of course.
He doesn’t walk this way anymore.
I flick my ashes.
I glance back at the house. Still clear. Take another drag off the cigarette.
I don’t know what I’m so worried about. My mother isn’t going to come out here. She hasn’t really been out of the house since the funeral, except into the backyard to feed the stray cats that live in the woods. She became kind of obsessed with them after my father died, standing at the window watching as, skinny, starved and frightened, they crept out to the food plate and ate like it was their last meal.
“I can’t stand this,” she said, turning to me with a look of agonized urgency in her eyes. “They’re going to die if we don’t intervene and then I’ll never be able to live with myself.” And so she ordered a Havahart trap online and started catching them, handing them over to my grandfather, who dutifully took them to the vet’s for shots and fixing, and then brought them back to her for food, shelter and gentling.
It was weird at first, coming into a house that started with Stripe and now held eleven cats in various stages of domestication, but somehow it ended up being no big deal.
Maybe because when every single thing in your life has already drastically changed, adding a few new cats isn’t even a blip on the radar.
And I don’t mind them. I really don’t.
What I mind is when she crawls into her nest of blankets on the couch, pictures of my father on the tables around her, cats in her lap, and shuts the rest of the world out, reading until she goes to bed and then starting up again over coffee in the morning.
I hate eating meals with her when she’s on the couch.
It makes me feel alone, abandoned, and that makes being lonely even lonelier.
My cigarette’s gone out, so I push myself up off the bench to go ditch it in the road.
The overpass is empty.
Everything is empty.
I drop the butt in the thin layer of grit on the shoulder, with all of the others.
Step on it, pressing down hard until it’s completely flattened.
Look both ways, and walk out to the center yellow line.
Pause.
Step slowly over it into the other lane and then up onto the sidewalk on the overpass.
They all stood here—my father, Eli, Corey and the baby—and now I’m here, too.
I can hear the traffic speeding by on the highway below and slowly, as if drawn against my will, I put my hands on the cement wall where Corey and his son sat, where they went over, and peer down.
The highway’s crowded with cars weaving in and out of lanes, commuter buses, trucks . . .
I watch them, mesmerized, until my vision blurs and then, with growing trepidation, blink away the haze and search the pavement for the spot Corey and Sammy hit. I don’t know what I’m expecting—a stain, a mark, chalk outlines—but there’s nothing there, only the remnants of a makeshift memorial off to the side of the road.
A white plastic cross stuck in the weeds and tied with sagging, faded blue ribbons. A weather-beaten teddy bear propped crooked at its base.
The full horror of it hits me.
I snatch my hands from the wall and step back, shuddering. Wipe them on my shorts once and then again, and that’s when I hear my mother calling my name.
Chapter 44
“What the hell were you doing out there?” she yells the minute I walk in the door, sending a panicked wave of cats bolting for cover.
“Nothing,” I say, taken aback.
“Nothing?” Her face is flushed and furious, her gaze wild. “You’re standing out on that goddamn overpass staring down over the side and you call that nothing?” She crosses the kitchen and grabs my arm, stares hard into my face. “What were you doing over there, Rowan? Tell me!”
“Mom, you’re scaring me,” I say in a small voice, and try to pull free, but her fingers are digging into my skin. “Ow.” Her breath is hot and stale, the scent of her sweat sharp with fear. “You’re hurting me.”
“I’m hurting you?” my mother says, but she releases me and steps back, breathing hard. “You could have fallen, Rowan, you could have lost your balance and gone over and been killed, do you realize that? You could have died and I couldn’t have done anything about it!” She stares are me, chin trembling, her terror too huge for the room. “When I saw you, I thought . . . oh my God.” Shaking, she puts a hand to her face and, groping behind her, sinks into a chair. “I couldn’t live if anything happened to you, Rowie.” She gazes up at me, tearful, beseeching. “Please, please swear to me that if you ever feel that bad you’ll tell me and let me help you, please—”
“I will,” I say, crying now, too. “I wasn’t going to do anything, Mom. I swear. I was just—” I stop, confused. I was just what, looking? Spellbound? What? What was I doing?
I don’t know.
“Rowie, listen.” She reaches out, catches hold of my hand. “I know it’s hard without your father. I do. And I know it’s up to me now and I don’t know how that’s going to go, I honestly don’t, but I do love you so please—”
“I’m sorry.” I drop to my knees and hug her back, feel the pain and desperation in her sobs, the fear that makes her cling so tight. “We’re going to be okay, Mom, we are,” I say, and through the tears realize t
his is the first time those words have come out of my mouth since my father died, and so I say them again, hear them again, but no, in my heart I still don’t believe them.
But my mother nods, dries her tears, accepts the reassurance, and it scares me, how much easier it is to comfort someone with a lie than it is to tell them the truth.
Chapter 45
Surprisingly, my mother doesn’t retreat and disappear right back into her books but instead, shyly, as if not wanting the closeness to end, suggests we make popcorn and watch a movie, and so, wrung out, exhausted but strangely gentle with each other, we curl up on the couch, content to be close and watch mindless TV together until bedtime, just me, my mother, eleven purring cats and my father’s urn on the mantel.
She sees me looking at it, shakes her head and with a wry smile says, “Puts a whole new spin on family night, doesn’t it?”
The comment catches me by surprise and my laugh shoots out before I can stop it. “Oh my God, Mom.” I glance at her, torn between the incredible wonder of us feeling, even for a moment, light enough to laugh and the worry caused by such flip and blatant disrespect. “I can’t believe you just said that.”
“Why not? Your father would have said it if that was me up there in a jar,” she says, lips twitching at my scandalized look. “Sometimes we need to laugh, or we’ll go crazy. A little irreverence takes the edge off. He would have been the first to tell you that.”
Yes, he would have, but the thought still leaves me uneasy. “What if he heard you, though?”
“What if he did?” my mother says, shrugging. “What’s he going to do, haunt me?” She glances at his picture on the end table and then back at me, trying to smile, but the humor in her gaze has faded and the loss sends a hollow spear of pain through my heart.
“Yeah, like that’d be something new, right?” I say quickly, wishing I just laughed and let it go, wishing I let that light in her eyes last a little longer. “I’m sorry,” I say, knotting my fingers together and staring down at my hands. “I didn’t mean to ruin it.”
“What? You didn’t ruin anything,” she says, reaching over, tugging one of my clenched hands free and cradling it between hers. “You said what you felt, and there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s what you’re supposed to do.”
“But it made you sad again,” I mumble.
“Oh, Rowie, it wasn’t you,” she says, squeezing my hand. “I’m sad all the time now and that’s okay, it’s a natural part of grieving. I never forget that he’s gone but sometimes it’s like the clouds part for a minute and a ray of sunshine shoots through, and then it’s done and the clouds close over again, that’s all. Hey.” She jiggles my hand until I look at her. “It wasn’t you. I promise, okay?”
“Okay,” I say grudgingly, and, easing my hand free, offer her the rest of my popcorn.
And it seems like we’re fine, or as fine as we can be, but later that night when I get up to go to the bathroom, I hear her crying.
I pause outside her door. “Mom?” Step closer and the night-light in the hall lifts the darkness enough for me to see into the room.
She’s standing on my father’s side of the room, at his armoire, where all of his clothes still wait inside, where his navy blue, terry-cloth bathrobe still hangs on an outside hook. She’s leaning against the bathrobe, nestled against the soft cloth, and weeping.
“Mom?” My voice cracks.
She lifts her head and says helplessly, “I don’t know how to stop waiting for him.” She presses the sleeve of the robe to her cheek. “Oh God, I miss him so bad.”
“I know,” I whisper, wrapping my arms around my waist.
“Do you remember how sad he looked at the end, so gray and hopeless? All I want to do now is take his poor, tired face in my hands and tell him not to worry, we’ll make it as long as we’re together. All that other stuff will pass, as long as he stays.” Her voice catches on a sob. “That’s what I should have told him, Row.”
“You did, Mom, like a hundred times,” I say, voice wobbling.
She shakes her head, refusing to be consoled. “I was impatient because of the stupid dining room and I thought maybe it would help if we tried to talk about it. God knows I’d tried everything else but now . . . if I could take it back, I would. I never should have done it. Talking only made him feel worse. I should have realized he was doing all he could just to hang on until the medication finally started working. I thought I knew how to help him, Rowan, but I didn’t, and I’ll never forgive myself for that. I won’t.”
“Don’t, Mom.” The guilt in her voice rattles me. “Please?”
“I can’t even tell him I’m sorry,” my mother says.
I go to her and for the second time today, she puts her arms around me. I lay my head against the bathrobe too, breathing in the last lingering traces of my father’s person smell, and we huddle there lost in yearning, still wanting, needing, wishing for one last chance to hold the hands, kiss the cheek, feel the embrace of a man we will never see again.
This is what the survivors of suicide—the aftermath, the wreckage, the walking wounded—look like in the hours between dusk and dawn.
Grief Journal
Who am I now, Dad, without you?
Really. I need to know.
Because I’m not who I used to be, that’s for sure.
Not even close.
Want to know some of the things I’ve learned since you left?
They’re not good and you’re not going to like hearing them but I can’t help that. They’re real and true, and I can’t get them out of my head.
And you’re the only one I can tell.
Okay, well, did you know that the American Psychiatric Association ranks the emotional trauma of losing a loved one to suicide as catastrophic?
That your decision forever changed the course of my life and who I am?
Did you know that most of the people who kill themselves have a diagnosable and treatable psychiatric disorder like depression at the time of their death?
That your depression wasn’t something you did wrong but a chemical imbalance in your brain, not a choice, and could have happened to anyone at any time, regardless of sex, age, race or religion?
Did you know that it’s pretty common for the first prescribed antidepressant not to work, and that there are others you could have tried?
A whole slew of others, and ones that might have helped?
God, Dad.
Did you know that individuals who have had a suicide in their families are at greater risk for suicide in the future than those who have not?
That now, thanks to you, that means me and Mom?
We are at risk now, Dad. You, who always protected us in life, risked us in death.
I hate knowing that, and to be honest, I’m afraid to think too much about it.
I’m screwed up enough these days as it is.
And you can’t save me.
Just kidding . . . but it’s true.
That’s one of the side effects of killing yourself. You get no say in anything anymore.
Actually, that’s wrong. Every single thing we’ve done these past three months has been because of you.
And it only took me ninety-two days to figure that out.
Wow. I guess I’m not as smart as you thought I was, am I?
It’s okay. You’re not who I thought you were, either.
I hate knowing that, too.
So, this is the beginning of the fourth month.
I thought maybe it would be some kind of turning point.
Turning to what, I don’t know, but anything’s got to be better than this.
Have I ever told you what it’s really been like for me?
What grief has been like so far, all up close and personal?
No? Then let me try.
It’s the perfect storm, Dad, and it hits like a wrecking ball, coming out of nowhere and slamming into your brain. It destroys everything. Your emotions are in shambles: One minute you’re crying, the
next you’re laughing, the next you can barely lift your head for the agony. Life narrows: You don’t care about stuff that used to matter and you overreact to the stuff that matters now. You need to be held but you want to be left alone. Your short-term memory is shot. Every step is like slogging through a mud pit. Exhaustion hits at random and all you can do is sleep. You second-guess yourself constantly. You can’t meet anyone’s gaze for fear you’ll see blame there, or suspicion or judgment. You feel small, weak, guilty. You think weird thoughts, do strange things. Every nerve in your body is raw but your brain is a foggy, unreliable mess. You can’t see from crying and food has no taste but all of a sudden you can smell a dirty sock three rooms away. Your moods are up, down, down, up, like a crazed, speeding, out-of-control roller coaster you can’t get off of, no matter how long or how awful the ride.
And that’s just the first three months.
Catastrophic.
Yeah, I’d say that’s about right.
Chapter 46
I no sooner get downstairs the next morning, a parade of playful, tumbling cats following behind me, than my mother comes in and, like all the closeness of last night is forgotten, tells me that I have to go grocery shopping with my grandparents.
“What? Are you kidding?” I say as she hands me the list and the money. “I’m not going out. I’m not even dressed.” I gesture at my baggy, wrinkled shorts and my father’s faded old PBA T-shirt. “Why do I have to go again? Why can’t you go this time?”
“Rowan. Look at me.” Her shorts are stained, and her sleeveless blouse missing a button. Her whole face is swollen from last night’s crying jag, her eyes bloodshot and her nose red and chafed from blowing. “Isn’t it obvious?”
“But—”
“I put hair dye on the list,” she says, and, with a self-conscious gesture, tucks a lank strand behind her ear. “I know it looks awful. I shouldn’t have waited so long.” She summons a crooked smile. “I got a good look at myself in the mirror this morning and realized that if I don’t do something soon I’m going to look more like your grandmother than your mother.”