10 Holy Shit

For some reason, Chris hated the word “shit.” He hated to hear me say it, and rarely said it himself. I threatened to title a previous book “Holy Shit,” considering it a cute play on the deeply religious yet craptacularly tragic aspects of my childhood family’s story, but he blanched. Just the thought of it gave him pains. So of course, in the months leading up to his death and in the months that have followed, this singularly potent singlesyllable word has come to define my life.

First, “shit magnet.” This phrase was coined by my Richardson brother Randy to describe one who exerts a powerful gravitational force on all that stinks: medical shit, job shit, unlucky-in-love shit, you-name-it shit. The closest synonym is probably schlimazel, the Yiddish word for the poor schlub most likely to have soup spilled into his lap; the spiller is a schlemiel, which, I suppose, Randy might term a “shit dispenser.” The Richardsons are shit magnets of the first order (that’s a whole other book, and my adoptive Dan-Dad plans to write it), but they are the most cheerful and loving shit magnets you will ever, ever meet. The shit flies at them, but they wipe it off with a smile.

My husband’s illness was shit that made no sense to anyone: not to me, not to his friends and family, certainly not to him. For more than twenty years he was the sanest man I’d ever known, and then he wasn’t. His personality changed. He stopped sleeping. Ambien kept him awake all night. Psych meds were no help either, and his hospitalizations only made him worse. After one long, awful day when he disappeared and I called the police, he was compelled to enter a psychiatric crisis center, and I was compelled to sit down with the doctor and his team to determine whether Chris was at risk for suicide. They asked me if I understood the danger. I said yes. I told them about my sister’s suicide in 1992, and my father’s attempt in 1974. I knew what this meant, I assured them.

“Oh,” remarked the psychiatrist. “So you’re a survivor.”

Yeah, I said. Or you could just call me a shit magnet.

And darned if they didn’t all laugh.

My brother-in-law Murray sits in my kitchen and says it flat-out: “You’re not a hex.”

My turn to laugh.

“You’ll be tempted to think that you’re a hex, that this is your fault, all this suicide. But you’re not. It’s not.”

I know, I say. I keep telling myself that. Thank you. I know.

But what I want to say, not to Murray but to the universe at large, is: WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON HERE? ARE YOU FUCKETY-FUCKING KIDDING ME? ANOTHER SUICIDE? SERIOUSLY?

And so I encounter the toughest shit yet: figuring out how to process my husband’s fatal leap so that I and my children and all whom I treasure in this world won’t lose our collective minds with grief and remorse. I know that I’m the crux of it; I have to frame this outrageous rearrangement of our lives in a way that allows all of us to move forever forward with love and hope, or something like it. And what I figure out is this: It can’t be figured out. Chris’s madness and suicide will never make sense. We will never understand it. My friend Jo calls it a “sorrowful mystery,” and I agree—realizing, finally, that I can only comprehend his death as something incomprehensible.

I share this thought with the kids. They absorb it quickly and completely, having witnessed the six-month change in their father and accepted the fact that their “real” dad, their well dad, didn’t choose to leave them and this life. Children are deeper than adults, wiser, because they’re accustomed to not having all the information. They already know they can’t know everything.

We discuss this not-knowing at the Casserole Club one night. I tell them our brains aren’t big enough to grasp what happened. I tell them someday we might, but not now. Not in the land of the living.

That’s when Jeanne hits us with it. Profundity from the mouth of a teenager. “While we’re alive, and we want to understand it, we can’t,” she says. “When we’re dead, and we’ll be able to understand it, we won’t give two shits.”

To that I say, amen.

Later, I think about the shitness of it all, and the mystery inherent in the shitness. What a worrier I am. How I fret over my shortcomings, past, present, and future. I ask myself what might have happened, what should be happening, what will. I have no clue what to do with myself now, stripped from the ballast of my husband and tossed adrift in some new direction on waters foaming with uncertainty and pain. I’m no longer his wife, but the whole notion of widowhood gives me agita: it’s a state of being defined by a vacancy. I’m more than unmarried, and I’m not quite whole.

Why did he have to die? Who am I without him beside me? The fuck if I know. I am obviously suffering through an existential crisis.

As I said. Shit.