31 I Really Need To Say This Out Loud

I won’t kill myself. I won’t.

I say this aloud, and I have to, because my kids have to hear it. I have to hear it. I think back often to my friend Joe, leaning across the loveseat toward me that bright, bleak September afternoon. He was right when he said that no one in a ten-mile radius is less at risk of suicide. He’s right because he has to be right, because it has to be true. I know that I can’t kill myself, so I won’t. So I say that I won’t. So I repeat it, loudly, whenever I have to, whenever I sense the kids could use a reminder.

Suicide is a fucker. It just is. After my sister Lucy committed suicide—OD’d on psych meds—I was stunned to realize that some people consider the act a choice, an actual, rational choice, and one of these same people expressed as much to me in soothing tones soon after her death. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Lucy? The brilliant, Harvard-educated, empathic, loving, giving Lucy? She “chose” to do herself in? To rip our mother’s heart out? My heart, too? No. Lucy didn’t embrace her suicidality; she didn’t choose it; she felt it and fought it bravely. Then it vanquished her.

She was out of her head with despair, just as my father Louis was out of his head when he made his attempt—OD’d on sleeping pills—and just as my husband was out of his head when he jumped. I sometimes try to put myself in that vacated headspace, wondering why anyone with anything to live for would throw it all away. Chris adored his children as much or more than any man I knew. He was a devoted husband, a generous friend, a man always attentive and attuned to other people’s needs. How could he have done this? What could have seized him in that moment? What if he had stepped back from the rim of the parking garage? Would that moment have passed?

This is what suicide does to the ones left behind. The damnation of it, the nasty and never-ending slog if it, is just this sort of fruitless and relentless cross-examination, the serial questioning that never ever yields an answer. Like the guilt, it gets you nowhere. It loops around and around and around, teasing and torturing with the cruelest of all cruel falsehoods: that your loved one might have lived had you only done something differently, or said something differently, or not said something else.

The if-onlys will eat you alive, if you let them. They’ll consume you from within. The best you can do, the best I can manage, is to lift the rational above the irrational and see this awful questioning as a function of the grief, and then see the grief as a thing apart from myself—my Self. It’s noisy, obnoxious, persistent. But it isn’t me.

This is me: The one still here. The one who won’t kill herself because she knows what it means to lose a dear one to suicide, she knows how it hurts, not for a year or two, but forever. Forever. I won’t do that to my own dear ones. I’m not built that way. I bend but don’t break; or perhaps I’m already broken, and that’s my secret weapon. I learned at age 11, just as my children learned, that a parent can love you but still yield to melancholy. Mine returned to me. Theirs didn’t. I don’t know why and I never will, no matter how often I ask.

It’s not fair. None of it’s fair. Every death feels like an injustice to the grieving, but suicide brings on its own sense of wrongness: seven months later, it still throbs and festers with doubt, demanding answers I don’t have. There is no figuring this out. I had no chance to say goodbye to Chris at the end, no time for closure, no occasion to say, “I love you, and thank you for all that you gave me.” I don’t know what he felt as he hurled off his parapet into the blue. I don’t know what he saw as he looked down and out and over our bustling, friendly neighborhood that last moment. I don’t know whether peace overcame him, or fear, or love. I picture him climbing the stairs to the roof of the parking garage, looking around, choosing a spot. I wonder if he hesitated: did he think of us? I wonder if he looked over the edge and felt seized by dizziness: did he plunge head first? He must have. “Multiple traumatic blunt force injuries,” in the words of the death certificate, suggest a vicious descent.

No one will ever ask such questions of me. My loved ones will never have to parse a coroner’s phrasings, question my final paroxysms, wonder about my mental state or picture me on a ledge.

I’m not leaving that way. I’m not killing myself. Neither should you.