judywhite
Sometimes when I’m driving the car, suddenly he’s there sitting shotgun.
Damn. Here we go again.
Well, geez, let me at least move my bag.
Sometimes I yell. I’ve finally got him where I want him, trapped in the passenger’s seat so I can scream how pissed off I am that he’s gone.
Usually he takes it. Sometimes he leaves.
Sometimes, most times, more and more often, I tell him I forgive him. I know if I say it enough, eventually it will stay true.
The second time we lived together, the first day we moved in, he brought the shotgun his dad had given him when he was twelve and put it in the hall closet while I stood there with big eyes.
“Are you crazy?” I said. “If you leave that there, someday I will probably shoot you with it.”
He just laughed.
Ha.
Usually it’s a song on the car radio that makes him appear. I never know which one will do it. Always a surprise. That’s one of his dead-guy powers, materializing out of nowhere to punch me in the stomach with grief and all its magical ride-along emotions. And he gets to stay thirty-five forever, unlined and lovely, beaming out of that great photo at the funeral. Not me. Silver hair and countdown to Medicare.
Sarah Mclachlan’s “I Will Remember You (Will you remember me?)” can usually do it. Or anything from Linda Ronstadt’s Heart Like a Wheel—I wore out the vinyl in college during our many break-ups. Technologies change. Sadness, however, has a perennial sound.
So here I sit, still wrestling with the ghost of my love at nineteen.
That’s more of his dead-guy powers. He got the last word. You put a shotgun in your mouth and presto, nobody else can answer back. Nobody can ask you why, nobody can talk you out of it, nobody can help you see this might have been just one of those moments over the edge. And nobody gets the chance to try living with you a third time and maybe this time get it right. Boom. Presto. All gone.
So. That shotgun in the closet. Only one percent of suicide attempts are by trying to blow your brains out with a firearm. One percent. But because guns are so good at what they do—close to 90 percent kill-good—shooting yourself is the go-to method for well over half of all “successful” suicides. Can’t stomach-pump a bullet. Guns also make suicide horrifically impulsive. Instead of pondering the act for days or weeks or years, 70 percent of those who tried with a gun, and then managed to survive, said they’d thought about it for less than an hour. Twenty-four percent gave it only five minutes before pulling the trigger.
Yikes. Tell me we haven’t all had five minutes over the edge at one point or another.
Which may explain why he left the bedroom door open so the dog could find him. The dog he adored so much it used to make me jealous. The police discovered Razz going berserk in the house all alone, bedroom door open. That’s the part that made the least sense to me out of all of it, but it’s the part that ultimately made me realize the desperate psychic agony, the terrible black hole he must have been in to do that to a goofy yellow Lab. Not even to close the door first. Totally and utterly over the edge, if only for five minutes.
I know our fifteen years of ridiculous, mecurial back-and-forthing had something to do with his decision, in the mix with all the other things that contributed to a perceived lack of options in his prison of perception. It drove us both crazy, our inability to make such a huge and passionate love work for any length of time in the real world. And then, boom, presto, he does this, six weeks after I finally marry for the first time, to someone else. (A marriage, you might guess, decidely doomed.) I refuse, mostly, to be guilty about it. I know in my head that I can’t take the blame for someone else’s hopeless choice. But suicide is a vacuum cleaner, endlessly sucking you in with the pull of guilt as you sift for clues amid the debris.
“Who would play you in the movie about your life?” I once asked, one of those iconic questions in the relationship game.
“Bruce Dern,” he said. “You know, the Bruce Dern in Coming Home.”
Bruce Dern? Bruce Dern? I would have cast James Garner, from the Rockford Files.
“You’re nothing like Bruce Dern! You mean the guy who walks into the ocean at the end of the film and kills himself?”
“Yeah.”
Big clue.
Suicide leaves a long memory—a complicated grief, they call it. It is thought-rape, a complete and utter rape of the senses.
My first suicide was our next-door neighbor when I was fourteen. He was seventeen, funny, handsome, and smart. And evidently, though not to the naked eye, very, very sad. He took some pills, put a plastic bag over his head, and didn’t answer the phone when my older sister’s best friend kept calling. So she went and found him and ran down the street screaming at the top of her lungs. My sister ran with her, both engulfed in grief. I can still hear them. My mother ripped off the bag, got down on the ground, and started blowing into his mouth. I stood there over her, watching, listening to the indescribable sounds of air rattling in and rasping out of dead lungs, greenish tinge already around his hairline, pretty clear it was too late, but she tried for a horrible eon before the paramedics arrived. I can still hear that too. My second and third suicides weren’t successful, a roommate I couldn’t wake up, whose stomach pumping was in time; then an ex-boyfriend who called after he’d taken pills; and I had to hang up on him and dial to negotiate the ambulance and his rescue.
No one ever knows the heart of anyone else.
I know about death, “regular” death. My parents decided early on to expose us kids to death, to defuse its power, taking us to open-casket wakes even of people we hadn’t known very well or at all. We were half-Irish, and wakes were often full of laughter amid the sobs, with boozy great stories and gallows humor. We got comfortable with death, in a way. It was a good thing, I guess, a preparation. My father died too young of war-related heart disease. My older sister died way too young of a brain tumor. Both were lingering deaths that had a sense of closure, even relief, to those of us left behind, and we learned to integrate those heartbreaking losses into going on with life.
But suicide has no closure. It’s complicated, with the usual grief and bereavement jumbled up with the shock of sudden death, topped with layers of guilt and post-traumatic stress disorder and stigma and trying to figure out why, sucker-punched with your own complicated ensuing or ongoing depression. And anger and blame at the very person who stole away that person you loved. You don’t “get over it.” There is no closure. The best you can do is dilute its power, learn to push that ungainly and wrinkled parachute back into a pack that is impossibly small, where some bit always refuses to behave.
I was so mad at him that when his mother asked me for suggestions on what should be read at the funeral, I gave her a poem I knew he hated.
Not that I don’t understand about depression. I know about careening from low to high and back again. And I have often gravitated to people who do the same, attracted, perhaps, to some sort of mirror. I don’t know when we stopped calling it manic-depression and changed to bipolar, a linguistic loss since the manic highs and lows are truly descriptively manic, but that kind of thing runs in my Irish side of the family.
And I know about wanting to die. I know about wanting pain to just go away, any way you can make that happen. Alcohol, sex, drugs, any dumbing numbing excess or escape will serve when you feel that anything is better than this. As effective as slamming your big toe with a hammer to stop thinking about the pain in your spirit. The temporary fix to what feels hopeless, instead of reaching for a more permanent one. Knowing what suicide does to the ones leftover—that knowing has kept me safely from the edge more than once. But it’s not a guarantee. The thought-rape of someone else’s suicide, especially of someone you knew well, with whom you weren’t finished, makes you think about suicide far more than you might have done. It becomes a terrible viable option.
Once upon a time, on a perfect summer day, a boy and a girl walked barefoot on a perfect sandy beach, making up a fairy tale about themselves, falling into each other’s souls. All I have left of that afternoon is a piece of sea glass found on the shore, a smooth and tumbled piece of loveliness in a particular shade of turquoise blue that you can just about see through, but not quite. When I want to touch the past, I pick it up, fingering little flaws on its surface, a magic time machine. My memory is terrible—just ask my little sister, who can’t believe the amount of detail I have managed to forget over time, and who has taken it upon herself to remember all the stories of our childhood for me. But there are moments in my life that are indelibly etched upon my being, that can transport me instantly with acute and perfect recall of how it felt, how it still feels. I don’t quite know who that person was back then, but I do admire the reckless way she loved.
I began to wear that sea-glass color so much and so well that he dubbed it “judyblue.” It was a running joke. All these years later, I still look good in it. Goes great with silver hair. Sometimes even now when I see that shade, without consciously knowing why, my heart will stop, and a hunk of anguish will appear, sitting in my chest, riding shotgun.
With age we actually do get wiser. Our coping mechanisms improve. We get different, able to weather better or longer. Generally the highs get lower, but the lows get higher. Modern drugs can help, other people can help, you learn to help yourself. Most suicides and attempts and thoughts are by people under the age of thirty-five, people who haven’t had the chance yet to see that paradigms shift, a lot of stuff passes, changes, morphs into tolerable or good or even disappears. Or maybe it doesn’t, maybe something so awful gets in your way at any age, because anything can happen to anyone at any moment. Everyone’s broken. And sometimes the burden of trying to not be broken, trying not to be sad, for all the innumerable reasons that can cause you pain, or perhaps unable to keep living up to what you think is everyone else’s expectations, or maybe of trying to always make everyone laugh, like the comet that was Robin Williams—it can all just get to be too much. Or the chemistry of your brain wreaks an unmitigated havoc for no reason at all. And all you need is five minutes over the edge. And then, oh, you miss so much that lies ahead.
He would have loved the Internet. And Ireland. And knowing I wrote a movie.
Yearning, one way or the other, can do you in. Memory torments when the old images are bad ones, the moments you were glad to be shot of, but that can return to stab at unexpected times with unexpected pain that you yearn never was. But memory can torment even when the flashbacks are good, because you can yearn too hard and too long for those moments to return, to be equaled, to be surpassed. I will mourn those moments of passionate totality all my life, if only at this point in widely spaced intervals. Time doesn’t heal. It just makes the spaces in between pain grow longer and longer.
So. Coping mechanisms. Mine is humor. Because life is still funny, even amidst loss and grief, if you can just let it. Laughter is the tool that can jumpstart me out of sadness sometimes. Even when I don’t feel like it, because even a fake hearty laugh has been shown to change your brain chemistry, an inner pharmacy proven to reduce pain—or at least raise your pain threshold—that seems to increase the happy endorphins, decrease stress hormones, load you up on oxygen at even the cellular level. Einstein famously said that you can’t solve a problem from the same plane of consciousness on which it was created. So I break the sad relays when I remember to, when I can, with belly laughs I don’t initially believe in, but that end up getting me to a different level, out of the blue.
We color memory. It’s not a fine-tuned ability. We color it bluntly with crayons, coloring outside the lines, or only partially filling them in, usually with broken stubs, old, melted and misshapen, coloring as if our lives depended upon it. All we have are our colors, and the power to choose the hues.
And with those colors comes a revisionist history to suicide. Even though he seemingly got the last word, I have the control in the end. I am still here. I can rewrite what happened and skew it to my heart’s content, try to make more order, color it however ineptly with my assorted tones, change the shading when I need, and when I want, when I can. Because the only thing I have any power over, though I have to remember it over and over and over again, is how I choose to react.
Sometimes, when he’s there riding shotgun, out of the blue, I tell a joke.
Knock knock.
Who’s there?
Boo.
Boo who?
Just boo, you dope. You’re a ghost.
And sometimes, every once in a while, the complications drop away and my memory is simple and pure and uncluttered, and all I remember is love.
And color it, judyblue.