The light is coming through the window sideways, and there in my towel still dripping water onto the wood floor, is where my heart breaks with sudden surprise when he comes to tell me a friend has killed himself.
I sit on the white sheets and feel the blood rush up in my ears; denial flooding my senses like the sound of the ocean in a conch shell. “You must be wrong. There is no way.”
He was a new friend. Not close. Yet. Becoming, maybe. The tessarae of quiet conversations had begun to fit together in my mind to make the mosaic of someone full of longing. He was caught in the humdrum of a life too full, too filled with things and forward motion. He had a brother who had also killed himself. Another, died in a fire. Ache must have been like the small broken skeletons of fishes fossilized the shale in of his ribcage.
Gills of sorrow always winnowing open and closed with a frantic private panic he couldn’t say. Sometimes I though I saw this in his dark brown eyes, across the table from me in a crowded room. Still, we couldn’t have known. We sat across from him and his high school sweetheart, married for years, their daughter Bean’s age and their son not even one, and ate nachos just last week. He held his son in his arms and walked around the restaurant until he fell asleep. Smiled. Said words that went out into clattering air of the restaurant. Laughed.
“I don’t want daddy to be gone,” Bean sobs with unexpected emotion, overhearing us talk. The house is full of sunlight. We’ve just cleaned up from breakfast. We carry him to the couch together, wrapping him with kisses, feeling both grateful and greedy for the moment, our cheeks touching.
The day after he kills himself it rains heavily and big branches from the poplars at the end of the road shear off, hitting electrical wires, making the neighborhood dark. In the morning when we hear the news I call his wife, and her voice sounds like broken teacups falling to the floor. She says she’s planning to take her kids to the Halloween parade, unable to make life stop moving forward. Her daughter was so looking forward to going, dressed as the family cat, anticipating sweets.
I keep calling throughout the day even though I know everyone else is there—closer friends, family, maybe people bearing official papers and information and possibly his body. She doesn’t call back, and on their answering machine still his voice, in a few words making them a family unit, not yet erased and replaced by just hers. I think of how many times she’ll play that message, keep it on purpose, just to hear him. I think of how when my father died I wore his blue flannel shirt for weeks, pressing my face into the fabric to smell him there.
Today the sky is cloudless and the sunlight falls in sleepy autumn angles and the trees are suddenly bare; leaves are strewn in wet heaps on the ground. When I sit on the sloping lawn at the back of the house, my gaze unexpectedly falls on a garden snake eating a frog twice the size of its mouth. Bean comes to sit on my lap and we watch its body writhe, mouth unhinged, the frog body slowly being consumed.
“Why is he eating that frog, Mommy?”
“It’s the way things are little guy, snakes need to eat too.”
“But now the frog isn’t alive any more is it?”
“No.”
“Why?”
The sunlight dapples his soft cheeks. His fingernails are caked with mud. On the couch when we held him and assured him daddy would not be leaving, he told us we needed to make a chest to gather stars in, to keep us safe. “Happy stars,” he said. Out of the blue. No context, no segue from the previous conversation.
Maybe if our friend had had a box of stars he wouldn’t have…
I know so little of his life, or hers. Recent friends, before the ties were deep enough to warrant pointed questions, or concern, even though we both tasted depression in the air when we were at their house. Like smelling snow, metallic, raw. We held our breath, laughed, shared meals, left grateful for the messy love of our own lives.
And now. Now what? How do you possibly reach out and hold someone who is as utterly blindsided by tragedy as she is? How do you tell them they can survive, even when they say they can’t—and you’re not even sure if it is possible to go on breathing when you’re drowning the way she must be drowning? I keep calling. Offer to bring dinner by. Feel helpless, and selfishly grateful it isn’t me. I can’t help it.
Outside the pale sky is strewn with fishbone clouds. On my lap Bean naps, while the late afternoon sun paints the walls. The day keeps on moving towards twilight, one day towards the next.
even in the midst of such a tragedy, you capture it so beautifully. thank you for sharing. so sorry for your loss: sending thoughts to you, and to their family. blessings.
“How do you possibly reach out and hold someone who is as utterly blindsided by tragedy as she is? How do you tell them they can survive, even when they say they can’t—and you’re not even sure if it is possible to go on breathing when you’re drowning the way she must be drowning?”
… You offer the best of your humanity — the security of your solidness. You nurture. You bring food and leave it on the doorstep. You send a handwritten note. You write poetry and leave it for her. You become a soft place to land if she needs it… You do whatever it is that feels right to you… but most of all (and this is the hardest part, I think), you expect nothing from her. You allow her the space to move through this in her own way; in her own time.
I wish you the inner peace and grace to be able to reflect the strength and courage that are most certainly at the core of her being, but which your friend may not know how to tap into right now. She is extraordinarily lucky to have your friendship. I am so very sorry for your loss…
Christina, I’m really, really sorry.
“How do you possibly reach out and hold someone who is as utterly blindsided by tragedy as she is? How do you tell them they can survive, even when they say they can’t—and you’re not even sure if it is possible to go on breathing when you’re drowning the way she must be drowning?â€
Yes, I agree with Lynn. You help pull her up when she can’t even say help. You bring food, you write notes. You ask for nothing in return. You love her when she can’t love back. She can only get through this second by second. She will not be able to give back but what you are doing will matter.
My thoughts are with you and I am so sorry for your loss.
sorry for your loss.
What an awful, awful thing.
A terrible tragedy. And an experience that I also went through at the beginning of the summer, when a close friend’s brother took his own life. It was the beginning of an awful summer.
You express your emotions so beautifully and I was drawn back instantly to the grief, to the questions, to the unknown.
I’m sorry for what you are going through.
I’m so very sorry for this loss.
I can’t imagine what kind of pain he must have been in…and all you can do now is to be present for this friend, to call her whenever you think of her and have a moment, to do exactly what you’re doing. To love her and support her months and months from now. My heart is breaking at the thought of something so sad – you can’t help but wonder why, especially with two young children who will wonder, now, for the rest of their lives, why their daddy didn’t want to (couldn’t) be there for them.
His daughter, the cat, the parade… I had to stop reading, then return after the fear and the heartache subside enough for me to see the words straight on the page. I am so sorry for you all. I am so very sorry.
So very sorry Christina. I’ll be thinking of you.
i am so sorry for your loss.
and for that of your friend
and her family. just be there for her.
that’s the most you can do.
i had a friend who’s mom committed suicide when she was 21. she called me and said, “can you come” it was 2 hours away, i jumped in my car and was at her side, no words were needed.
again, i am so sorry……
tara
i’m so sorry.
oh christina. so sorry.
oh my, i have tears in my eyes. for that poor soul who, for whatever the reason, felt he had no other option. and for you, his wife, his family, left to mourn the loss and try to make sense of it all. hugs to you.