Knowing and Not Knowing

How my mother's suicide has taught me to reside in liminal spaces.

(this post mentions and engages with the suicide of a loved one)

Me at the space needle when I was young. Photo by my mother.

I am not unfamiliar with grief, though I didn’t know what the sensation was when I was younger and first felt it. I don’t remember life without grief. I don’t remember moments of pure happiness in my childhood. I remember, always, a sense that something was missing.

My father’s absence, maybe, was the first time I experienced grief. But he left when I was so young. Maybe, then, it was my mother’s next partner and his absence. I called him Dad, and loved him like a father.

The dim understanding of — no, reckoning with, the absence of a father-figure dug into the cavern of my chest and created a small pond, its surface smooth and mirrorlike. I shielded myself behind the mirror of the grief. My mother, whose moods were unpredictable, tolerated no sadness, for if I was sad it invoked her own grief, unfathomable and infinite in appearance (though I know now that every…