On My Mother’s 64th Birthday Had She Not Died by Suicide
A short reflection on the profundity of a media hiatus and self-forgiveness
A note: this post contains content that may be triggering, particularly relating to suicide loss.
On my mother’s birthday I stopped watching television.
During the two days before my mother’s birthday, I watched hours and hours of television. I binged shows and movies. I told myself it was okay, because for the thirteenth year my mother wasn’t here to celebrate her birthday, and each year that passes I am closer to the age she was when she died by suicide.
But on her birthday, I knew it wasn’t okay. I knew it wasn’t healthy. I knew I was doing exactly what she had done. Turning away from reality. From sensation. From pain. From complexity.
Turning away from myself.
In the years before my mother died, after her second divorce, before she bought the gun; she drank.
The years before my mother’s suicide were the last of her forties and the last of my twenties. We had always been separated by only twenty-one years. In the last years of my mother’s forties she drank more and more. In the last years of my twenties I drank less and less.
In the year before my mother died, she lost her job, and drank more, and spent more money despite having less money. I started therapy. I told her: I need some space. She told me: I have cancer. It’s terminal. It’s stage four.
I didn’t believe her, but I didn’t believe my disbelief.
When she told me she was dying, I could not say: I need space. So, I moved to where she was. I said: I am yours. Again.
But it was not enough. I asked about doctors; diagnoses. These were questions she didn’t want to answer. Everyone said: You are such a good daughter,
until I left my mother, with her cancer that was colon or brain, depending on who I asked.
When I asked her friends, gently, if they thought she could, perhaps (maybe) be lying. If they, perhaps (maybe) had noticed the all day drinking, or the inconsistencies, they looked at me, incredulous.
It was then I knew that I was alone.
I did not yet know about the gun; her plans.
Would I have left if I had known?
When I left I gave her the business cards of several therapists and said, I’ll stay if you take me to the doctor with you.
She shook her head and we embraced, our cheeks touching; our tears mingling. It was my last try. It was the last time I saw her.
It’s been three full days now with no television and no social media.
On what would have been my mother’s birthday I thought of the year after her death. The panic attacks and dissociation and the new therapist who told me that my nightly possessions were not possessions but panic attacks.
My laptop; my sleeping companion, its soft fuzzy light like a blanket protecting me from what lived in the darkness.
What lived in the darkness: (the gun; the note that said I am sorry I lied about the cancer; the autopsy that said: there was no cancer; the two thousand dollars in cash in an envelope xoxo. everything unsaid and everything I could never ask).
In the year after my mother’s death it was like I had no skin. Everything hurt. A look. A song.
Kindness hurt as much as meanness. Or more.
In the year after my mother’s death I was alone 98% of the time.
In the thirteen years since my mother’s death I have not let anyone touch me. I have not let my guard down. I am not sure I can.
But how will I know who I am (what I can do) if I keep turning away?
Every year that passes, I forgive my mother. Forgiveness feels good.
If I forgive her I am a good person.
If I forgive her enough…
But what about me? Can I forgive myself?
How can I forgive myself if I don’t know, truly, what is happening inside of me?
How can I forgive myself if I refuse to listen to myself?
How can I forgive myself if I keep turning away?
In the three days since I have stopped watching television and the two weeks since I have quit social media, I have remembered my dreams. Not aspirations but real dreams, the kind that happen when you’re sleeping. I have woken up halfway here and halfway there. It’s as if my subconscious is rejoicing in my presence.
I have come home from school in the evenings, exhausted, and instead of watching a show I listen to a book while making my dinner. On the first night I cried. I thought to myself: have I been alone for thirteen years? Last night I prepared dinner, took a bath, read poetry, and went to bed. There was no reason to cry.
I had forgotten how much I love being alone. The choices I can make for myself. The spaciousness of my own thoughts. The sounds and silences of my dwelling.
The television is about the past or the future. Social media is aspirational. But what am I aspiring to if I am not present in my own life, right now? In this moment?
Who is telling me what I should be, and why am I listening?
My mother would be 64 now, and I am 43. In eight years I will be the age she was when she decided she knew the answer. Sometimes I want to go back in time and tell her: it is not the answer! I can go into a spiral thinking of everything I would have done differently.
But why? What use is that? The past is like a dream itself, malleable and reshaped thousands of times. What is true, and what do I remember?
I am 43 and I am alive and I want to be here, and somehow despite everything I have been given the gift of presence, of being able to stand being here, and often enjoying being here, and sometimes hating being here but knowing that change is always coming, always on its way. Change is the one reliable element.
If I live the next eight years in opposition to my lineage, to my mother’s path, a lineage and a path of addiction and turmoil, then I live the next eight years in inquiry. As practice. Turning towards instead of away. Leaping into what terrifies me and finding out, again and again, that the most terrifying things have already happened to me. I have died already. I have been obliterated more than once, and survived, and now I am ready to do more than only survive.
My relationship to my mother (and the way she died) was very different from yours, but it resonates so deeply for me. It's so regrettable, yet seems inevitable, that our mothers' wounds will become ours to carry once they are gone. Learning to disentangle and release them so that we can become ourselves is hard, sometimes lonely work. Living into the healing that they could not do for themselves (and we can't do for them, either, but can do for ourselves) seems a fitting tribute.
this is brilliant. thank you.