On Understanding my Mother and her Suicide, Eleven Years Later.
This week’s newsletter contains content that could be activating/triggering, including writing about suicide.
My life has been a series of emergences. I learned to swim while holding my breath, submerged, to keep safe. No splashing. All movement happened on the inside, where I created different worlds for myself. I learned to extract myself from my body and live from outside myself, eschewing sensation, eschewing presence. Not consciously. For survival.
In May 2010 my mother drank enough wine to make her handwriting shaky, took some vicodin, and put the barrel of a pearl-handled pistol to her temple. I often wonder how long she held it there. If she felt the shape of it against the softest part of her skull, the part her mother must have stroked when she was just a baby. If she thought of her mother. She pulled the trigger. I had been calling her; maybe her phone had been ringing just then, when it happened.
Her rental house was littered with handwritten notes, some crumpled.
She was in Seattle, I was in Alaska. Pacing my yurt, whose skylight was shaping the dusky sunlight into a circle on my plywood floor. Inside my chest something was exploding. The next morning, I convinced a friend of hers to go to my mom’s rental house and check on her. Our voices were connected when she opened the door to my mother’s room and screamed. I screamed. I collapsed on the plywood floor. I never want to make a sound like that again.
I arrived there on Mother’s Day, noticing first the bloody mattress leaning against a tall bush and then the peonies whose heads were too heavy to stay upright. The blue of the sky saturated everything.
I was there a week— I could only afford a week off from work. I scrambled to take care of everything: the pile of credit card receipts and bills on the dining room table, notifying friends and family of what she’d done, telling them she didn’t have cancer (something she admitted lying about in her notes). Comforting others. I was so good at comforting. Me? I wasn’t really there. My cousin poured us white wine and took a picture of us clinking our glasses for Instagram. I kept thinking: my mom killed herself. The phrase looped. Killed herself. Killed herself.
She had nothing but a nice car and a bunch of antiques. No house, no property. A lot of debt. I flew back to Alaska. I was called to a fire in the wilderness. I started my training as a helicopter crew member. In the helicopter I stared down and the Alaskan tundra, puddles of water sparkling like shards of glass, and imagined sliding the door open, opening my arms wide, and jumping. The glass would surely cut me. I would surely die. It sounded nice.
For a few days we were socked in by the Kantishna River, left without a helicopter because it was too smoky to fly. I sat in the sand and fiddled with the short willow stalks, whose tops had been munched by rabbits. I stood by the river and watched the sun on the water. I didn’t cry. Not in the daytime. Only at night, after our sixteen hour shifts ended, would I retreat to my tent, pressing my hands against the softest parts of my skull, my temples, to hold in the pain. I stayed silent, still underwater, holding my breath.
We killed a bear when he came for our food. The gunshot sounded twice, and we heard him tumble. There were lots of bears in Alaska. I petted its head, its rough fur, and wanted to place its soft dangling tongue back inside its mouth.
When a bear is skinned, it looks human.
I didn’t know about PTSD then. I didn’t know about resourcing. I didn’t know about self-care. I knew about survival. I knew I’d grown up with adults who hurt me regularly, and then felt terrible about it, or sometimes didn’t. I knew it was my job to make the people around me happy, in order to stay safe. I knew fawning; I knew acquiescence. I knew I needed money. I didn’t know myself at all. I hadn’t been allowed that freedom.
That summer I threw up all my food in a bucket I kept in my yurt. I slept with a coworker and got pregnant. I had an abortion. I can’t even remember it. I went to fire after fire and stayed out in the Alaskan wilderness for months. I told whoever would listen: my mom killed herself. The phrase, repeating in my head, needed to be repeated and released. I wanted it to be released. I wanted it to be untrue, or for someone to reply: I understand. Instead, people reacted with surprise, anxiety, terror, fear, aversion. I took that to mean that my particular experience was so terrible others couldn’t even imagine it. Wouldn’t imagine it. That I was now living a life others refused to comprehend.
Eleven years later, coming up on the anniversary of my mom’s suicide, I know what resourcing is. I know what self-care is. I fawn less. I am a recovered bulimic. And yet, I hold my mother’s suicide inside of me. If I show it to others, I know many won’t be able to understand. Not totally. The impact of it. The obliterating pain of someone you love choosing to leave this world, so violently. The lost potential. The way, looking back, self-blame creeps in. If only I had. Maybe if I had.
When something terrible happens to us, we are forced to reckon with things no one would ever volunteer to reckon with. Our bodies, our brains, our souls resist it, and simultaneously brace for a recurrent tragedy. This is PTSD. My body, my brain, my soul assumes that the world is a place where terrible things happen, to me. I brace for them. When someone sets off fireworks on my street I scuttle from window to window, trying to see. Firecrackers, or gunshots? I lock my door. I wait for my pounding heart to slow, as I realize there is no threat.
To survive, to be okay, to stay alive, means that I need time alone, space to process. I can’t live my life the way some others can. This is a fact I have learned from experience. Events, good or bad, are exhausting. Relationship conflicts require hours and hours of sifting through my reactions, matching my sensations with reality, like holding up film to a window and trying to see the picture. Is this person a threat, or is my body telling me this person is a threat because of (blank)?
To survive, we sometimes have to deny our alarm bells, especially if the people meant to love and care for us instead hurt us. Denying intuition becomes a norm, and then others hurt us because we have denied our own terror and misgivings and trusted someone as damaged as we are.
Eleven years after my mother’s death, twenty-two years after the last time I was sexually assaulted, I rejoice in the sound of my alarm bells, my intuition. They are louder. Clearer. But still I must pause, sift, find the golden truth. Threat, or no threat?
I emerge. Eleven years after my mother’s death broke me open, I am here. I no longer leave my body. I breathe. I pat myself on the arm and whisper, “it’s okay.”
I don’t cry often. I think about my mom all the time. There are things I wish. I hold her complexity up to the light like a crystal, studying each seam, each texture. A young mother with a small child, doing her best. An abusive parent. An abuse survivor. A woman who wanted a man to save her. An alcoholic. Her generous heart, which could also be terrible. I see the reality of my mother, everything true at once, and the reality of myself, so flawed and dangerous and compassionate and loving. There is no perfection, no goodness without its counterpart. I see that reality because I must. I didn’t volunteer, but I am grateful for the sight.
There is no resolution. Eleven years later, the pain has not receded. I can dip into it. I can submerge myself. It is a wound I’ve learned to bandage carefully, hiding it from myself and others. I remove the bandage and find its no less tender. No scabbing. I want it that way. That tenderness? It’s my strength. It’s my willingness to understand. It’s my curiosity. My love. My ruthless truth. It me, saying to my mother: I see you. It’s okay. I understand. I forgive you.
Check out my 12-week course for embodiment and self-acceptance HERE.
