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 i…