Reflections on the Reverberations of my Mother's Suicide.

Content warning: suicide, addiction, trauma.

It’s been a hard week. I say that knowing that I have all my needs met, which is a privilege. I have a job, an apartment, a comfortable bed, food. I don’t take these things for granted. Last night while driving home I saw a man sitting next to a small fire he’d started on the sidewalk underneath a bridge, warming himself. He was situated in between several tents, most of them connected by a complicated series of tarps and plastic bags. I am glad to see the tents, because I want people to be able to shelter themselves. The tents are terrible, because I want everyone to have equal access to housing, whether or not they can afford it.

Sometimes I wonder if I’m meant to be in Seattle. The city is saturated with memories. That park in Pioneer Square where I got jumped when I was thirteen; that movie theater where someone much older than me kissed me when I had run away from home; the road leading to the house my mother rented in the last years of her life, where her body was found after she had shot herself. I don’t go down it every day, but I have gone down it, and I will again. Everything here— the lush waterfront parks, the skyline, the low hanging clouds and their multitudinous grays and bruise-blues, reminds me of something, and I am constantly asking myself, do I remember that? I stare into the city like a crystal ball, looking for memories my psyche has blackened and singed, burning them away for my own sanity.

I don’t only remember places, but sensations and feelings. I can wrap my old selves around me and situate myself in former states of being. I remember the fear I felt when I was homeless, and how that fear made me blind to my surroundings and the people I met. I remember the stretching nothingness of dissociation after my mother’s death, the trips to Public Storage on Capitol Hill, the walks in Discovery Park by myself, longing for another life. All I need to do is cross a bridge to find my child-self and the pristine sadness which was my natural and most dominant state. It saturated everything. A sense of nostalgia for a life I knew I wasn’t getting; a longing to be loved, or, if not that, safe.

It’s late in the winter and these memories, sensations, and former selves beckon. I ruminate on my mother’s last year of life, late February 2010, her gazing out of a picture window overlooking Lake Washington, watching the crows. She liked the way they called to each other in the fog. On this date eleven years ago she had a little over two months left. Then she was gone, leaving behind a bunch of crumpled notes, a pile of receipts on my grandparent’s table, documenting her overspending and the debt she left behind. There were dirty dishes in the sink, a nearly empty refrigerator, save a few takeout boxes and condiments, a glass of wine on her nightstand with a dead fruit fly adrift on its liquid surface, a quilt I folded up to keep, until my hand touched a small reservoir of her dried blood and threw it on the ground.

I don’t talk much about my mother’s death, because It hurts to think about, and yet I can’t pretend it never happened. It will always be part of me, like my mom herself.

Sometimes I allow myself to imagine what my mother’s life could have been like had she gotten help for her alcoholism, for her own PTSD. I think about my journey, sifting through the remnants of past choices and trauma, my alcoholism and drug addiction, the number of sexual partners I’ve had, the times I misconstrued fear as attraction, the ways of being I was so accustomed to and my ignorance of their origins. A lack of impulse control, we both had that. She doesn’t have impulses anymore because she is dead. I have many impulses, and yet I have caressed my psyche for enough years that they are less electric and, most importantly, more discernible. For most of my life I was a walking impulse, muscled like a snake, always striking.

I picture my mother in her own kitchen, finally comfortable without a man. She always needed men. I inherited that trait from her and for many years thought it was my own. I picture an apron, a scent of Mrs. Meyer’s Bergamot cleaner (her favorite), steamed crab, butter. The television on, a warm house filled with silly knick knacks and framed Andy Warhol prints. All the things she loved. No booze, no cigs. I never knew my mom sober, which means she barely knew herself sober.

It’s not only a kind of life I picture for her, a life with open windows and confidence, solo travel and adventure, but the things I would say to her. While she was alive I clung to the ways she harmed me, and there were many, all ongoing. I inhabited the role of the victim perfectly, and she did, too. This is where my imagination falters. How can I tell my mom how I feel (I am so sorry, I love you so much, I shouldn’t have been so hard on you, I know you did your best) when those things feel both true and false. I am sorry. I do love her so much. I could have been easier on her. Did she do her best?

Do we all do our best?

Sometimes when I am with the beautiful children I nanny for, preschool aged, I think of the things my mother told me when I was a child. The words she used. Fat. Selfish. Worst kid in the world. I feel the flat of her hand on my cheek, her hands tight around my ankles, the carpet pulling my shirt up as she dragged me down the hallway. I think of how vulnerable I was, eager to please, and all the things I told myself about my badness to convince myself I was safe with the one person who was meant to keep me so.

I also think about my mother’s own childhood, her mother a drug addict, her father a major fan of corporal punishment, her brothers misogynists both. She, like me, left home when she was a teenager, seeking an escape to something better. I aborted my teenage conception; she didn’t. That’s how I’m here. And I am so grateful to be here.

She did try. Truly. And I think that’s what’s so painful, is that we both tried, although our tries never fully aligned in the way we wanted them to. It wasn’t that she didn’t love me, but that for her, love was something dangerous, just as it became for me. Love was something painful, intertwined with abuse and exploitation and codependence. I don’t know if she knew what love was, because I don’t think love is a feeling but rather a commitment, and one can’t make that commitment unless one is seeing clearly, and trauma is nothing if not always eclipsing reality with our own projections of past terrors and harmful deeds. It’s taken me forty years to figure out that I can trust most people, but the intellectual understanding and the ability to do so seem so remote from each other that I’m not sure I will ever be able to fully allow people into my life. I hope so. I wish my mom could have, too. Maybe it’s for her that I keep working towards that.

After my mom’s suicide I walked into her rental house, into a stark and crystallized anger which coated everything with a gloss sheen. I knew she was angry at me because I had chosen to leave Seattle and take a job fighting fires in Alaska. I say “choose” loosely. I was broke and so was she. I was also setting a boundary, something I’d never been able to do with her. I’d been practicing, and as I practiced she escalated her need for me until it created a lie about having cancer. She clung to that lie, even when I told her I didn’t care if it was a lie, I would love her. I did love her. It was only in her suicide note that she could release it. I’m sorry I lied about the cancer.

But I wasn’t the only one my mother was angry at. I also know my mother wished our lives had been better. Wished she could undo her past choices. I was a reminder of her misdeeds. If only I could have taken her hands in mine (I still remember every detail of her hands) and said I forgive you. I couldn’t do that back then. I hadn’t even forgiven myself yet.

We reach areas of understanding at our own pace. It can’t be accelerated. An area of understanding is a field. The openness of a field can be terrifying. Some of us run through the field without understanding where we are. Some of us run for our entire lives.

Is it worse to run through the field or walk into its center, where we can see everything?

Neither is comfortable.

Sometimes my body shudders with longing. It’s not for a lover, for fame, for money. It’s for my mother. To have ten more minutes with her. To tell her all the things I know now, that I didn’t know then. To say with the utmost forgiveness and love: I miss you.

My mother chose to leave me and I’ll never know why. It wasn’t something she did to me, only something she did. Most of the hurt we encounter isn’t even meant to hurt us. But it does.

When I want to feel my mother and my childhood and my father, who hasn’t been mentioned but was a peripheral part of my life, I go down to Pike Place Market. In non-pandemic times I’d go to the Athena and sit in a booth near the window. I’d buy a bowl of clam chowder and dump a small bag of fish shaped crackers in it. My mom used to put those bags in her purse where they’d eventually burst and litter the entire inside with crumbs, which would intermingle with stray tobacco from her Marlboro Lights 100’s.

The winter after my mother’s death I went there and stared out the window, mesmerized by a large bush whose branches danced with the wind, floating up and then downwards, as if in its center were a bellows, as if it were breathing. I stared at that bush until I understood that everything around us is always breathing along with us. Nothing here is unmoving. There is no silence. There is nothing but change. That was comforting to me, and still is.

Suicide is not something that can be resolved. When someone dies, they are still with us, and we continue having a relationship with them. When someone dies by suicide, there are unanswered questions, regrets, guilt. I wonder, if I lived in a different city, in a different landscape, would I not think about my mother so much? But I want to think about her, to keep her alive, to remember my mistakes so I don’t make them again. I want to heal.

If you or someone you know is struggling with suicidal thoughts, please reach out to someone close to you, or call the suicide hotline at 800-273-8255.