9 years ago today
October 29, 2015
I was in a doctoral seminar, in year two of course-work for my PhD program.
I finished the class and saw a missed call from my mother.
I returned her call, and she informed me that my father was dead, that he had taken his own life.
I have thought a lot about that memory in these nine years. I’ve replayed it in my mind, again and again.
But I’ve thought about it from my own experience.
Now, nine years later, after some healing and trauma-work as well as in a better mental health state, I think about my mother and her experience.
I think about what it must have been like for her, to have to make those phone calls to her children, her daughter and her son, letting them know that their father was dead.
My poor mother, already traumatized from life, and heavily depressed and unwell, processing her own shock, now had to call her children—the two people she loved most in the world, the ones she made her everything, to try to protect them from life’s harms…
She may have thought that at least they were adults now, and the verbally abusive and emotionally distant alcoholic father could no longer hurt her children, the same way that they had before.
But life is full of unexpected twists and turns--even ugly surprises—
I distinctly remember how she started the conversation, first informing me was he gone. When I asked her how, she said it was suicide.
I also recall how she told me it took place with my brother:
He started crying immediately after she told him that dad was dead. When he learned why, then he got angry.
I wonder how he processed so much so quickly. How he was able to switch gears, flip on emotions, so quickly.
My reaction was not anger or grief, but complete shock.
It’s interesting how different people react to shocking, grave, traumatic and life-changing news.
I had a hard time processing. I couldn’t have reacted with anger or grief, immediately, because I couldn’t make sense of what was happening.
Now that I recall, in fact, I remember absorbing the news that he was dead, allowing it to sink into my brain and understanding.
But then, when I got the added information that he had taken his own life, things got hazier. More sludgy, as if in slow-motion, trying to trudge through quicksand.
In retrospect, I think that that detail is important because it speaks to how our brains shut down to protect us from unbearable news.
I could process that he was dead, but couldn’t/wouldn’t, when I learned that he completed suicide.
I love fall, but I have started to dread the late autumn season. I’ve written about this at length, because of the embodied memories of what it felt like outside when my body learned that my father had shot himself. The body recalls, the mind remembers, hence the body keeps score.
However, I now live in the south, and with climate change, our days are still hovering at around 75-80 degrees. So, the air isn’t yet cool and crisp, the leaves are still green or now just starting to turn colors.
I am glad, that there isn’t yet the crunch of the dead leaves underfoot that I associate with that memory.
Because that point of the fall season makes my body recall. In fact, it demands recollection and self-protection, in very odd ways. Even when/if I’m not actively thinking about the time of year, my body braces itself.
It remembers:
That this is what it was like, what it looked like, felt like outside, when dad died. When the first trauma, the initial suicide, happened.
Memory is a funny thing. Embodied memories are downright bizarre and creepy, how they store trauma and wounds within it, they tell the stories that we can’t/don’t, and haven’t even processed yet.
Three years ago, during my dad’s deathversary, my partner at the time, was there when I drank so much wine that I threw up. Then I cried, bawled. I remembered my father, how he died, the tufts of hair, the remnants of brain, that I found in the aftermath.
I am so very grateful to be sober. Because all the booze didn’t make the memories any less painful. It didn’t change that he died, or how he died. My brother would die the same way. And drinking to sleep and manage my insomnia became a regular practice. Drinking to escape reality of two deaths became the norm. Drinking to numb out and self-medicate and protect myself from feelings of grief that I thought would grumble me became my coping strategies.
Until I had to face that they weren’t coping strategies, they were self-destructive and self-abuse. They were intertwined with feelings of guilt that I was still here, a way to try to cover up the admission that—
I don’t know how to cope with these losses. I don’t know how to live. To survive, to go on.
As I remember my father today, and my brother and mother, as these experiences are also theirs, I just am glad that I now know and completely believe them all—
To finally, finally, be at peace.
