One page moment--
if you stepped into my story in flashback scenes...
SCENE:
I felt alarmed, stricken and deeply uncomfortable. I had only been in a funeral home two other times that I remembered. I was sixteen years old. My best friend at my side. I knew she also felt uneasy. But we stood strong. We were there for Lee.
I remembered feeling an additional wave of discomfort as we approached him in the visitation hour line. Lee normally looked stoic, calm. He didn't smile often.
But now, he looked anguished. His countenance looked pained. I had never seen someone who looked like they were experiencing deep bodily pain from an emotional wound. His body posture crumpled; it looked like it was hard for him to keep his body upright.
He saw us. We made eye contact. He crumpled further, face red, bursting into tears. His body wreaked with sobs.
I didn't know what to say. I didn't know how to comfort him. I wanted to, but what could I say?
What can anyone say when your father has killed himself?
It was not until several years later, where I would better understand Lee’s position in the receiving line.
SCENE:
I am standing at the front of the room in the funeral home, receiving visitors. Everyone stands awkwardly waiting for their turn to speak to my mother, my brother and I. I feel the heavy gaze of someone's eyes on me. I look up. The eyes dart, do not make eye contact with me.
My aunt approaches the line, she speaks to my mother and brother. Then she comes up to me in a forced, awkward, almost violent embrace.
"How are you doing?" She asks, somewhat dramatically, in hushed tones, like it's some conspiracy, hidden secret. Her eyes big.
"I'm fine," I reply, automatically.
"Because..." She trails off.
I lean in.
"Your dad DID just die." She looks at me, waiting for a reaction, a response.
I am spotlighted. I feel it on me again, her gaze. She is expecting some different emotion, a performance or response that I am not giving her.
I don't react differently. I don't give her what she wants.
I shrug. I glance at my mother, checking on her.
I catch my brother out of my periphery.
I look at her, my expression hard. I move on, with my gaze, to the next person in line.
SCENE:
My doctoral seminar has just ended. There is the shuffle of books and rustle of papers and movement as everyone is preparing to leave the room. I pick up my phone from my school bag. And see a missed call from my mom with a voicemail, not an unusual occurrence, as we talk quite frequently. I call and listen to the voicemail: "Danielle, call me when you get this," the urgency in her tone is different. The pace with which she delivers the request.
I am my way out the door when I call her, "Hi Mom," I say. "What going on?"
"Dad passed away."
"WHAT?!???" I say, shocked. He was old with COPD, a condition from his years of smoking, but not in dire health to the point of death.
"Well, I got home. A police officer was here, he said, I'm sorry ma'am, there's no easy way to tell you this but your husband took his own life."
I don't exactly have words for what happened within me when that happened. But I do know that I had to sit down. I was walking down the stairs. I needed to sit.
Looking back on it now, that surprises me, I never understood people whose bodies give out and betray them. I never had the weak knees moment from some emotional hardship. But then, I had to sit.
I told her that I didn't want to be alone or there in the house where he had done it. I said I would drive there as soon as possible. Now, I just had to get my knees to work.
I suddenly felt alone and scared. Panicked.
The class had cleared out and walked down the stairs walking around me. My professor remained. She was walking down the stairs.
Again, involuntarily, it seemed, my arm reached out and grabbed hers. It clutched her and pulled her down beside me. She looked at me, knowing something serious was taking place, asked me what was wrong.
This was out of character for me. It must have seemed a moment of desperation to her.
It was.
I told her: My father just killed himself.
She sank onto the steps with me with a soft, "ohhhhh."
I admire her for what she said next. Absorbing it herself and allowing me to do so, she simply said:
"Your life has changed just forever."
It may seem obvious, and it was. But she didn't try to say something dumb like many do, but instead held space for the shock of what I was feeling, the weight, she put words to it before I could do so
Many others sense have said much less helpful things after hearing my father killed himself.
"Yes," I affirmed.
“What are you going to do now? Where will you go?”
She offered to drive me to NY where my mother was, a 4 hour drive, which I politely declined.
I later called my best friend who was in Cleveland, on the way, to make the journey with me.
That human moment, that my professor offered me, it is part of the overall memory, the flashback of one of the worst moments of my life, where she listened and held space for me, when I needed it the most.