In sharing his stories and childhood with me, my partner has told me that he had very solid parents, their support of him very stable and foundational, the relationship that they modeled with each other. They were also educated, successful, and active.
In summing it up, he said to me,
“They provided a template for life.”
That shit blows my mind.
Now, I loved my parents. I did. Both of them.
I know they loved me as best as they were able and gave me what they could.
I see them also as heavily traumatized and emotionally wounded and unstable people, in many many ways.
But never ever would I say that they provided me with a template for life.
My mother would readily admit to this. She was a good momma in always wanting better for me than she had had or that she could give me in my childhood.
She knew what she gave me lacked and she felt terribly about it.
My father was lost in a haze of alcoholism and I don’t think he could even go there mentally other than the few years of his life when he was sober.
In short, I can’t grasp what it must be like to grow up in a family and with parents like that, who offer such a solid foundation, where you feel like that they provide you with a template for life.
So, I’ve started to reflect on how impressionable we are for the examples set forth for us, both the ones we wish to emulate and the others that we are adamant to avoid. At all costs.
And I’ve also thought about—
What does it mean when you have to procure your own template?
How about when you go forward to try to find other stories and templates of people who have also endured two suicides in the immediate family and you find none?
No such template exists. That I could find, anyway.
This is why I feel called to write my story.
Which isn’t to say that my story or version is the right one, or that I would ever categorize it as a template per se.
I firmly believe we all have to find our own ways through losses, grief, suicides.
But I wish I had found just that—many examples and possibilities of versions that existed and were readily available.
Instead, I have pieced together tidbits here and there from others stories, their struggles with mental health help, grave losses, suicide survivorship, trauma embodied, PTSD, etc, etc.
I looked for stories of how humans keep breathing, how we go on, how we endure and power through the unthinkable, because they matter.
How we learned to go on, to survive, it matters.
Because also— similar to how we may reject certain templates on resume formats or powerpoint presentations, it does help to have one to build content from, rather than to start from square one, an empty page.
I don’t have a template.
I can’t grasp what life would be like if there were one.
It is bittersweet because I also think that I would feel a grave sadness and deep empathy to learn that there were many others out there like me.
But, as they haven’t appeared—
I am just making this shit up as I go along.
Constantly trying to learn, to heal, to read, to process, to release trauma, to tend to my broken heart and deep grief and loss.
I don’t know any other way.