Completed

My mothers sister killed herself in November.  I spent part of my Thanksgiving week traveling to view and claim her body.  Of all the horror I have witnessed; this was one of my more disturbing moments.  I went in alone and I still wish that I had not.

She is number three.  My sister.  My mother.  And now her.  They are a group of three while I am on the outside looking in.

I wish people would leave my life without forcing themselves, by their own hands, through that narrow tunnel of death.  Forced is never easy.  For the person dying or the one left behind.

I try not to imagine what their final moments might have been like.  I walk that fine edge of looking but then ripping my eyes away.  I want to know but at the final moment I turn away because I am not a part of their sacred group. 

I wander into another kind of group that is supposed to support people like myself.  Those left behind to answer all the questions that never have an answer.

There are six of us.  A group of six with little in common except a forcible death in our lives.

Completed suicide.  That's the phrase they use when introducing their loved one. 

When I think of the word completed, I think in terms of... completed 1st grade... completed a project... completed a task. 

Completing death?  Creepy.  And a nice way of dressing up the fact that there are some people who off themselves because things suck really bad for them.

The circle stops at my chair I say my name and rattle off my group of three.  The leader repeats back my group of three and it suddenly sounds so much worse.

The circle begins again as each describes how their loved one completed suicide.  There's that word again.

In graphic detail... three gunshots, a hanging and an overdose.  Blood... eyeballs bulging... vomit... brains and walls.  If completed didn't sound strange before it has certainly become the fucking understatement of the evening now.

The circle stops at me again and I stare.  I finally just say no thank you and the circle keeps on rolling down  the steep descent.

Now it's time for the grief and feelings.  The other five members have all lost their children.  I'm the only one who has lost a parent, sibling, and an aunt.  I tell myself that doesn't matter.  Grief is grief.  Feelings are feelings.

But as I listen to the parents grieve their children I am stunned as I hear their words.

... anything to take their place...

... I would have taken their pain...

... miss them so much...

I hear their words but hear my mother's louder as she wished aloud that it was me instead of my sister lying in that hospital bed.  And once again speaking her wishes once my sister passed away.  Quite the contrast.

I break out in a cold sweat.  I shiver as my stomach lurches.  My head is screaming as the voices gain momentum.  I try to gather a few feelings to speak but they are drowned out by the frantic pitch my mind is at.

It's once again my turn to share.  My heart is pounding and the room is spinning.  I know what comes next.  I grab my keys and excuse myself.  I get sick in the parking lot and then I drive away.  My head hasn't stopped screaming yet.

I completed my first attempt at a support group and that was the only time that evening that word was used correctly.

Birthday

My birthday is this week.

I was looking through some old posts here and noticed a pattern.  For the past two years, I have never posted in the month of September.  Until now.

I don't know exactly what that means.  I want it to mean that I'm stronger.  I want it to mean that I'm healing.

I despise my birthday.  It celebrates the cruelest of jokes.  The day I was born into that family.  If you can call them that.

But as my daughter has grown, one of her very favorite things is to celebrate a birthday.  I have had to grit my teeth and smile because it's certainly not her fault that I don't enjoy marking the day I was born.

And then there's my husband.  Sans one year that he forgot; he likes to be extravagant.  I don't care for extravagant anything.

This year feels different.  I still don't want the fanfare or gifts but I'm at some sort of peace with the day.  My memories of years before are still hell but I'm not drowning in their depressing sorrow either.

Am I happy?  Not really.  I feel grief well up from my hurting heart. 

I am also alive and that was no small feat.  Dead before 30.  A "doctor" spoke it.  And I believed it.  But somewhere along the way I learned to fight. 

It hasn't been easy.  It's still not easy.  But I also have a sense of pride to have fought and won.

I can't say that I'm always glad to be alive.  But I survived and that has to count for something.

This year I choose to celebrate survival.

Breath

I have never paid much attention to breathing.  It is just something that happens without thought, without reason.  This air is hardly important until it ceases.  Because then we are dead.

I talk very little about my sister.  And even less about those moments prior to her death.  I am still racked with grief and guilt if I allow myself the time to submerge my heart beneath the surface of the day-to-day fine.

She used a gun I owned.  A gun my sister offered to keep because I was too nervous to have a weapon in my own home with a baby.  That perpetual chain of events still takes my own breath away and leaves a putrid grief filled vacuum behind.  Guilt laced air is what I breathe now.

In her final day or so she was not much to look at.  A piece of her skull removed for swelling left her tragic head misshapen and uninhabitable.  It was an unnatural symmetry to watch her chest rise and fall in rhythm with machines.  I knew she was gone yet there she was lying in a shallow and selfish grave. 

I go back to that moment often.  For some strange reason I grasp at the fading memory trying to recall if she ever exhaled the final breath she drew.  I do not know why this is important.  And never mind that it is certainly of no consequence to the circumstances I find myself within today.  But still I wonder.

Did she give something back or did she steal that tiny piece of air never to reciprocate again?

Thinking precisely back to nights in that big, white, and wooden bed I can hear her breathing.  Nearly nose to nose I match my breath with hers and we share.  We share the space and we share our secret burdens.  And we never say a word.

Growing siblings often fight as they learn to share.  But we were forced to share and we did so brilliantly.  We never fought over who was fucking us.  We never fought over who betrayed us.  I held her collective breath and she held mine.  But in the end we did not share survival and I will always wonder why.

We both grew up and with her final stolen breath our secrets died with her.  Every minute of every day I breathe and if I'm mindful I can feel the pangs of the memories lost with her.  She should be turning a year older soon but she never recovered from that last breath of toxic shame she took.