Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow

22 Feb 2014 26 Comments

by Denise in Death, Faith, Motherhood Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

What fierceness to say, “I will never accept this.” What comfort is mixed up in that, knowing I’ve taken a stand. What despair is at the core of it, because not to accept what is, is a form of insanity. I can be as angry as I want, but that won’t change what is so. When I carry around anger about something I can do nothing about, it’s because I think anger is going to get me what I want. Why else remain angry? Why else tell myself the story of what happened so that I wind up the victim? What happens when I realize that I’ve taken some fact of my life, an event that happened in time, and told myself an unhappy story around it? Then I see how I keep alive the ghost of  the past and so miss my life, which is only ever happening now. Not in the past, not in the future. Now. But the voice in my head insists otherwise.

And if I think my anger isn’t an attempt to get something I want, I can think about the way I feel about letting it go. It’s  like if I’m not mad, then I’m saying something’s okay when it isn’t, and what an outrage that is. If I’m not mad, that person/institution/whatever gets away with “it.” How humiliating for me; if I’m not mad, I’ve lost.

Except that isn’t it, not at all. If I’ve let go that anger, it’s peace to me. It’s freedom. It’s not my job to see that someone doesn’t get away with something, as if anyone “gets away” with anything. An unconscious life is its own prison. Truth will out, with no help from me.

A year ago fall, the first fall after Philip died, I went outside one brilliant morning to walk the dogs. I lived in Montclair, known for its massive, shaggy trees. Four years I’d been living on that particular block, walking past one particular tree, and that morning I witnessed its transformation. The sun lit that tree and it shimmered red and gold; it was glass on fire, and if it could have  made a sound, it would’ve been celestial. This was shock and awe, I thought, as I stood staring up at it. Are you seeing this, a man yelled to me, from across the street? I couldn’t take my eyes off it to answer.

If I could live in that light, I thought, if I could just not move and stay right here, I will be all right and it will all have been worth it. Which is right about when my mind rushed in and reminded me that I’d caught a moment that would be gone in another, and I’d probably never see another one like it. Ever. What was the point, then? What was the point of having my breath taken away only to have it return with its disappointments and hopelessness?

It wasn’t enough because in some fundamentally human way it’s never enough; it’s the grasping, needy edge of ego that wants to want more than it wants to have. No having is ever enough, not when having something becomes essential to our identity.  If our reality is based on having, then that reality must be false. What can we possibly have that won’t turn into something else? After it disappoints us, first. Where’s the reality then?

It’s easy to see what I’m talking about if you look at the objects that once seemed so necessary to a happy existence. I had to have those pants and make it two pair, since that’s safer. In case one wears out or something. Or that car or house or earrings or lover or body size or whatever external thing will confirm the reality of me as I perceive myself. It’s not that hard to see the objects I’m attached to and begin to move away from their power. And of course we all need things – I’m talking about the attachment to those things, to the way they become part of our identity, the way we feel diminished we lose something, when it breaks, when it gets gone like all and everything eventually will.

But what happens when I think about attachment and loss in terms of relationships, of actual people? I’m 55. I have years behind of me of people – of romantic relationships, in particular – that I believed I had to have or I couldn’t go on. But their time passed, too; and from this view, I see what I wanted from them, how much of what I called “love” was grasping and clinging; how the wanting, in the end, drove me more than the having.

But then your kid goes and dies and you wonder where the hell you’ve been all your life because there isn’t anything that feels more real than the grief of losing them and the contemplation of living the rest of your life (we talking 20, 30 years? You fucking kidding me?) without them. What of all I’ve just written, I think? What of attachment, of wanting, of having, of disappointment, of anger? I am speaking of my child now, not the two pair of jeans I finally tossed into the giveaway pile. How now?

Mom, Philip says, when you think of me, you think of me in a long dark tunnel. It isn’t that way. Think of me in the light you saw in that tree, only infinitely brighter, and you’re closer to the truth. The truth? That’s what I’m trying to figure out here. Truth doesn’t change – in the world, it’s relative. But in stark reality, it’s unchangeable. Else it wouldn’t be Truth. So how to think about these truths in terms of Philip? When is “having” enough, and what do I mean by that? In essence, I have not lost Philip. In fact, I’ve never felt closer to him or more certain that he’s around than I do now. I ask, he answers. He leads, I follow. He talks, I listen. And all any of that requires is turning my attention to him.

I dreamt of Philip a couple weeks ago – twice in one night. In the first, he was running up the stairs, “Philip!” I called. He came down smiling. “Why didn’t you tell me??” I asked, in shock. “I wanted to surprise you,” he said. In the next, again, I saw him. This time he looked confused. “Philip,” I said, “Where have you been? I thought you were dead!” “I’m not,” he said. “But where were you for two years?” “I don’t know,” he answered. “But I saw you in the coffin,” I said. “I know,” he said. “But I got up afterward.”

I’m no interpreter of dreams. So I went to the source. What was that about? I asked Philip. I’m trying to get your attention, he answered. Because for these last few whatever, I’ve been thinking about him instead of listening to him. I’ve been looking at a world where dead means dark, stark silence instead of seeing the startling ways he lets me know he’s around. It’s time to start working, he said to me. I’m here, but you’ve got to do the work.

If I’ve jumped around here, I’ve no doubt I’ll be sorting it out as I go on. Yesterday was two years since the last day Philip was alive. Today was the day he lay dead in his room, and no one knew. Tomorrow was the day we found out, the day on his death certificate, the “official” day he died. These two years seem to have passed quickly. I’m grateful. Because I’d rather wrestle with my grief as it is now, instead of as it was then. It’s not gone, for sure, but at least it’s different.

© 2014 Denise Smyth

Too Rare, Too Quickly

15 Feb 2014 24 Comments

by Denise in Death, Faith, Motherhood Tags: , , , , , , , ,

                      “…Curse only
the fact that such days are too rare
and pass too quickly.”
Grace Bauer from “Nowhere All at Once”

That’s from a poem we read Wednesday night in my writing class, in anticipation of yet another snow day here in NJ. I’m about the only one I know who’s loving this weather. I look for its excuses to stay inside; I look for it the way others look for spring. I resent spring’s incessant blooming, its insistence that I be outside. What all am I supposed to do out there? Inside, there are curtains to sew, movies to watch, books to read, words to write. And stillness to inhabit, because all the sewing, watching, reading and even writing are not going to teach me how to live with Philip’s death if I can’t spend some time still and silent.

Natalie and I live on the top floor of a two-story garden apartment. Our unit is part of a brick building set back from the sidewalk in a small u-shape. When I look out my living room window, the bottom of the U is to my left, and I face the side of the U opposite mine.  In the center lawn is a large, wide evergreen; on Thursday, its trunk was disappearing under the same snow it gracefully shook from its branches, with some help from the passing wind. Snow was coming off the roof in delicate powder-puff bursts, which weren’t at all delicate when I stood underneath them – then they were a chill hail of icy needles aimed at my upturned face. Not unpleasant, really, unless I stood long enough for the chill to take hold. Because if it did, it’d work its way under my skin and I wouldn’t be rid of it easily.

By 1:00 I’d come inside for the fifth time. I was restless and uneasy and kept going outside to breathe icy air, to make sure the snow was as real as I wanted it to be. It was up to my knees and I didn’t want it to stop. I was all-too-happy to fall asleep the night before, knowing I’d wake up to that snow. But there it was and I watched and waited but for what, I didn’t know. The flakes kept shrinking and growing and I dreaded their cessation, afraid they were going to stop before I heard what they had to say; if I didn’t hurry up and get their message, it could be for-ever until they came again

“The universe is talking to you,” Ed says, every time I tell him some new way Philip’s let me know he’s around; “What more do you want?” I could be flip and say, “I want my son not-dead,” but that’s not what I say. That feels false, and I don’t mean because I don’t want Philip here. I mean that’s a glib, thoughtless response, designed to cut Ed off and leave myself alone and misunderstood. Why do I tell Ed these things, why tell anyone, if I’m going to diminish them to prove that grief trumps all. And what then? I win?

I looked out my window for hours on Thursday, looking for something in the brooding silence of the storm. But then it stopped and the sidewalks and walkways were snow-blown into 18”-wide perfectly-edged mini corridors. The snow I’d trudged through earlier that day had been tamed into something more manageable.  But I wanted more; the world wasn’t yet white enough. The bushes were still visible, and that tree looked no more covered than a woman in a sheer lace top. Why can’t we abide the quiet? Why the rush to order, to busy-ness; the hurry to get back to what’s familiar, to what we think life should be? The way it is is the way it’s supposed to be. How do I know? Because that’s the way it is. Complain about the snow, the rain, the cold – each serves its own purpose. How much more peaceful to recognize that than to insist that life’s not fitting the story we want it to.

And if I really think life’s the way it’s supposed to be, then I need to accept that Philip’s not here the way I want him to be, to respect the way the universe is talking to me through him. I need to move past the stamping-my-feet phase of my grief and see what it means to live in its depths, always with Philip guiding me. “In life,” Philip says to me, “you said the more you let go, the longer our bond became. Nothing’s changed, Mom. And whatever you’re afraid of isn’t binding us any tighter. It’s just causing you to miss what it is I’m trying to tell you.”

Try some happy, Mom, Natalie says. So here’s some 24 hours of it. Enjoy.

© 2014 Denise Smyth

What About Sex?

09 Feb 2014 Leave a comment

by Denise in Death, Faith, Motherhood Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

A couple weeks after I left home and moved into Nadiya’s, I had to stop at my house before I went to work. I’d forgotten some essential article of clothing that God forbid should cause a wardrobe crisis. It was August, 2009. Philip was a freshman on his way to Rutgers, living his last couple of weeks at home. Natalie was 16, and splitting her time between me and Phil. Up the stairs I went to my (former) bedroom, and saw Philip’s bedroom door was open. Philip’s bedroom door was never open when he was asleep. Curious, I stuck my head in to find he was not at all asleep, what with the girl he had in bed with him. He rose up in surprise, half-naked (top half, thank God), and I was all, “Oh-my-God-I-am-so-sorry-I’ll-get-what-I-need-and-get-out-of here.” Back in the car, when I finally stopped laughing my ass off, I sent him some funny text about protecting himself, and ended it with, “And you’d better be good to her or I’ll kick your ass.” I knew he’d show it to her; I didn’t know who she was or what she meant to him, but just in case she was going to be sticking around, I wanted to mitigate the weirdness that was now between us. If she meant something to him, then she meant to me, too.

That night Philip and I were meeting for dinner, and I’d already decided not to bring it up. What was there to say, really? He was 18, and I knew he was responsible. But he brought it up, and I appreciated his candor.

So what about sex? When Philip and Natalie were teenagers, Phil used to tell them not to have sex until they got married. That wasn’t anything I’d ever say, but I didn’t mind him saying it.  Somebody should tell them to wait, I thought, and since I was sixteen the first time I allowed a guy into my sacred space, I wasn’t sure I was the one to do it.

Besides, I didn’t really know what I thought about them having sex. When they were younger, I had the conversation about the mechanics of it – me trying to explain while they tried to squirm away. But what about the heart of it? I didn’t talk to them about that, I didn’t tell them that you wait for someone you care for and who cares for you, someone who’ll not only be there in the morning for breakfast, but will stick around and help clean up. That sex will bring you the hottest and holiest pleasure you’ll have in your life and if you’re going to make yourself vulnerable to someone that way, it had better be someone you trust.

So while Phil did the forbidding, I began to have the other conversations about sex. The kind you have in a moving car. The last such conversation I remember having with Philip was when he was 17 and I realized the bandana he was wearing around his neck was hiding a hickey. He and Natalie laughed when I noticed it and went into my feigned horror-and-surprise mode: “Is that a hickey, oh my God you have a hickey why did you let yourself get a hickey summer hickeys are harder to hide blah blah blah.”

I admit to having had a guilty pleasure at the sight of that mottled blotch. It was an animal pride that my good-looking, 6′ 1” tall son was marked with desire. Desire makes the world go round. It’s biological; if our bodies didn’t meet to fuck, there’d be no little bodies to grow and do the same. Which isn’t what I said to Philip. Later that night we were in the car and he was captive behind the steering wheel.  “Philip,” I said, “we have to talk about sex.” His response was to reach for the radio, mine was to slap his hand away. I told him hickeys were ugly and disrespectful to X (his girlfriend). Why should you wear your business on your neck for everyone to see? What are you telling people about X? He agreed to no more hickeys. “And I want to remind you that sex makes babies, so if you’re having sex you better think about how you’re going to raise the kid.”

Which was my not-so-subtle way of reminding him that abortion is not a form of birth control.

I’ve been wanting to write about this for a while, but wondering why this particular incident, why now? There’s ego involved, for sure. Look at me, I want to say; look at the kind of mom I am. I mean, how cool am I?? My response to finding Philip and a girl in his bed was just me being me. But then I took that response and added it to the list of things that made me a cool mom, like my long streaked hair, skinny jeans and Free People wardrobe. Like the fact that my kids not only loved me, they liked me, were proud of me, had no problem being seen in public with me. And I am embarrassed at the pleasure I took when my daughter announced that the word around school was that I was a MILF. In fact, I’m so embarrassed by my reaction that I’m leaving it as an acronym. If you don’t know what it means, it’s easy enough to find out.

What did I want my kids to see when they looked at me? The important stuff, they knew. They knew I loved them, that I’d happily take Philip to the airport at 5:30 in the morning, then wait for him in the terminal when he got back. That I’d drive Natalie back and forth to Rutgers in New Brunswick as many times as she needed. That being sick always meant pajamas on the couch, fluffy pillows, comfy blankets, lots of fluids, and an indispensable mom who appeared just when the soup was needed, the juice glass was empty or a sweaty head needed some stroking.

But what about physical-me? The last few years of Philip’s life, it got real important that my kids should think I was attractive, that I was sexy and pretty and cool enough for their friends to invite me to hang (they did), and even cooler when, of course, I didn’t. I just wanted to be noticed. I thought if their friends liked me, my kids’d like me more, too.

What’s up with that? Is it so obvious that I don’t see it ‘cause I’m looking a little too deep? What’s up with wanting to be seen as sexy, with wanting Philip to know that’s how I was seen? The “obvious” answer – I’m getting older, I’m afraid  I can’t be desired, I don’t want to be a juice-less hag – that’s all surface. For decades I was uncomfortable in my body whether my clothes were on or off. And if I go down that road now, this post is going to take too long of a  diversion. For now, suffice to say that at 52 I was waking up sexually. For years I was all baggy jeans, shapeless tees and outfits that didn’t seem to work because I dressed around hiding my ass.  But the more I bloomed, the tighter my clothes clung. With some help from a padded bra, my curves were out there for y’all to see.

No small part of this is the yin yang of male/female energy. The longing to be whole, which we can’t be, not in body, and if that’s where we place our longing, we’ll not only get fucked, we’ll be fucked. Because we’ll fuck selfishly, desperately, insatiably – through our hungry mind instead of our open heart. Always feeling that something is missing, often blaming our partner, believing what we’re looking for is about our body and not our being.

That last year of Philip’s life another shift was taking place between us. The night he came over, a year before he died, the night I said, “When they find you dead of an overdose, they’ll blame me,” the shift was palpable. We stood on the third floor landing where I was living, me asking him not to do drugs; him saying he wouldn’t, me knowing I couldn’t protect him from his choices. And so another shrinking of my mother-ness, another growth of his other-ness. Philip needed room to grow and I gave him all.  As paradoxical it sounds, every step back brought us closer.

I wasn’t afraid of these psychic shifts because I trusted what was between Philip and me. He told me we were “growing up together,” and it’s only now I’m beginning to see what he meant. As he became independent so did I, freer than ever of that formerly-unshakable feeling that I couldn’t be happy because there was something wrong with me. And part of what I counted on was his love and support which existed beyond his physical presence. I didn’t have to see him, or even speak to him, to know he was there.

Kinda sorta like what he’s asking me to do now.

© 2014 Denise Smyth

Enjoy

02 Feb 2014 10 Comments

by Denise in Death, Motherhood Tags: , , , , , , , ,

 

Natalie, almost 2, and Philip, 4

Natalie, almost 2, and Philip, 4

This is what our children give us. And no matter what, it’s with us always. Enjoy them; I know I did.

Two Years

01 Feb 2014 40 Comments

by Denise in Death, Motherhood Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Me and Philip, August 2012

Me and Philip, August 2012

Two years ago today was the last time I saw Philip; February 1st, as in 2/1 or 2/01 which will make sense if you read what I wrote here.

We went to dinner at the moderately expensive restaurant called Next Door, so named because it’s next to Blu, its older, more expensive sibling. It’s the omission of the “e” that makes you think it’s okay to pay up.

We ate, we talked. When we were done Philip asked if he could leave before the check; he had to get to fencing practice. Of course you can, I said. We stood to say good-bye and the restaurant became the stage where I kissed my handsome, 6’1” son for what would be the last time. Are you all watching, I thought; are you looking at this child of mine, this beautiful boy I mothered – me, I did it – and do you see what I see?

Turned out someone was watching.  I sat to wait for the check and the woman next to me smiled. “You always worry about them, don’t you?” she said. I smiled and nodded but truth was I didn’t worry. Philip and I were solid and if what was between us was right, what did anything else matter?

Then the unimaginable – that’s what came to matter.

© 2014 Denise Smyth

My Secret

31 Jan 2014 17 Comments

by Denise in Addiction, Death Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

I ended my last post with what was to be next. Instead, I digress.

 *******************

 AA says you’re only as sick as your secrets. The light’s supposed to shine away the dark. Because it’s always there, the light. It’s a matter of if you see it.

Secrets are built into addiction. It’s a matter of survival. “Addiction” becomes this thing you are, not this thing you have. It’s a force, and it wants to survive. It’s not supposed to be able to thrive in the light. So where does the light come from? Just from telling the secret? What exactly happens when you say the thing you think you are or think you have? With all the AA I’ve absorbed, you’d think I’d know.

I have bulimia and anorexia. I don’t mean I had bulimia and anorexia. I mean I have bulimia and anorexia. That’s been my response to Philip dying. At first I wouldn’t eat. For months after Philip died I picked at food. I was drained. A bag of bones my clothes hung on. It wasn’t so much a choice; the food wouldn’t go down. Anxiety was a tsunami in my belly. If anything went in, it would have been blown back out.

In the mess of days after Philip died, people wanted to feed me. “Are you hungry? Can I get you something to eat?” they’d ask. I could only shake my head. I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t talk. I couldn’t do normal. I couldn’t pay attention to anyone because they weren’t in my world. In my world the only answer was, “I will never eat again; I will starve myself to where my son is.”

David Foster Wallace, himself a sober addict when he died, wrote about benign and malignant addictions. “Many addictions, from exercise to letter-writing, are pretty benign.” He then adds, “…  something is malignantly addictive if (1) it causes real problems for the addict, and (2) it offers itself as relief from the very problems it causes.” And so round and round I go.

I am so damn angry. And I’ve a habit of punishing myself when I suffer loss, which I wrote about here. In the past, it was about The Guy. The one who always turned out to be a jerk, because, of course, it was his fault. All I wanted was to be loved. I lived for these guys, yearned for them, dressed for them, got on my knees for them; why the fuck couldn’t they love my need away? So I’d leave them, depressed and angry, and start the Food Games. Months of barely eating until my body couldn’t take it any more, at which point I went to war with it. Hunger was a betrayal, forcing me to eat when all I wanted to do was die. I’d sneak into delis and grocery stores, head down, walking as close to the shelves as I could, as embarrassed by my hunger as by my cartful of cookies and cupcakes and chips. I’d start eating in the car, and once I was home, tore through that food until I felt like a blimp about to burst. Then into the bathroom to hurl it all back at the universe. And soon as I got hungry again, I did it all over. Buying more food at different stores. At my worst, binging eight or nine times a day. At my worst, all 5’4” of me weighting 98 lbs., and counting down.

It was my mind that drove me crazy, and my body that I punished.

So what happened? At 28, I met my husband and it hit me it was either him, or my crazy. I chose him. I got help. I settled down. I learned how to eat, how to listen to my body. I stabilized at 125 lbs. The more I let myself eat, the less food was an “issue.” I got married, had kids. And to my wonder and surprise, after Philip was born, I lost more than my pregnancy pounds. I weighed in at 118, where I stayed for the next 20 years.

The blow of Philip’s death blasted me into a suffering I was helpless to deal with, so I turned to food. Same pattern – I went from barely eating, to vomiting. Back and forth, back and forth. Down to 102 lbs., obsessed with staying there. Telling no one; not anyone, for longer than I can remember. Until the day I told Kirsten, told Rose, who is sweet and lovely and who I’ve yet – but hope – to meet. Finally, I told my therapist. And most importantly, I told Natalie, because I would never have taken the risk that she’d find this out through a blog instead of directly from me.

I’ve been throwing out weight and height to make a point, to make the picture clear. To make myself see what I am doing, to shake myself into some semblance of caring for myself. Because much as I’m taking the steps to do what’s right, it’s coming from “I have to,” not, “I want to.” The have-to is because of Natalie; I love her enough to understand she needs me right where I am. It’s all for her; I don’t know how I ever let it get to be for me, too.

Here’s where I stand: I have stopped throwing up. I am afraid to eat, even though I do. I do not weigh myself. I am probably somewhere between 110 − 115 lbs. I am told I am too thin. I do not believe that. When I look in the mirror I don’t see what you do.

And I’m exhausted; I’m tired of worrying about food, tired of it always being on my mind, tired of the voices in my head  that don’t even sound like voices, just sound like normal thoughts. Normal? Here’s a sample: “Oh, are you going to eat that for lunch? That’s too heavy. You better not eat breakfast. Eat some grapes and drink some Vitamin Water. Don’t finish what you’re eating. It’s good to leave food on your plate. What are you going to eat for dinner? You ate lunch, after all, you can’t eat too much for dinner. And don’t eat too late. What? You’re eating popcorn at 10:00 at night? I don’t care if it’s fat-free; that’s bad. Very bad. Bad, bad, bad.”

This isn’t the end; it’s just all I can say for now.

© 2014 Denise Smyth

The Reason (Suicide, Part 3)

26 Jan 2014 19 Comments

by Denise in Addiction, Death, Lonlieness, Motherhood Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

“I keep one foot out the door, and that’s suicide by increments.”
Rob (played by John Cusack) in “High Fidelity”

And that, right there, is the problem. I’ve a lead foot out the door and I think it’s soldered there. There’s an uncertain fear I live with and don’t care to define. Ed’s done it for me: “You are afraid to live because you think you’ll lose Philip.” But what does it mean to live, I want to ask him; show me how. He’d only shake his head because really, what else could he do? He can’t show me how to live because life isn’t given you by someone else, and if you think it is, it isn’t yours and you’ll wind up resentful, angry and either half-alive or half-dead, depending on the way you look at such things.

I keep thinking that living means having oh-so-many friends and taking fabulous vacations and talking on my cell when when I’m not texting on my cell and Facebooking, Twittering, Instagramming and “connecting” whatever latest way the internet’s figured out how to keep us glued to each other 24/7 because God forbid we should spend too much time considering. Life. Death. Meaning. WTF. It’s exhausting. But that’s not what Ed means by living. He means taking my foot out that door, which has to do with being, not doing. That still gives me only a vague idea of what it means to be in life. And what I see when I come close to sensing what living means is that I’m afraid if I’m not shaming myself, then someone else will do it for me. Somehow, that foot out the door feels like protection.

Hecht writes, “When a person dies, he does wrenching damage to the community.”  And, as Hamlet says of suicide, “ay, there’s the rub.” He’s talking of his uncertainty that death is any kind of end; I’m talking of what happens to those left in the wreckage of a loved one’s suicide, as well as the collective impact. Living carries responsibility with it, which includes taking seriously my effect on other people. I have to tell myself this because I don’t know it. I know I love Philip and I know I love Natalie; what I don’t know is how much I matter to both of them. Nor do I seem to “get” what I mean to other people.

And I think people who kill themselves don’t get what they mean to others. I’ve heard suicide called “selfish.” That’s a cruel, shallow, ignorant and cliched way to describe someone who’s in such devastating pain that it overwhelms consideration of anyone else. For  many, it’s almost like there is no one else because it feels like no one can help and no one really cares, not really. Because it doesn’t penetrate. Because  when you look around it seems like everyone else’s figured out this thing called life while I’m some solitary freak who can’t even find any other solitary freaks to commiserate with. I mean, what is it that keeps people wanting to live? It’s got to be love, doesn’t it? For people, for art, for work that is satisfying; for nature and its mysteries. That feeling of aliveness where you’re engaged in what you’re doing or who you’re with and there you are, being.  But what if you can’t feel anything but the lack of it all, the “Why?” that has no answer?

I can’t speak for anyone else, but my experience can’t be unique. I’ve wanted to die because I couldn’t feel love from anyone out there. I mean, I could feel love toward certain people – most deeply and particularly my children – but it didn’t feel reciprocal. When they were little, in my worst moments I would tell myself that I would kill myself when Natalie turned 16, because by then she wouldn’t need me any more.  She’d be well on her way (where the hell did I think she was going?), I’d be one more thing out of her way. Dead mom? Blip in the road, a stumble with quick recovery, then back to it like I wasn’t really there in the first place.

I believed this.

“We are all members of society,” Hecht writes, “and these connections are to be honored.” She says suicide creates more suicide. So I think about this. I think about the way Philip died – it was an accident. And I think of what I went through when I first learned of it, what I’m going through now. I was tortured; it didn’t matter that there wasn’t anything I could’ve done. I’m his mother – I was supposed to protect him. I was sick at the thought that there was a moment when he knew he was going to die, and he was alone and terrified but he had to let go. No way, I’m told; because of the heroin he went out in a blaze of bliss. I’m not so sure, but there isn’t anything I can do about it.

But as devastating as Philip’s death is, what if he’d chosen to killed himself? The things I hold on to are that he was a happy kid, that we were close, that there wasn’t anything unsaid between us. That I’ve nothing to feel guilty about unless I choose to make it so. But look at what his dying has done to me, to his father, to his sister – to all who knew him. The shocking, mindless blow of it. Do I think my own death would be any less shattering? What worse thing for Natalie than to live with a mother who’s not only dead, but dead by her own hand? So she not only gets to suffer my death, she gets to spend her life wondering why she wasn’t enough for me to live for.

And if I would do such a thing, in what meaningful way would I have loved her?

A few months ago, in my bathroom, I got a pain in my chest. It wasn’t about my heart – more like indigestion. But it caused me to bend over, and I closed my eyes, and made believe it was my heart. I might be dying, I thought. My heart might be shutting down and I might just keel over and Natalie’s upstairs, my God Natalie’s upstairs, I can’t leave her now, she’ll freak. She needs me to stay with her – I don’t want to leave her. So there was a crack in the atmosphere and I got it…but where’d it go? Do people live in full knowledge that they matter, they very much matter, to those who love them?

And so I have reason to Stay. But I’m missing the part about wanting to. I’m more attached to Philip’s death than Natalie’s life.

Next: What Philip says about that.

© 2014 Denise Smyth

1/20

20 Jan 2014 42 Comments

by Denise in Death, Motherhood, Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , , ,

Philip at 6

Philip at 6

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I always sent Philip a text right after midnight to say Happy Birthday, so here I am. I don’t remember how it was last year, that first birthday. It was a Sunday, and Natalie took me horseback riding. It was a surprise; she knows I love to ride, and I hadn’t, not since the last vacation the four of us took together.

It wasn’t so much his birthday; it was the days following. I’ve found that’s when grief starts kicking my ass, in the aftermath. This year I’ve been walking in a white cloud of Philip. Walking along with pregnant-me, my belly full of him. Sitting with me on my bed, nursing him in wonder and stroking his soft, downy head. And seeing my 21-year-old son watching me, ever reminding me those moments are mine and not even his death can take that away from me.

I found this picture of Philip right after he died and I couldn’t bear it. You know why it’s so hard for you to look at this picture, he asked? Because you see the joy in me and you think you’ll never find it in you. I came from you, mom; if I have it, so do you. I do? Could I ever radiate, knowing what I know of death and loss and grief? I feel old in ways that are exhausting; I feel dirty next to his bright innocence. And guilty, that I now know what neither of us could, that he was only years away from the train wreck his life would end in.

I took today off because I think I would go crazy if I had to sit at work and pretend this is a day like any other. Birthday number two and I’ve not figured out how to mark it. What special thing there is to do. It seems it would be comforting to have a ritual, but I can’t think what that would be. Maybe I’m not to live a life of tradition; maybe I’m to learn to take it as it comes. Kirsten is making dinner for Natalie and me. Will you do this every year, I want to ask her? Can I count on you to always be here?

Let us enjoy our dinner tonight, let that be enough for now. Let me learn one by one that people love me, let me hold what I learn in my heart.

And let me, as Philip has asked, learn to find the joy.

© 2014 Denise Smyth

Sobbing and Useless (Suicide, Part Two)

13 Jan 2014 17 Comments

by Denise in Death, Faith, Motherhood Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

Naturally the first (and as yet only) chapter of Jennifer Michael Hecht’s “Stay” that I’ve read is “Suffering and Happiness.” Because as anyone who’s tried to delve into what they suffer knows, lots of people have lots of things to say about the suffering/joy thing. I will not ask the one question that haunts: why? I mean, why the fuck does one have to suffer to know joy? Hell, I can even answer that in my own way – but it doesn’t satisfy, not really. But suffering transmuted can liberate me from believing that I must suffer. Can show me, if I’m honest, what my part is in what I feel. Like everyone, I suffer within the context of my life, and Philip is now the focal point of that suffering. But as I’ve said, he’s told me not to make his death into something it isn’t. I have to get my head out my ass first.

And what I mean by “suffering in the context of my life” is that Philip’s death is of a part of the rest of it. A really simple way to understand that is if you’ve generally been okay with being alive you’ll probably wrestle with your child’s death differently than if you’ve spent most of your life thinking you and those around you would be better off with no-you. I mean, one of the reasons I used to think it’d better if I died was because my insurance policy would pay for my kids’ college.

Think I had some of those self-esteem issues we hear talk about?

My cousin Maria remembers that when I was a kid I always loved gray days. They make me feel safe, I told her. Nothing’s changed. I’m looking out my window now, where the sun’s breaking through the clouds that just yesterday were full of rain. I’ve a pit in my stomach; they always leave, the clouds. Always. There’s more sun-time than cloud-time and it doesn’t seem fair. What I feel good about is temporary, leaves too quickly. What keeps me twisted is reliable. And that’s pretty much how life’s felt.

I don’t much like Hecht’s poem, “No Hemlock Rock (don’t kill yourself); there’s a certain silliness to some of it and I’m not sure what she’s trying to do:

Don’t kill yourself. Don’t kill yourself.
Don’t. Eat a donut, be a blown nut.
That is, if you’re going to kill yourself,
stand on a street corner rhyming
seizure with Indonesia, and wreck it with
racket. Allow medical terms.
Rave and fail. Be an absurd living ghost,
if necessary, but don’t kill yourself.

I guess she’s saying be crazy, do anything, anything at all except kill yourself; but those words have nothing to do with me because I’m hurting and and it’s too much effort to go out and get a donut and I don’t even know what it means to be a blown nut.

But “Stay” is something else. When two of Hecht’s close friends killed themselves, she wrote an open essay letter on a blog that she writes for.  “Life has always been too hard to bear, for a lot of people, a lot of the time,” she wrote. “It’s awful. But it isn’t too hard to bear, it’s only almost too hard to bear.” She tells us to sob and be useless because “Sobbing and useless is million times better than dead. A billion times.” She calls those who want to kill themselves but don’t, heroes.

I’m no hero. I didn’t kill myself out of fear; nothing heroic about it. And before I start going on about how cowardly I am that I didn’t, I’m going to switch gears. I have to start seeing things differently. I’m not into heroics, so I’ll just say I have some level of sanity or I’d’ve thrown myself drunk in front of one of our Montclair rail crossings.

But how crazy am I to be touch with Philip daily and yet want to die because he did? What is it about the dark that attracts me? Philip told me that he is my teacher where he is, and Natalie’s my teacher where she is. He’s here to show me what death isn’t; she is showing me what life is. But it’s Philip I listen for and yearn for and learn from; I don’t learn from Natalie. She’s intense and blooming and instead of learning that from her, I sit on the sidelines because I can’t have that. Too late, don’t know how.

How complicated is this all? Philip was my first born, and extraordinary to me. The first thing I’d done right; and when I saw the beautiful child he grew into, all the more proof of what I was worth. He was my light. Funny thing is, there were times I thought I was paying way more attention to Natalie than to Philip; but my children needed what they needed, and Natalie needed more. Philip was my steady. Lights don’t go out, I said when he died; they just don’t. “I didn’t go out, mom,” he says. “Have a little faith.”

See, I can bow my head every day in gratitude when he lets me know he’s near. But what good is it if I don’t learn to live. If I want to work with what he’s trying to teach me, then I have to be willing to follow Natalie’s lead.

Hecht quotes Ann Sexton: “I don’t want to live…Now listen, life is lovely, but I Can’t Live It. I can’t even explain…if you knew how it Felt. To be alive, yes, alive, but not be able to live it…I am like a stone that lives…locked outside of all that’s real…I wish, or think I wish, that I were dying of something for then I could be brave…to [be] behind a wall watching everyone fit in where I can’t…to live but to not reach or to reach wrong…to do it all wrong…I’m not a part. I’m not a member. I’m frozen.”

I know this. I know every word of this. I’ve said it all, down to wishing I was dying so I could be brave. So I am not alone. But this is what else I know: It does not have to be this way. I don’t have to be this way. I haven’t figured out what that means yet. But this is only part two.

Next: Suicide, Part Three

© 2014 Denise Smyth

Stay (Suicide, Part One)

05 Jan 2014 35 Comments

by Denise in Addiction, Death, Lonlieness Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

No, I’m not going to kill myself. But I’ve been preoccupied with being dead, and since the inner eventually becomes the outer, all things suicide have been coming my way.

Natalie bought me a book about suicide for Christmas. “Stay,” by Jennifer Michael Hecht. I find the title wrenching. “Dad asked me if I bought it because I was worried you’re thinking about killing yourself,” she said. “I told him no, it’s just I know you’re interested in suicide.”

My therapist is concerned. So I asked Natalie, who, after getting annoyed about the whole thing, pointed out that she knows I once tried to kill myself and hence, my interest; that she heard about the book on NPR, which gave her the idea to buy it; that if I was going to kill myself I would have already done so, since I’ve gone through the worst thing in my life so far; and that anyway, I wouldn’t do that to her. And no, I wouldn’t.

But she’s the thread I’m hanging from. I have enough sanity to see she’s a reason not to die. But it feels impossible I’ll ever get to the part about wanting to live. Or maybe I don’t think about that for the next few-whatever. Maybe I first get through Philip’s birthday on January 20th, then February 23rd when it’ll be two years since he died. Because if I’ve learned nothing else these last two months, it’s that this year-two stuff is pretty sickening. Year one’s unreality has been replaced by year two’s finality, and where’s there to go from here?

I get a daily poem from The Writer’s Almanac, which, by the way, is connected to NPR. 95% of the time I don’t read them. But one day last week, I got two emails from the Almanac, the second one correcting the first. Maybe I should read it, I thought; maybe that poem’s trying to get my attention. It was a poem about suicide. I mentioned it to Natalie because of the book she’d given me, and she said maybe it was the same author. So I checked, and sure enough, it was.

And if that’s not enough suicide-stuff, a couple weeks ago, I got a link to a blog post about suicide. The blogger – who I think had once felt suicidal and is now really happy to be alive – decided that those who kill themselves are selfish and cowardly. I don’t argue online – I don’t usually have the energy or self-righteousness for it. But this closed-minded, cliched version of What Kind of People kill themselves incensed me enough to let the blogger know exactly what I thought, which included the fact that many who’d read the post were the ones who’d lived through a loved one’s suicide, and what kind of burden does that add to a load that’s already broken a whole bunch of people to pieces? (And the end of that story was instead of getting flipped-off, the blogger read my entire blog and left a lovely comment. Who knew??)

Since Philip died, I’ve come across people whose loved ones have killed themselves, and I don’t pretend to know what kind of hell it is to live with that. Especially if it’s your child – what ginormous excess of grief must that create? Suicide has nothing to do with the people who love you. It has to do with unfathomable loneliness, other-ness, not belonging, not seeing, not getting why you’re alive if this is what it feels; if all/most of the time, this is what it feels like. And screw feelings-aren’t-facts. Feelings are the world if that’s what you let them be.

My secret mantra has yet again become, “This won’t last forever because I will die.” Not exactly suicide, but a way of becoming one of the walking dead. I already wrote about what Philip said to me about suicide here. And I promised him I’d stop wishing myself dead. But lately, I’m not hearing anything but the battering between my ears, and I don’t know what it is I’m trying to accomplish with my little mantra. Maybe I think it’ll bring a natural death faster, and no one will blame me if that’s how I go.

I become unreachable when I’m lusting for death, which I’ve long considered the only way “out.” When I finally figured out that if I thought death was the answer, I was asking the wrong question, Philip died. And even though I remind myself that death remains the wrong answer, these last few weeks I’ve given up and given in and I see no way through. I’m not in touch with anything inside me that knows how to live, much less wants to. It seems wrong and unnatural, but life’s never much felt like a home I belonged in.

For whatever the reason, I was miserable and angry about life since I was a kid. When I turned 11, I decided the way out was to drink. By 14, I added pot to the mix. By 22, I had bulimia. For years I turned the rage I felt but never understood into a scathing diatribe against myself. I swore God took special pleasure in my unhappiness or else He’d make it go away.

When I was 21, I sat in my parents’ bathtub at 4:00 in the morning while they were away for the weekend, drinking and hacking away at my wrists with a razor blade. I thought I was making progress when the blood started spraying, but that’s when I heard the phone ringing. I guess I wanted to live more than I wanted to die because I answered it. It was my soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend, Chris. Earlier that night, I’d left him at a party, drunk and angry that he hadn’t given me any of the Quaaludes he’d already passed out from taking. What he later told me was that he’d woken up out of his stupor and knew something was wrong when he couldn’t find me. He came over and wanted to take me to the emergency room. I refused, so he wrapped a towel around my wrist and went to a 24-hour drugstore for some butterfly bandages. When he was done patching me up, I sat in the bathroom watching him clean the blood from the walls around the tub.  On his knees, he tossed his long Jesus-hair back over his shoulders and never said a word while he worked. I longed to lay my head on his long, narrow back while he rinsed that bloody rag. I wanted him to love me as much as he wanted to save me, but when he stood and turned to me he was the Chris I knew again, his ever-increasing remoteness further justified.

After that, I went to therapy. I still didn’t want to live, but I was embarrassed by my failed attempt and by what I considered my cowardliness because I knew I wouldn’t do it again. By 24 I went to AA and I stopped drinking. By 30, I married Phil, which went a long way toward stabilizing my violent moodiness. I relied on his steadiness, but it offered no insight into how to build a life that I could enjoy. I’d stopped drinking and vomiting and had even given God a shot, but I wasn’t happy. I was living in a long, gray corridor called depression.  Wanting to die was my default position, the only way to permanently right what was wrong. I got it together for everyone else; I loved my kids and took care of my family, but the life I was living didn’t seem to include me.  I was bored staying home with the kids, unhappy being married, despondent because I had no career, resentful that being a wife meant having sex when the only touch I didn’t object to was that of my children. I was waiting my life out. I thought about swallowing pills but had no idea how to get them. Sleep was the only peace I knew, and the nights I was particularly despondent I’d crawl under the covers, pull them up to my chin and curl up to say my adult version of the prayer my mother taught me as a kid:

Now I lay me down to sleep
I pray the Lord my soul to keep
I  pray to die before I wake
I pray the Lord my soul to take.

But the Lord wasn’t listening, so I kept a package of razorblades in my kitchen drawer. I might’ve been too scared to use them, but they were my version of hope.

Next: Suicide, Part Two

© 2014 Denise Smyth

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