Gabriel and Me and Suicide and Things

 Somewhere, at some point during the worst year of my life, I read something along the lines of, "We don't like victims. They make us uncomfortable because they remind us that our society can be unsafe." 

This morning, I spent about an hour looking through my more scientific books trying to find where I'd initially read this quote because it seemed the only way to start this post. It seemed like a good, feeling-validating opening for a post that would almost certainly scar the reader for life. I just wanted to let the readers know that it's okay for them to be uncomfortable reading this. Alas, not only did I not find the passage, but I also came across several other passages that brought me to tears. Well, shit. It's going to be a hard week. It's already been a hard year.  Hell, it's been a hard two years. Jesus, it's been a hard life. Look, if I end up finding the quote and author, I'll come back and make an edit. Until then, enjoy my paraphrased opening.

Edit: 10/2/2020 I found it! "Nobody wants to remember trauma. In that regard society is no different from the victims themselves. We all want to live in a world that is safe, manageable, and predictable, and victims remind us that this is not always the case. In order to understand trauma, we have to overcome our natural reluctance to confront that reality and cultivate the courage to listen to the testimonies of survivors... The essence of trauma is that it is overwhelming, unbelievable, and unbearable. Each patient demands that we suspend our sense of what is normal and accept that we are dealing with a dual reality: the reality of a relatively secure and predictable present that lives side by side with a ruinous, ever-present past." pages 196-197 of "The Body Keeps The Score" by Bessel Van Der Kolk, M.D.

Another edit: 10/2/2020 Several people have mentioned that this post portrayed my mother as a "bad guy" and my father as a "good guy". Let me clarify. Above all, she's my mom and she raised me and I love and respect her. Talking to her after she read this was one of the hardest things I've ever done. My worry for her added a whole other layer to the conflict I felt in writing this because I knew what it would do to her to read it. Also, only reason I did not go into detail on my relationship with my father is that he was not a part of my childhood and anything involving someone else isn't my story to tell. He didn't do anything to me except, well, reject me when I was old enough to call and ask for visits, and I don't feel like talking about that bottomless well of misery. The passage in which I mention him offering to take me to therapy when I was 15 is literally the only caregiver-type thing he ever tried to do for me. So, that's that.

A note to my relatives: This will make you uncomfortable. It might even make you angry. If that's the case, then you will most likely be angry at me for speaking up publicly. You can be mad. You are allowed to feel that. You are not allowed to ask me to be quiet about the cycles of abuse in our family. No one else should die just because you are too damn proud and hell-bent on protecting an image than protecting an actual helpless child. Also, shame on all of you. I carry immense weight and do loads of work in therapy because of your inaction. Silence is complicity. I hope that stings. To my dad and step mom, thank you for trying to put me in therapy when I was in middle school. I wasn't ready.

At this point, I'll give a trigger warning and an opportunity for any reader to bail if you prefer to avoid any of the following: violence, gore, dark humor, incest, general cynicism, responses that don't conform to interpretations of the Holy Bible. Take a moment. Make your decision.

If you're still here, then welcome, and let us begin. Take a deep breath (she said more for herself than for her readers.)

When I first learned that my brother was dead, I was brushing my teeth. I did not stop brushing my teeth. I turned off the spinning feature so that I could better hear my mother - who was, by the way, angry beyond belief that her asshole son would do something like this - describe to me the manner by which he had killed himself. Man, she was pissed. That's what I remember most about that phone call. I finished brushing my teeth and assumed my role of caretaker. I grabbed a loaf of pumpkin bread, which I bake in 3's all autumn long, and grabbed some books, more for comfort than for actual use. I drove to her house. She would not speak to me. She would not hug me. I leaned in, crying, and she said, "No" and pulled away. That's a layer of trauma that deserves its own blog post entirely. Caitlin was sweeping. Jordan was calling people. My mother was a fuming pile of anger on the couch and also a million miles away from me, so I did what I do best. I said "fuck this" and went somewhere else. For the rest of the day, I compiled photos of G's childhood and scanned them into an album. At some point I ate a salad. For the next 9 months, food triggered my gag reflex. I should have eaten something a little more hefty that day, but how was I supposed to know that I'd resume having panic attacks and lose all my body fat?

I won't be the first person to recall in a blog the onset of grief as being "foggy", "unclear", or "jumbled". It's a universal truth. That amount of mental anguish just cannot be assimilated easily, even by the sharpest of minds. What I do know, though, is that I tried to continue working full time and couldn't. I tried to enact the divorce I'd recently asked for and couldn't. I tried to continue exercising and couldn't. I tried to eat the 1,885 calories a day that someone of my stature and activity level needs in order to maintain body weight and couldn't. About the only thing that I could do was (sort of) care for my daughter. There are weeks that don't trigger a visual memory for me but instead bring up an acute physical pain. That is how I recall the weeks after his death, with the exception of two clear memories.

Two events stand out to me with shocking clarity: standing over his body (and various smaller bits of it), both at the funeral home where he was cremated and in his backyard where, unfortunately, the police missed a spot; and roaming through his house smelling his clothes, sitting at the table where he wrote his note (and reading the items-collected-as-evidence receipt from the sheriffs), and sitting on his back porch wondering when my own timer would run out. This is where the post gets even more uncomfortable. Let's save my "timer" for a few paragraphs later in the post and transition instead to the funeral home.

It was a weekday. I dressed for work but couldn't apply makeup to my raw skin. Everything hurt. I drove to work. By 10, it was apparent that I was going to be useless that day, so I asked to leave. My supervisor cried. I'd intruded in on a meeting without realizing it and unloaded the various reasons why I felt I needed to leave, and noticed only after hearing more sobbing that I had a horrified audience. I apologized. I said thank you. I excused myself. I tried to go home. I couldn't. By the way, the phrase "I couldn't do it" will continue to characterize this post as it has continued to characterize my actual life. Instead of going home, I went to see Brenda, who was G's partner at the time of his death and who is the mother of his baby Tristan.

I sat with Brenda on her bed. She filled me in on so much that I didn't know about their relationship. Since, just a few months earlier, my brother-in-law had died by what I personally believe to be suicide, I was unfortunately well-acquainted with little-known details of cremation, including the fact that you can request to cremate items with the loved one. Items can include notes. I encouraged Brenda to write a note about everything that was unresolved between them. After all, I could sense that she was sentimental like me and would therefore probably benefit from such a gesture. She wrote the note. We drove to the funeral home. She told my dad we were going. He decided he wanted to join. 

After an extremely uncomfortable exchange in which my father and Brenda asked to see G's face and were denied on the grounds that "It's policy. We're sorry, but we cannot allow you to do that. The damage is, well, it's catastrophic." I can see the his face and hear his voice as I type about the funeral director's response. All my life, I've demanded directness from people. I so appreciate his because it prepared me, or prepared me as much as could reasonably be expected, to encounter a body that had a plastic mask where the face should be. Here is a sample of my thoughts as I placed my hands on the blanket that draped my brother's body: "This is a soft blanket. Mom had one like this. Someone let it touch a heater and it burned. It had a charred corner. Something's cold underneath this blanket. Oh, right, they're keeping him refrigerated. God, he's bony. That's not his nose. Why isn't that his nose? Where's the rest of his ... oh. Oh. Oh, right. Oh, God. That's horrible. This isn't at all how I remember him. Such a big person. Such a big personality too. He could fill up a room. His voice would make windows rattle. His laugh was so stupid. He loved being the center of attention. I don't feel him here. I don't feel him in this room. All I feel is my memories of him. Ooo, that's a bad memory there. Stop it. Stop that. Do not let that memory come in. Not here. Not now. Not standing over his body. This is embarrassing. You're past that." At some point, Brenda and my dad responded because I'd started speaking those thoughts out loud. They asked what I meant. I told them what I meant. Brenda's body jerked and then went stiff like a jolt of electricity had shocked her. My dad's body straightened and he shifted to the other foot and then laughed nervously. Anything to fill the silence or diffuse the tension, he chose, as he does, the wrong thing to say, "Oh, you mean when he molested you? It wasn't a big deal. It wasn't even that bad." Brenda just stared at me. Even now, my heart feels compassion for her and respect for holding that enormous amount of space for me in addition to all the things that she herself was feeling as a mother of an abandoned infant and an abandoned partner herself. Did I mention that he called her right before he shot himself because he wanted her to hear it? 

This whole post is going to be really fucked up, so feel free to close it if you weren't expecting this level of violence or trauma. If you do decide to push through until the end, be kind to yourself. Do yourself a favor and just check in with what you're feeling. Does your stomach hurt? Does your chest feel tight? Are your hands and feet cold or tingly? Allow yourself to have whatever reaction comes. If you don't really feel anything, then maybe you've got space in there to have compassion for me because, I kid you not, that is my every day experience.

Now let's move to that other memory, the one where I'm sitting on his back patio wondering about my timer. It was a Friday night. I wore leggings that looked great on my legs and a t shirt and, as usual, had let my hair dry naturally, which meant it was sexy beach waves (genetics for the win, y'all). I'd already started losing weight due to *gestures broadly*, but I hadn't lost enough to look sick yet, so I actually looked... great. I looked great, and I felt like there was a ticking time bomb inside of me that was going to explode and take me with it, but I didn't know when.

A sidenote: Have a lesson in Author's Craft. My physical description is used intentionally as a contrast, a contrast that highlights the duality I've worked really hard to balance. Here's how it works. In this post, I suggest to you a woman who looks mostly fine, if only a little tired. As you continue to read, you visualize my outward appearance and notice a stark contrast to the ugly reality within. In effect, you learn 1. more about me and 2. more about trauma. I never thought I could be healthy on the inside too, so I just focused on the outside. That stopped working when G died and my panic attacks started back again. See, a part of healing is being honest about what my life has been. I try really hard to stay fit and look attractive so that no one has the slightest idea that, inside, I'm a whole sad bag of assault and neglect and the intersection of the two and their devastating consequences. Picture me beautiful and smiling "Guys, I'm fine, really" while wandering my brother's house, but now imagine that I'm absolutely fucking dying inside and try to fit both of those images into your understanding of how complicated it is to be a survivor of sexual assault and then to grieve your brother on top of that. It all hit me at once, repressed memories, repressed rage, all of it, all at once, all in September of last year. It's a lot. It's heavy. I mean, my stomach feels like it's in my toes when it hits me. My chest is an ice block. I wake up breathing way too fast, and my arm pits sweat. And when it gets really bad, which is way more often than any human should be physically capable of enduring, I phase out mentally too and can only hear echoes of what's being said around me, and - the worst part yet - I can't sense any physical presence, not even my own. I don't feel like I'm even real. It's. As. If. I. Died. This pretends-to-be-beautiful school-teacher and mother of one has felt as if she died 20 years ago. Read this paragraph again. Sit with your reaction. Picture me typing this. Picture me feeling this. Picture me trying to live with so many horrors. Feel something for me, and then reach out to me, please. Let me know that I'm real to you, whoever you are, reading this post. That is my purpose in writing this. I need to feel real to you after a lifetime of being invisible.

Now, let's get back to my "timer". After my mother and sister - yes, the sister who is usually stationed as far away from us as she can physically get - had left, I stayed behind at his house to be in my feelings. It's really hard to feel the way you feel when you have a small child who demands that her environment be a certain way and who emulates literally anything and everything. Usually, I wear the mom face around her, only being vulnerable when her well-being and emotional development depend on my explaining something to her, as when modeling how to deal with a feeling. Other than that, I'm locked up tight. At first, I'd walked out of G's house with them, exhausted from cleaning and feeling feelings, but as I sat in my car and started to feel the weight of death sitting on my chest, I decided I'd rather not feel that way at home. It was dark by then, so I couldn't see much when I went into the backyard. I already knew he'd died there, but I didn't know the exact spot. I just assumed, because I mistook some red paint splatter for blood, that he died on the patio. So, what did I do in order to connect with my brother? I sat where I thought he'd died and wondered why he did it. It wasn't because he and Brenda were separated. It wasn't because of their custody arrangement. I mean, it sort of was, but only in the way that an AIDS or cancer patient dies of the common cold. There was something much deeper going on, and it had been stewing for decades.

No. Listen, when I sat on that patio, I felt the physical sensation of sinking. I stepped off my pedestal that I'd built out of health, fitness, education, my super-mom persona, and waded into the swamp. I mean, I said fuck it and I walked right in and sat down and let the filth rise up over my head. That swamp is where he lived, and that's why he died. He lived in the swamp, and he never saw a way out of it. There I was, out of my play-pretend safety zone (I mean, technically, I'm married, but it feels more like playing house with someone who's just as damaged as I am), and all I could think was, "When will it happen to me?" 

G was five years older than me. He was an April baby in 1987, and I was a Christmas baby in 1992. There weren't many years between us. There were some traumatic childhood experiences that he experienced firsthand that I only experienced secondhand. There were some that we experienced together (cue the incest, you're-from-Jarrell jokes and then cue the awkward silence when you realize that incest is what this post is actually about). It's the shared trauma that made me wonder when my timer would go off. This is the strange logic that plays through my mind any time I stop progressing through the swamp and start sinking: He made it 32 years before he decided that enough was enough and that it was time to give up the fight. And because the exact things that caused him to feel that way are also inside of me, living in my nervous system, living in my memories, living in my actual skin, at some point I will reach the same point as he did where something will trigger every single thing and I will see no other choice but to die. When will it be? When will I decide that I have no choice but to die because living is unimaginable pain. Are you wondering why I'm being so dramatic? Reread the paragraph where I describe the physical pain, and reread the paragraph where I describe feeling dead already. If you need more context, ask me about what happened any time I rallied enough courage to ask for help. Ask me what it feels like to think I'm a real human and then have to reconcile that with the experience that so many people have only ever used me as a sex toy and then abandoned me to draw blurry crayon pictures of my mommy because I wanted so badly to be comforted but was only ever met with rejection again and again and again. Then, ask me what it feels like for literally everyone around me to know what's happening to me but not give enough of a shit to try and save me (looking directly at you aunts, uncles, cousins of parents, parents of classmates, and teachers. Shake in your boots because I'm calling you out.) Childhood abuse doesn't always add up to anger and defiance. Actually, it usually manifests in self-hated and self-destruction. You should have paid attention to what you saw.

I'll also mention, even though I can't bear to go into any more detail on the interwebz, that I was molested and raped by multiple people. I'll also mention that that wasn't even the worst part of being me as a child. The worst part was wanting help and comfort and safety and being flicked away like an insect. The worst part is that so many people knew, and did nothing, so there was no one to comfort me. I just wanted to be held. I wanted to be seen and cared for. And I couldn't even have that. As if it wasn't bad enough to have been used as a sex toy, I was then too much of a burden to be comforted. Let that sit with you.

So here's the conclusion. I have never attempted suicide. Eventually, I got up off G's patio and drove home. Don't get me wrong, I've dwelled on the thought. Honestly, I still feel that way occasionally - even last night I woke up having a panic attack because I can't believe that this is going to be a part of me for the rest of my life and holy shit what does that even look like - and do still occasionally wonder if I'll ever attempt to take my own life just like my brother - with whom I identify so much - but that's not the point of the post. The point is that although I am fairly certain that I will never make that attempt, I live with indescribable, imaginable, unbearable pain every single day and that I do not know what to do with it. (It's also a slight FU to everyone who told me that his suicide was selfish and that they don't understand.) He was tormented. You just didn't look hard enough to see it. You looked away because, for whatever reason, it made you uncomfortable.

I have some good days in which I feel like I've come a long way. Then, I have days where I can't breath and can't bring my body to feel like it's normal temperature and I shake and my stomach feels like it drops out of my ass every few minutes, and my ears burn, and it feels as though an elephant is sitting on my chest, and my muscles ache, and I can't perceive colors and sounds, and I can't perceive other people around me, and I can't bring myself to feel like I'm physically present in the room, and I'm absolutely terrified that I am going to die and no one will know because I am invisible and they cannot see me. Those are really, really tough days. There is no one that I can turn to when it happens. I pay a therapist a ton of money (and it's worth every penny) to help me envision a future in which my stomach no longer flips and churns, my brain can fathom an actual, healthy bond with another human being, and I can like receive actual healthy, unconditional love (instead of me looking for it from broken people who, yeah, give me some love, but also give me a whole lot of other shit along with it.) But that's going to be a really long road, and I am still in the swamp, and there is no way out but through it. Every so often, I'll trudge past a body of a childhood friend or relative in the swamp who gave up and dropped off and, you know, chose to die, and that's a really tough reminder to me of the gravity of the situation I'm in now that I'm not hiding things anymore, and yeah it does scare the hell out of me that I have come so close to suicide  at times in my life, but like... idk, those are just the cards I was dealt, and if I ever want my child to fully experience life and not, you know, feel like she's literally dead and invisible in a room full of other people, I'm going to have to get through this. What would my suicide do for her? Honestly, what good would suicide do for anyone in my family, who are already being forced to face their traumas and, for some, their hand in the trauma of others. 

Truly, this post does end on a good note. It doesn't end with "Goodbye, these are my last wishes because surprise ha! ha! bitches it's a suicide note." Lol, that would be so mean. No, it's not that at all. I think it's more of a plea for attention to a really fucked up and overlooked topic. Survivors of abuse are sometimes not okay, even years after seeking help. I'm a survivor, and I've gotten help, and still right now I am most definitely not okay. So, like, call me or come see me and for everyone's sake, do not pretend like you do not know what I've been through. Admit that you don't like this topic. (Who does?) Admit that it makes you uncomfortable, and then bond with me over the fact that we're being authentic. (Or don't, but don't expect me to, like, shop from your small business or buy from your kid's fundraiser or pretend to be friends on social media if you can't honor the fact that I've shared this with you.) I am a package deal. Being my friend will mean being a part of my support network when I wake up sweaty after a nightmare or have panic attacks on my couch. It will mean helping me with my daughter when I'm doubled over in pain from a panic attack. There will be no more duality. No more pretty, made-up Brianna, hiding everything inside. I am integrating all of this into who I am every day with the hope that someday I'll stop feeling unreal, someday I'll stop phasing out, someday I'll stop feeling like an imposter, and every day without exception I can safely inhabit my own body. Someday I'll stop wondering if I have to die before I can be free from emotional pain. I'm devastatingly sad, y'all, and I'm devastatingly alone in it because I haven't spoken up. This is me saying that I need help. I need my friends. I cannot do this alone.

To Gabriel: I never have been and never will be angry at you for any of the decisions you ever made, even your choice to die. I always saw what you were, underneath. I am sorry that I was born so long after you that I didn't have the tools in time to talk to you when it might have made a difference. I love you with all my heart. In a strange way, thank you for sacrificing yourself so that this family would be forced to have the Reckoning that has for so long been coming. Because of you, our children, and our childrens' children will be safe, happy, and healthy and will never have to face the horrible things we faced as children. You didn't make it, but I did, and Hunter did, and your other sisters did, and we are doing the work for the kids. Kerri and Brenda are raising your babies with so much love. Rest in peace, brother. I miss your big voice and your stupid laugh. I love you. We love you. We forgive you. Until I see you again, Bri.