On the Day of your Dying, a Finally Transition

This post is twice the length I normally limit myself to because it is a piece that requires more words.

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October 3, 2022. Exactly five years ago today you took your own life. I say the 3rd while the official documents say the 4th, because you straddled midnight; the line between life and death, the line between Tuesday and Wednesday. 

After a tragedy I will hear people say “something died inside me that day.” Yet nothing died in me that day, instead something was severely injured. That wounded section of my soul has drug itself along on its bloody rough elbows, digging ruts in the dusty dirt, for five years until it finally feels like dying.

The Fifth anniversary feels worse than the First because I’m getting used to you being gone. 

Five years ago tonight, I turned my phone to “do not disturb” before going to sleep. Fifteen minutes before you died, I saw my phone light up across the room. In our sleep, both your sister and I swear we heard an ear shattering grunt, a boulder being thrown through a wall of rock.

Then the phone rang, which means the Sherif must have called twice trying to find your family. A phone call in the middle of night is never celebrated pregnancies or lotteries; they are calls of loss. With my phone finally open, I saw the end of your text asking me to donate your organs and cremate your body. An emergency contact in death if not 15 minutes before in life. 

You will be sad to know that 5 years on and I’m no longer friends with your family. Likely because I loved the Nephew who smelled like You too much and the Sister who didn’t not enough. 

A wet deafening howl slid from my mouth that night, lasting so long that I thought I stopped breathing. The serpentine smoke of my soul leaving its body. Did the Sheriff’s deputy bat an eye? The audio trauma of that scream is now one of Jim’s ghosts, and these Built To Spill lyrics have taken on new meaning for us:

I can't get that sound you make

Out of my head

I can't even figure out what's making it

It feels like fingernails across the moon

For several months after Juan’s death, anxiety was all around me. The idea of turning my phone to “do not disturb” left me in a panic, and I was suddenly afraid of the dark. Jim and I tried to walk the old country road near his parents’ place but I had to turn back because Juan died on the prairie at night, and now darkness equaled death. The trees bent low over my smallness and threatened to snatch me away from Jim. Wherever I turned, Death was waiting to take either me or all my others.

Juan was a planner and thought of everyone, never missing the birthday of a loved one, or the opportunity to reach out and offer connection and comfort. So it was so very “him” to call the sheriff before the shot so that no one he knew would be burdened with “finding” him. 

A sudden gut wrenching reminder of how lost you have to be to keep others from finding you.

I’ve wondered a million times about the universe where I didn’t have my phone on “do not disturb,” where I saw your text before your death. . . but all I can do is believe that it wouldn’t have changed the outcome. Your phone would have been off, your tea would have been drunk, and you would have still ravaged your skull just to release your mind. 

I don’t blame myself for missing his text but I will always blame myself for his death, and he knew this about me (as best friends do) which is why he wrote;

“There are no words I can say or think of that will prevent you from feeling what you feel. . . all I can say is. . .this is not your burden to bear. It was my doing. Goodbye my dearest friend, til we meet again.”

The Kübler-Ross method of grieving has been misrepresented for years. The five stages of grief were not designed for people grieving the death of others, it was designed for those grieving their own dying.

Denial. 

Anger. 

Bargaining. 

Depression. 

Acceptance. 

No wonder we hear people describe their loved ones the days before their suicides as “happy, and finally content.” They’d all reached the fifth stage of Death Acceptance. 

You endured the five stages of grief without me. I am caught again in the barbed wire. How many times did you release me? How many shirts required mending?

There are no stages of grief for the ones left alive. Our grief is cyclical. We grieve like the phases of the moon, from sea-foam light to obsidian night.

Like the moon at its fattest, sometimes I am full and bright, giving light to the nights of others. But often, like this morning, I am a new moon, concealed and heaving with darkness.

I trudge the attritious road of worn down until I’m just bone avoidance. So I will, as I said before, try and go about Healing instead of Hurting, and I will do that by driving to Iowa to hike at Hitchcock like we used to do on an almost weekly basis. I haven’t been there since you were alive, and today - on the full-hand-anniversary of your death - I will go back again.

It’s the afternoon of the 3rd and I’m back from Iowa. The bur oaks were still as gnarled. The hills still as steep. The aggressive red of the sumac and the delicate blue of aster tell us it’s fall without a calendar. 

I feared I’d be flooded with memories of you, overwhelmed in a torrent of remembered forgetting. But instead I was flooded with memories of Jim, Doug, Kali (now gone two years yesterday), Jessica, Elisabeth, Kristin, Jason, etc. . . . and it occurred to me that in my several years of grief, I’ve been neglecting others, even if they don’t agree or can’t see it. Or maybe they are acutely aware of it, and they will be relieved at my revelation. My entire body felt lighter, and for the first time since Juan died, I felt like he was actually beside me instead of a million lives away.