Inheritance

Bailey Guess

When my world split cleanly down the middle, one rainy October night, I was holding a teapot.

It was white, with pink flowers and two bamboo handles that made it difficult to wedge onto my tiny boarding-school bookshelf. It was, at that moment, with hot water sloshing wildly from side to side, that my hands went numb and began to tremble.

“He was still warm when they got him down,” said Mr. Beck, our headmaster, “and he’s en route to the hospital right now. We’re all hoping and praying for the best.” My knuckles tightened around the handle. It was as if I was holding two worlds in my head at once — one where my friend Tom was fine, and we’d just had an incredible two-hour conversation that afternoon. And, one in which, this meeting wasn’t happening. Where my world had fallen apart as a result of a belt, a chair, and a closet rack. Without even a note. In the grief, and confusion that spurred in my lungs, I clutched the teapot tighter than anything — as if the tighter I held onto it the less the world would fall apart.

“So is he still alive?” Sofia, a tall, curt junior, asked as if she were about to cry.

“We don’t know,” Mr. Beck said.

I got up as we all began to dissipate — some crying, some hugging, some looking for his best friends, Pearl and Story, to comfort them. Others were calling home.

I looked down at my phone and felt a familiar tug in the back of my throat as I tried to assess the risk. My father hated books or songs that were too dark or painful because they reminded him too much about his own tragedy. How the hell would he feel about this?

But I had to talk to someone.

I tried my mom first, however, the call went to voicemail.

“Fuck,” I whispered.

Then, I called him.

“Hey, sweetie!” my father answered cheerily. “What’s up?”

“Dad,” I said, rushing to get the words out before the tears caught up with them, “I’m so sorry to call you about this, and I’m so sorry if this triggers anything, but my friend Tom just tried to kill himself and we don’t know if he’s alive — !”

Half an hour later, Mr. Beck called us back into the lounge of the girls’ dorm. It had never been made to hold more than thirty or forty people, so given that the boys had trekked across the field, on that Los Olivos boarding school, to join us. I found myself squeezed between classmates as we held our breaths and listened.

I tried, for a moment, to pray to any god that could hear me. But I’d been an avowed agnostic since I was twelve, and I’d already seen the look on the headmaster’s face.

“Tom died,” he said.

I didn’t break the teapot; that much I managed. But I did go out on the cement walkway and break a cheap ceramic mug an ex had given me, and though it was less organic, when one’s world is breaking, it can feel like equilibrium to break something tangible — a way of stabilizing something that won’t be stable for a very long time.

And gathering up the pieces, I thought about Memorial Day weekend in 2005, and wondered exactly how much of my father’s DNA I shared.

—

From what I have seen, while depression is not always hereditary, one does have a greater chance of suffering from the disease if one’s antecedents have as well. However, while some who inherit depression are born with it and often suffer greatly from an early age, for others it can be jump-started by an event or experience, even if it had made no appearance before then.

For my father, that experience was his brother’s suicide. My uncle, John, was diagnosed with his illness for as long as I can remember.

He hadn’t shown any of the signs of fatality to however: like my friend Tom, he’d kept it hidden well. My father had a bad feeling about him — but my uncle lived an hour and a half away in Bellingham, WA, and his wife, Laurie, was aware that he stopped taking his medication. So the bad feeling stayed a bad feeling until Memorial Day weekend in 2005. My other uncle, Phil, hadn’t seen him, and neither had my father nor Laurie. With increased urgency, their search continued. Until they finally went to the police, and found my uncle with a shotgun under a Bellingham bridge.

He was 41 years old.

The main thing I gleaned from the funeral and memorial services was the reality and inevitability of death. That may sound somewhat grim, given that I was six at the time, but to me it was a simple fact — the sky was blue, the grass was green, and at one point or another, everything dies. Later on, when pets became a fixture in our household, there were no farms upstate or underhanded replacements: it was still tragic, even with goldfish, but death was death.

My uncle’s suicide instilled something in my father — a constant state of exhaustion and snappishness, along with a pain that hovered on the crossways between mental, emotional, and physical.

Thank god my mother was able to set aside her reservations about depression to help my father. As it was, my father was put on medication for depression. The difference, my mother said, was palpable. I was made privy to this information much later; I was quite surprised to learn that news.

But that is how the disease made itself known in him — rooting deep in his genes and sprouting up at calamity. And while it’s true that my father and I have our differences (he’s a Blondie fan, for god’s sake) I’ve always gotten comments that we resemble one another. We share the same nose, hooked at the end; the same green-blue-gray eyes; the same oval face and long neck. And we’re both stubborn as hell, doubly endearing ourselves to and frustrating my mother.

So when Tom died, among the rest of the cacophony and pain that ensued, part of me was lying in wait for depression to awaken in me the same way it had in my father. Just try it, I remember thinking grimly one night. I know the signs. I know the symptoms. I know about therapy, about medication. If depression was waiting around the corner for me, I reminded myself, I had at least learned, by proxy, how to live with it.

I told no one about my thoughts — not even my father, who, flew down to Santa Barbara, drove over the mountains into the tiny town of Los Olivos to see me. He arrived five days after Tom passed, which during that time, I’d also been rejected from my dream school. To top it off, I had found myself unable to continue writing the novel I’d been working on without feeling the urge to be sick on the keyboard. If my genes were going to betray me the same way they’d betrayed my father, this would be the moment.

And yet, I was strangely calm.

It was as if I’d prepared as much as I could for a hurricane that might or might not touch down: there had come a point where there was nothing left to do but wait.

Driving with Dad to a nearby diner, I felt a kind of pressure mounting in my chest. As we talked about normal, average things, they lapsed into silences. I felt myself growing increasingly desperate with the need to say something about what had happened. But how to phrase it without sounding crass, or uncaring, or self-centered? Worst of all, if I did manage to put something into words, would it trigger my father into one of his bad days that even the medication couldn’t fully get rid of? What was there to do?

As my thoughts spun wildly out of control, my father cleared his throat. “You know,” he said, “I’ve never believed in the idea of closure.”

I stared at him for a moment, trying to connect this phrase to anything. “Yeah?”

He looked at me for a minute, his eyes darting back to the road. “From my experience, grief is cyclical. You never get fully away from it, but some days get better than others. And there might be a lot of bad days in there — but it gets better, gradually. And that is something I can say for sure.”

For probably the hundredth time in the last week, I felt tears start in my eyes. “Promise?”

“Oh, sweetheart.” He sounded broken, and I started to cry. “I promise.”

It’s been nearly a year now since Tom passed away. I watched and waited — but my genes did not follow through on their threat. Instead, like my father said, it got better. The suffocating pain receded. After the first week, I stopped sleeping twelve hours a day. I even managed to pull enough of myself together to finish my college applications by the end of November. The pain continues to fester — but is much better than I could have ever imagined.

I can’t stop thinking about what happened, and what, if anything, I could have done. There are songs I can’t hear; movies I can’t watch. And even though things are so much better, there’s still such a clear gap between everything in my world before and after Tom. I’m healing, but still split.

Sitting at my desk and writing this, I can look up and see a teapot, white with pink flowers and bamboo handles, wedged in between two stacks of books. There is something beautiful from that night, then, that remains whole: something that endured. And, I remind myself, people are much stronger than ceramic.

Spring 2018 Issue

Nonfiction