Suicide Ghosts: Frighteningly Close, Disturbingly Resilient
It’s been nearly a year (August 31st) since my son died by his own hand. I stopped living that day and started to merely exist; it’s the day the “great masquerade” began.
I am now an unwitting member of the Fraternity of Sustained Grief and a social counterfeit.
People will ask “how you doing?” And I answer: “I’m fine.” It is the lie I tell multiple times on a daily basis, as if I’m trapped in some twisted social experiment. But it is the only way I know how to make it through the day. It hasn’t been easy.
At work, just sitting through meetings feels like a 1,000 needles pin-pricking my flesh. I take an inordinate amount of walks each day because I find it hard to concentrate for more than an hour at a time and I.Just.Need.Air.
I returned to work only two weeks after his death, a strategic mistake of enormous consequence.
Thankfully, wonderfully, I work for a company that is benevolent from the top down and I have been given the opportunity of a month off to step back in an effort to regroup, regain my footing and take a running start at wrestling this demon of grief to the ground.
My hope for this month is that I’ll be able to find some answers to many things that have been dogging me since my son’s death. So I’ve flown out to California and have secluded myself in a tiny, cramped apartment my parents built decades ago in backyard of the house I grew up in. There are ghosts of all manner here, frighteningly close and disturbingly resilient. I was here nearly a year ago in the direct aftermath of his death, wading through the journals he left behind as I sought answers; few materialized.
During this time my main “project” will be doing revisions on the manuscripts of two complete books my son left behind. They are annotated with notes and comments from two New York literary agents that were, at one time, excited about the publishing prospects of both books, only to then abandon them when my son, in one of his bipolar manic periods, poisoned these literary relationships, by casting aspersions on the agents, their talents and their trade.
I’ll seek to finish off the books according to those notes and others my son left behind and then seek out those same agents with an explanation of my son’s illness, his demise and my own efforts to resurrect the books. Whether I’ll be successful in all this remains very much in doubt. But I feel I have to try. Above all else, my son wished to be a published author, I’ll be doing my damnedest to see his dream take flight.
But it is no easy task I’ve set before myself. I am filled with much fear and trepidation. I will have to crawl back into my son’s life, back into his head and from the time I have spent in the journals he left behind, that is a scary, frightening place to be for this parent.
It will reawaken all my self-loathing, doubt and questioning about “what should I have done differently?” and an “if only” laundry list that seems to stretch on for a lifetime.
I don’t for a minute believe this month will somehow magically snap me back into a “normal” life… I’m just hoping it gives me a good running start…
