Thinking of You

On a warm summer day, my cousin died.  Hit by a train, his body ripped in two.   You don’t have to pretend you care.  Very few people do.

His death left behind so many questions that, nearly three years later, remain unsolved.  Questions varied and chilling, questions involving the words murder, suicide, cover up.  Questions that I know, deep down, will never be answered.

Death is messy.  It splatters all over a family, and no amount of hand washing makes the feeling go away.  You feel dirty.  You feel incomplete.  You feel sick and hot and tired.  Later, you realize it’s the tears. 

I know too much about death to get lost in the little occurrences in life.  I don’t regret what I do because I don’t do things I know I’ll regret.  I don’t lose myself in what feels good, only what feels right; sometimes, these are two very different things. 

It took three deaths in two years to make me realize the meaning of time.  Of patience.  Of permanence.  Of grief.  Depression can cripple you; death erases you.  One does not solve the other, merely creates a plague.  Suicide.  Do you want your family to follow you? 

Tonight, I sit here thinking of my cousin.  Early twenties, lots of life, even more problems than me.  His last months were spent with more drama and pain than anyone can imagine; his death, more than a tragedy, was only a misplaced answer to a prayer no one had the courage to utter.

Tonight, I think of my cousin.  I think about the whistle of a train, wonder what it sounds like for someone to die. 

Around me, people think about sex, about homework, about drunken mistakes and regrets.  Problems that seem like the end of the world to someone who has never seen someone lowered into a hole and watched it get filled with dirt.

But tonight I think of my cousin.  I think of his smile when we were kids.  Of the way he said my name. 

Tonight, dear cousin, I’m thinking of you.  I hope you’ve found your peace.  Someday our family will finally find it too.

Final Barrier

I have this scar
of tough white fibrous tissue,
my longest, my angriest.
It serves as a barrier
on the upper part of my left arm.
I dare not cross it,
cut only above, never below.
In some twisted way
it is my last strand of hope,
my last door separating me.
It tells me:
You are okay.
Not all of you is broken.
It is okay to cry.

Our Departed Lion

I’m supposed to write only a few lines in memorial for your birthday.  Just a few lines.  But how can a few lines even begin to describe how much you are missed? 

I feel like the day you left is the last day any of us saw any sort of light.  Life without you is darker and quieter and not nearly as fulfilling.  Life feels like staring through a window because nothing feels real or right or attainable, just a distant illusion of living.

Grandpa goes to your grave once a week.  He would go every day if he could.  They have him taking pills to fill the gap that you left, the emptiness in his life where you once stood with a smile. 

Grandma avoids the cemetery the same way she avoids everything painful she experienced in her life, but it is still there.  You are still with her every single hour of every single day with every soft clanging of the wind chimes outside. 

I catch my dad just staring off into space sometimes.  A month or so after you died he reached for the phone with a smile to call you, only to burst into tears remembering you are gone.  He misses you the way you miss the sun when you’re cold.  His eyes still water at your memory.  He still feels empty thinking of all the tomorrows you two never got to share.

Your name is a blessing and a curse.  It is uttered and everyone pauses to look for you as if you are still part of the conversation.  We have not accepted the fact that you are gone.  Everyone misses you as terribly as the day you left. 

I watch everyone missing you, but I remain silent because no one needs another grief spoken.  I offer hugs and words of encouragement, but inside I am hollow with all the things about you I never got to know. I cry when no one is watching, I grieve when no one listens, I talk to you when the entire world is asleep and silent because I miss you.  I miss you. I have never stopped. 

No one but you knows the number of hours I have rocked myself back and forth trying to ease the pain.  No one knows the number of times I wanted to visit your cemetery but did not want to ask.  I talk about you with a straight face but my eyes are filled with so much pain, and I know you see it.  I’m sorry I cannot make it go away.

I flip through my pictures and I see you on your last day.  I stare at your picture in my dad’s living room without every uttering a word.  You are right there on the edge of every thought I have, because you so inexorably changed everything I ever thought I knew the moment I learned sorrow is forever. 

I wish I could say we are doing better without you, but I see the shadow of where you should have been at every family gathering around the table.  You belonged with us and you should not have been taken.  Your loss is a gained pocket of sorrow and every single one of us carries it despite the passing of yet another day.

We see you everywhere, and your presence is with us always.  We have never forgotten you despite all these seconds that have ticked on past.  At the house still sits that lion on top of furniture watching and observing silently at every gathering like you are.  Like you always will. 

 

 

Ask Anyone

Sometimes we write crap.  But sometimes the crap needs to get out to filter the pain.  This is one of those times. 

Ask anyone, and they would say Josiah lived a good life.  He had a loving family.  His parents were divorced, but good people.  His siblings adored him.  He had loyal pets.  His parents worked hard, and he received everything he could ever want.  

Josiah liked to smile at people he didn’t know.  He nodded and tried to make his eyes sparkle in that special way that he knew people found sincere.  He loved deeply and spoke sincerely.  He was even funny and witty in his own way, good enough to make people smile whenever he cracked a joke.

And no matter what, Josiah always made time to make people think they were special.

Ask anyone, and they would say Josiah was happy.  Except his family. They would say he was too tired all the time.  Or didn’t smile enough.  Was too lazy to work hard.  Didn’t ever put any effort into anything.  Needed to get outside. Exercise. Enjoy the air.  Enjoy life.  Why didn’t he ever smile?

Ask anyone, and they would say Josiah was good.  Kind. Caring. Bright.

Ask anyone, and they would say Josiah had a good life.

Ask anyone.  Except Josiah.  Because Josiah would say the truth.

Josiah’s family loved him, but he knew he would never be good enough for their standards.  His parents were good people, but they didn’t care much about Josiah’s interests other than to criticize.  His siblings adored him when it benefited them.  He received every material thing he could ever want, but he didn’t much receive the approval he would always need.

Josiah smiled at the people he didn’t know because they were the only ones who liked his smile.  His family always told him he never smiled, even as his lips were turned up, because he didn’t smile that smile they loved.  And Josiah smiled sadly as he thought his family couldn’t even love his smile.

Josiah loved deeply and spoke sincerely, but no one knew because no one understood or listened.  He loved so many people, but they all loved their own, and Josiah never really felt reciprocated.

Josiah was funny and witty because it was the one thing he knew that people would appreciate.  A good laugh.  A funny joke.  A witty comeback.  And all Josiah ever wanted was to be appreciated.

And Josiah made people feel special with his time because he knew what it was like for no one to have any.  That was his life.  This was his gift.

If anyone had asked, Josiah would say he would never be enough.  And he accepted that as best he could.  You couldn’t change your life.  He had tried.  Josiah thought he would always try.

Ask anyone, and they would say Josiah’s death made no sense.  His mother screamed and his father actually cried and everyone who ever knew him just couldn’t understand it.  

But that’s because they didn’t understand Josiah.

Because the truth of Josiah was always overlooked, like his smile, like his efforts.

And Josiah died as lonely and cold as he lived, veins empty of all the pain he had carried around with him every single day.  Pain the color of scarlet, the smell of iron, and as thick and dark as the journals he kept stacked in his bookshelf.

Ask anyone, and they’d tell you they didn’t quite understand Josiah’s lies.

But ask Josiah, and he’d tell you he didn’t quite understand anyone’s version of the truth.

 

This is For You

This is for those who know Cancer isn’t just a word.

For anyone who has ever watched his or her loved one carried out in a black zipped-up bag.

For those who know the true extent of last words.

For anyone who has had to stand in front of a room of people and shakily recite a eulogy.

For those who have truly had to say goodbye.

 

This is for those who cringe at the word rape.

Who silently sit in the back of the room knowing all too well the sticky, ugly fingers of molest.

Who know that rape isn’t something to laugh at, make obscene jokes about, or even smile in the presence of.

Who know what it means to be violated.

Who have cried themselves to sleep bleeding there.

 

This is for those who woke up to a gunshot, found a bloody mess and dull razor, couldn’t find any more pills next to the cold body; Suicide.  They say it and they know what it means.

This is for the girls who see only darkness, despair, death every waking hour of every damned day.

For those who cower behind hidden scars they feel every night to know that something is still there.

For those who see suicide statistic and think brother, mother, sister, father, friend, husband, person.

 

This is for those who go to sleep at night praying for a better tomorrow.

For those who wake up in the middle of the night and momentarily forget what it feels like to grieve.

For every dreamer and hoper and lover and believer who just knows that it has to get better.  There is more than this pain. 

This is for me.  For my family.  My friends. My loss.

But most importantly, this is for you.

 

Rambling

If grief was an ocean, I’m stuck somewhere on the dark, sandy bottom.

If you were a picture, I’d rip you in two, shred you, watch you blow away in the wind.

If we were a memory, I’d hit my head so hard to make us disappear.

If death is an ultimatum, I choose to hide it in the corner so I don’t have to look at it anymore.

And if you were a miracle, why am I always the one stuck saving?

A Philosophy on Crying

Noah’s mom always told him life was full of tragedies, and crying about it wouldn’t do a damn thing.

He supposed she knew what she was talking about: her dad left her mother, her brother committed suicide at twelve, and she had to commit her own mother to an insane asylum before she turned twenty.

Still, sometimes Noah thought she had it wrong.

She didn’t cry when the army officers delivered her a flag instead of her husband’s intact body after a tour in Iraq.

She didn’t cry when Noah’s sister Astelle shattered the urn that carried her uncle’s ashes, even though he was the only father she ever knew, and the only man in her life who ever indefinitely stayed.

She didn’t cry when Noah told her he would join the army and fight like his dad, and that he would be proud if he died.

She didn’t cry when Astelle came home crying and pregnant, telling them how her future ex-husband hit her so hard she couldn’t remember the fight leading up to it.

She didn’t cry when her best friend of fifty years died silently in her sleep of an aneurysm.

She didn’t cry when the doctor told her she herself would die of lung cancer. In fact, she laughed. “Well, those cigarettes did their job then!”

She didn’t cry during chemo or radiation or any other treatment that Noah had to beg her to receive.

She didn’t cry when she asked Noah, recently discharged from the military and studying creative writing at the local university, to write her eulogy. She only smiled.

She didn’t even cry as she told him she wanted to be buried in the cheapest, most rickety casket you could find because she “just didn’t see the point in making it difficult for worms to eat.”

And his mother, the woman whom he had watched and admired for years, waiting for the inevitable slip, the single tear drop to drip, died on a sunny Friday morning before Noah had even grabbed his morning coffee. She never shed a tear.

When Noah went through her things, he realized she refused to cry because her mother never stopped after her husband left. But that didn’t mean she didn’t feel the ache of every tragic moment nestled deep in her chest.

In fact, reading her journals she had kept diligently for sixty years, his mother felt more acutely and tragically than them all.

Noah now tells his two children – Anita, 12, and James, 8 – that his mother always told him life was full of tragedies, and crying wouldn’t solve a damn thing. “But, kids,” he tells them. “Silence, doesn’t either.”

And Noah? When he feels like it, he cries. Because, unlike his mother – as strong and blessed and beloved as she may be – he never wants his kids to question whether he feels.

Because he does. He feels. With every single drop. Every drip. A tear. A sadness. A feeling. Every single day.

Everlasting

Vincent Van Gogh’s dying words: “The sadness will last forever.”

What a wonderful way to live, knowing this will never stop.

I’m sorry I’m not normal. That I can’t smile as easily or speak as freely. That I would rather sit by myself than in a crowd, would rather read than act, watch than participate.

I’m sorry I don’t live up to the word perfect. I’m sorry that the only way I could even come close is to end.

I’m sorry you don’t think the treatment is worth it. I’m sorry for making you waste your money. I’m sorry for being such a damn burden, even after all this time.

I’m sorry sometimes I wake up wishing I were dead or gone or someone else so that this lasting sadness will just go away.

I’m sorry you know about the scars on my arms. That you read my painful words scribbled into some long-forgotten journal. That on some level you know that sometimes your words will literally find their way to my body in the form of white, tough scar tissue.

I’m sorry for caring too much. Or not enough. Or too greatly or not at all. I’m sorry you have to deal with this. With me.

And I would make it so that you don’t have to deal anymore. So that you don’t waste any more money. I could do that. Hide. Float off in some never-ending sea. So you wouldn’t even have to spend money to bury me. Or for a service. But then you would cry and forget all this and complain about that. I’ll never make you happy.

You say you want me to stay around, but then you give me every reason not to. And I’m so confused.

I don’t know much, but I do know that Van Gogh was right. The sadness will last forever.

And, fuck it, I’m just tired.

Bring it on

When I think about everything I’ve lost the past two years, I find it incredibly difficult to breathe, much less to want to. 

The color yellow doesn’t mean Spongebob, it means jaundice.  It means skinny and yellow and dead with a scraggly beard.  It means last breaths.

I can’t watch movies with hospitals in it because the beeping reminds me of my uncle’s final days strapped to machines, dying minute by minute with a liver saturated with cancer. 

My phone lies cracked where I dropped it, the phone I bought the last weekend he was alive, and I think it fits because that’s how my life is.  I look past the cracks, I still function, but damn’t if I’m not just broken because of this massive fall.

The bruise where my mom stepped on me at my grandpa’s funeral has faded.  The scar is gone.  Ten months later, and I still feel his loss.  I don’t care what my scar tissue shows.  It’s still right there.  I feel it.

I want to cut, but that wouldn’t solve things.  It would just hurt, and I want the hurting to go away.  So I turn to medicine, but three pills, five pills, eight isn’t enough to make it stop.  No matter how much medicine I take, how medicated I become so I lose the ability to move, I can still think, and it hurts.

So, tonight I won’t pretend it doesn’t hurt.

I am bare.

Bring it on.

A Modern Day Love Story

Love has a funny way of showing itself.

Brad fell in love with Sarah because, when he met her, she couldn’t remember her name.  Her brown hair fell into her green eyes and she danced to the music like they always tell you to, like she didn’t care if anyone was watching, like she was trying to make people see this is what life was about.  Without knowing him, she wrapped her arms around him and swayed around the room with him to some utterly insignificant song, her eyes closed, her body free and fluid.

“What’s your name?” he shouted, needing to know her, needing to assign meaning to this moment.

And she threw her head back, laughed like a child being tickled, laughed at the absurdity of such a question.  “Hell, I can’t even remember what century I’m in, much less who I am!”

When the music died down, the lights came back on, and everyone left, she remembered her name was Sarah.  He told her his name was Brad.  “Well, Brad, I’m in the mood for a big warm cinnamon roll.  I know the perfect place.  You coming?”

He did.  He had known her two hours, but he knew then he would follow her anywhere because she had a spark he lacked, an understanding of life he admired.  They went to a tiny hole in the wall café that sold one pound cinnamon rolls.  He bought two, one for them to share, one for her to tuck snugly into her colorful purse covered in tiny pins about love, dancing, and music.  They stayed at the café talking and eating until dawn.

She dragged him to the park so that they could watch the sun rising over the river.  He let her sit on his coat, even though it was 30 degrees outside and he only had on a sweater, because being with her was warmth itself.  She reached into her bag and unwrapped the extra cinnamon roll, tearing off a piece and placing it in her mouth, moaning in delight.  She licked her fingers and commented, “You know, love is like a cinnamon roll.  It’s sweet and delicious and tastes better warm.”

He kissed her because she was right, and because he was already falling in love with her, and because it just good to forget himself for a while.  When he pulled back, she smiled, her eyes sparkling more than any star, and said, “I’ve been waiting all night for that.  You don’t disappoint.”

He loved her because she sometimes pronounced her Ls as Ws and was the first person who ever made him dance in the rain and her smile reminded him of the warmth in hot chocolate.  He loved her because she said no the first time he slid his hand up her shirt and made him wait four months for sex.  He loved her because she cried at his sweetness the first time he insisted he walk her home.

She told him she loved him because his blue eyes are old.  Because he didn’t like Beethoven, preferred Spiderman to Batman, and poetry to prose.   Because he secretly loved the smell of roses, smelled of pine trees, and when he held her she felt so big and small at the same time.  She wouldn’t tell him what that meant.

He began to hate her when she told him the truth behind her scars.  She cried and told him she really didn’t have it figured out, and she liked dancing in the rain because it made her forget her pain, and her eyes were always so sparkly just because she was one step away from crying, and he made her cry when he walked her home because she had forgotten anyone cared.  She really wasn’t afraid of sex, she was afraid of his eyes when he saw her scars.  She cried for hours when she saw his quiet, silent gaze stare at her legs in nonchalant fascination.

She began to hate him when she realized why he was always so quiet.  He told her his mom died young, his dad bought a gun, and no one ever believed the bruises they could not see.  He didn’t like Beethoven because his dad played it while drinking; Spiderman soared from rooftops, Batman hid in shadows; poetry hinted at pain, prose explained too well; roses reminded him of his mom, pine trees of the first full day he went without thinking of how she died; he held her because he feared she would run away.

He never hated her more than the day he walked into her apartment to find her crying in the bathroom, blood streaming from the cuts on her legs, mascara streaming down in rivers from her eyes, crying I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

She never hated him more than the day he angrily punched the wall, his old blue eyes ablaze, hair wild like weeds and light like snow, muscles tensing and clenching as he whispered I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, Damn You I Love You.

He hated her because she hated herself.  She hated him because he wouldn’t hate her.  They loved each other because they fit like a hand in a glove.

And despite all the pain, they stayed together because life anywhere else wasn’t worth living.