Two Years

This weekend will be the 2nd anniversary of Matt's suicide.

I feel as though I should have something important to say about it all-- as though I should have some gems of wisdoms- or if not gems, at least easter eggs, or silver linings-- something to say Yes, this is terrible but this is why things are okay! A terrible thing happened and look, everything is fine, put a pretty bow on it!

That would feel both true and disingenuous.

We-- my and my three little girls (the youngest 2 now, her age marking the years of separation between us and her daddy alive) really are fine. At this exact moment we are watching Miyazaki films and eating chocolate bars and salty seaweed (not at the same time) while the girls snuggle their dolls and practice backbends on the couch. I have 25 tabs open on my laptop-- chapters of the fantasy novels I'm writing and esoteric research topics (How did stone age people make tattoo ink? What are the parts of a medieval wagon? Can you restart a batch of hard cider using the previous batch?). The little one is sleeping, limbs slack and head back, in a jacket that has a moose hood and she calls her cow coat.

Some things feel very ordinary. The girls go to school and have playdates and piano recitals and karate belt promotions and soccer games. We travel more than makes sense but we love it and the house remains a mess. I try to meet up with friends as much as I can, and they feed my soul. I stress about my future career choices and the upkeep of the big house I'm responsible for and spend too much time on Facebook. My to-read list is too long and I carry a permanent balance of library fines. I'm always learning new things and forgetting old things that I should not.

Some things feel like a constructed kind of ordinary. We structure time to spend together: going to the cafe before the kids' grief group in Salt Lake, Monday game night, Friday Pizza and movies, Saturday Waffles, Sunday hiking. No-screen weekends and nightly stories...Camping and roadtrips and one-on-one outings on our birthday dates every month. I hold on to these discreet family-building rituals like pearls on a long pale string, or punctuation across a page.

The substrate below all that ordinary life and routine-- the bedrock and the aquifers and the groundwater-- feels anything but ordinary-- anything but okay.

I wonder if I'll survive. Even on bright and beautiful days, when we are snuggled close and have friends around, and we're sharing meals and music and sunshine with people we love, the shadow is a deep cold lake underneath everything I experience. And it seems like it would be a relief to let go and let myself drop in and down, down, down.

I hate that I understand that almost-irresistible appeal of nothingness, darkness, rest. Matt left it behind and left it in me when he killed himself. It's oft-repeated but true, true, true: people who die by suicide are in so much pain-- but it doesn't end when they die. It lives on and multiplies in the people they leave behind. I can understand the pain Matt felt, and still be beyond furious that Matt let go and allowed himself to give in to it. He ran towards it, cultivated it like a terrible pet. I can understand and empathize-- and still be furious that he chose things that fed the darkness and hid from things that would have grown the light. I can be angry and understand that he was tired.

Now I'm tired.

Maybe that's how, at this moment (tomorrow may be utterly different of course), I'd describe my grief. It's big, gray, heavy, cold. I'm worn down.

For the past two years, I've been blazing with pain and anger-- a screaming sprint away from that moment of nuclear blast when he died, and we lost our home and everything the kids had ever known. Now the sprint is slowing down. I have the space to think, and even more frighteningly to feel.

But I think I'm ready-- or ready to become ready, incrementally, to begin feeling. As I let myself feel those little tendrils of grief, I can also re-sow my heart. I want to feel trust again, and hope, and confidence, and plenty.

I left my religion of origin, but I still believe in faith-- the power of believing that things will be alright, even if there is no evidence. That's what I want in my life-- I may be ready for the regrowth of faith-- confidence in the bounty and safety of the world. 


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