Love, Me.

Dear Victrola,

       No one ever called you Victrola except for me, so that's how you'll know who is writing this letter.  

     I haven't had chance to process my feelings about the fact that you took your own life 2 weeks ago.  In the middle of so many crises I am in the middle of walking through, I have had you constantly in my thoughts.  Memories have flooded back, and I am wearing your clothes every day.  Do you remember that phase we went through-ok it was three years- where we only wore dresses every day?  We would trade and borrow probably looked silly much of the time.  We freely borrowed each other's clothes.  I remember you coming home from Ross one day with a new pile of dresses you had just "scored."  

   So now it's like that time again, except that I am the only one here now, to wear both of our clothes, for both of us.  Only I'm not wearing my own clothes now, because my grief just wants to rest in the hug of yours.  20 years after the dress phase, your clothes are now soft and comfortable.  Like a comforter.  They are comforter clothes.  Except not, because they're just clothes.  

     Last night, I was driving with two kids in the backseat and we hit bumper to bumper traffic.  The kids in the back did not think that bumper to bumper traffic was a good place in which to be stuck on a Friday afternoon, with 200 miles of driving left to go before they could rest their heads in their own beds.  Thankfully the DVD player distracted them and we eventually made it home.  Weary when we got there, and still with work to do, but whole. 

 But here. 

 Somewhere in the middle of planet Earth.

         But in the mind numbing drive after the traffic cleared and the quiet kids, I had time to think, and to feel, and what I felt surprised me.  I was mad at you.  I was MAD at you.  You took the cheater's way out.  Yes, I have compassion for your mental and emotional state.  Yes, I do.  I do not judge you for your choice, because here's the thing: life is hard, and full of hurts, in all the most unexpected nooks and crannies, for ALL of us, probably more than ANY of us ever let on.  And this world contains so few comforts, most of which are shallow, but we cling to the little bit of comfort we can find, and then we become addicted to things.  Life hurts. 

      But when someone does what you did, it opens that heavy, screeching door in the back of all of our minds, opens it just a little bit more than it was ever opened before, that whispers to the possibility for ALL of us to follow your lead. 

     And about your pain: I know you were trying to end your pain.  But here's the problem with suicide: it doesn't actually end your pain.  It just transfers that pain onto all of the people around you.  It doesn't just spread the pain out to all of those around you, it multiplies, pushes down upon the rest of us still here on Earth, and it breaks all of our hearts, not just broken but shattered into so many pieces that our lives will always be more exponentially broken than they already were.  

     I say "All of those around you," instead of "the people who loved you" because even people who don't know you well were hurt when you made the choice to end your life and followed through with your choice.  Even people who only know the people who knew you are affected by your choice.  But for those of us on your inner circle of closeness?  It's the worst.  We are not only affected by our loss of you; we also grieve for the grief of the others who were close to you, because we care about them, too. 

      I cannot bear to think about your husband's grief and all of the details you left him to tend to.  Not just the obvious details, like where to live, selling your belongings, but the deeper details. The memories, the misplaced guilt.  All the what if's and what could have been's, not to mention the raw grief details.

     I can't even bear to think about your sister's level of broken.  I could call it torment.  I wish I could take it from her.  I wish I could take your Mom's, your husbands, your extended family, your friends close and distant, my own, I wish I could sweep all of the grief of all of us into a huge pile and blow it away, to dissolve into the air into nothingness.  

     But the world, the whole entire world, is not big enough to contain a pile of all of our grief.  The whole entire world could not contain the grief of even just one of us. And so the Ocean will never run out of salt water, because we will never run out of tears.  Never while we live on this side of eternity, do you understand this now, 'trola?   

     Do you know that even my children are grieving over you?  My oldest daughter especially.  She came to your memorial because you were the first person she felt close to who died.  One of the first things she asked me was that I please not take her to the beach that has always been our family's favorite, because it is full of the memory of you.  

     So yes, I was mad at you yesterday.  But you and I were the kind of friends who would tell each other when we got on each other's nerves.  When I say we were sisters, I don't just mean that we were close friends.  We were sisters too in that we could say "I am frustrated with you, and here is why," and the bond would not be broken, the closeness was still intact, and I know that you would want to hear me saying this now, too.  You would not want me to keep this to myself, you would want to hear it.  

     Victrola, I wouldn't be mad if I didn't love you and miss you so much...,If I didn't regret not having called you the week before, as I was planning to do!  I truly was! I wish that when my phone said I had a missed call from you two weeks ago, and I called you back, that it had actually been you on the other end, and not your husband telling me that you had ended your own life.  No, I do not think our conversation would have changed your decision, but at least now I would have that last phone call to remember.  

     I was thinking all of these thoughts on my drive last night as the sun was going down behind the distant mountains.  And then I saw something that would sound like it came straight out of the cheesiest of cheesy movies, the kind your mom used to record for us, if it hadn't actually happened:   There was a low section of clouds huddled together, but to the right and just above them was another cloud in the shape of a bird.  It had it's wings spread straight out, and it was flying up, and it was free.  Victrola, do you know that that cloud followed me all the way home?  Or maybe it was leading me, I don't know.  The colors in the sky became brilliant pinks, oranges, deep purples, all feeling above me, and I drove straight. The bird cloud stretched before me, in front of me, as if the whole sky was a movie projector; as if it was trying to show me something that I was not quite ready to comprehend.

Grief

Grief is a different kind of beast.
It strangles you
and forces you
to learn how to breathe water.