10 years

“This life. This night. Your story. Your pain. Your hope. It matters. All of it matters.” — Jamie Tworkowski

Ten years ago, my dad turned 64 and my father-in-law ended his own life.

He was 68 years old.

On Dec. 11, 2014, six months after we celebrated one dad and mourned the other, I started to write this piece, trying to put words to what I was feeling.  This is as far as I got:

This is the story of the house winning and a family losing. They say life is not defined by one single moment but a series of moments define your life.

I say bullshit. I think life is a series of before and after. Each life-altering event becomes a dividing line on the timeline of your life.

My husband found his father in the guestroom of his home. He died from a single, self-inflicted gunshot wound. It’s hard to type those words, even now, 10 years later. When someone you love makes a choice to leave this world, the unbearable despair, shame and anger that remains changes your life forever. There is no roadmap for grief, no end point. It’s a rollercoaster ride without a final stop. In time, the ups and downs even out but grief is sneaky and will drop you to your knees on a random Tuesday when you hear a song or smell a smell.

It was a Thursday afternoon when Luke found his dad and lost a piece of his heart. I still remember certain moments from that day like the dark lunchtime sky as I drove my daughter home from cheer camp, the impending storms that are the norm during summer afternoons in Louisiana. I remember thinking it was so beautiful and how cool it was to see the weather patterns shift so quickly.

I remember the sound that my daughter’s plastic Cinderella princess heels made against the slate floor – as my son, who was one month shy of turning two – clomped around, trying so hard to be just like her. I remember holding the phone tightly against my ear to drown out the clomping and giggling of my kids to hear my husband on the other end of the phone, who was in his dad’s house, searching for his father, calling out his name. It was the juxtaposition of those two sounds – innocence and horror in my husband’s voice after he opened up the guestroom and found his dad.

When I arrived at the house, I remember begging the coroner to check for fingerprints, hoping it was a crime scene and not a suicide scene. I remember standing in the driveway of my father-in-law’s house, watching neighbors watch my husband pace back and forth and feeling so helpless. I remember blaming myself for not knowing he was depressed and saying it over and over again, I should have known. I should have known. I should have known. Why didn’t I know?  I remember my husband’s soft-spoken uncle grabbing my face and loudly saying, “THIS. IS. NOT. YOUR. FAULT.” And I remember not believing him. The doom spiral of thoughts continued in my head for years.

Why weren’t we enough for him? What was so wrong with us that he couldn’t stay? Why didn’t he ask us for help? What are we going to tell our kids? How do we survive this?

I remember looking for a note. Looking for the why. If we could find a note, we could understand. If we could understand, we could move on and have closure.

The days that followed that day were a blur of making all of the phone calls to get the things in order while spending time and energy to not fall apart.

What my husband and I shared in common with dates, we lacked in our muddled journey of grieving. He was sad. He missed his dad. I was angry. At his dad.

It was the toughest season of our marriage.

Losing someone to suicide is like watching a boomerang of destruction slice through your life. There is no straight path and no end, it just keeps hitting everything in its path and the pain and shame of this type of death always lands right back in your lap. There’s a lot of resources out there about depression and mental health and feeling suicidal but no one ever talks about the destruction it leaves for those left behind.

Every Tuesday for six months after his dad’s death, we went to a group counseling session at the Baton Rouge Crisis Intervention Center, behind Hobby Lobby. It was one of the saddest places I have ever been. Quilts with the names of suicide victims lined the entryway to the small building and every time I read those names on those quilts, I would recognize another name from a family I knew. There were so many names.

We sat in a circle around a candle. Luke in one room, me in the other, our grief divided. He talked about his dad and his life, and I talked about how angry I was at his dad and how much he messed up our lives. I was the angry spout of vitriol that didn’t cry but seethed in endless resentment, surrounded by grieving parents and widows who shared their despair.

I asked about the anger and one woman, whose husband shot himself in their backyard, said she used to throw ice against the bricks of her home. I remember thinking, Ice? I want to throw bricks at the side of my bricks. After those meetings, we went out for dinner, the date-night-ending to the worst type of date-night-beginning and then went home, paid the babysitter and tucked our still so tiny and innocent children into bed. I was angry that we had to leave them. Angry that he left them. He was their only grandparent in Louisiana and none of us were good enough for him to stay. For him to live. I was angry that he stole my thoughts, and he created this amount of anger in me so instead of being the mom I wanted to be, I was just filled with rage.

Eventually we stopped going to those meetings. We moved forward, raising small kids with big personalities. Thank goodness for the busyness of a two-year-old and a five-year-old. Their tiny-ness helped us survive. My husband disconnected with reality for a while, choosing instead to lose himself in online games and work and everything that wasn’t us. I disconnected from him, diving into being a mom and a freelance writer.

If my father-in-law’s suicide made me feel rejected and angry, my husband’s disconnect made me feel even worse. But at the time, his choice was talking to someone who resembled the Hulk most of the time or hiding from a life that he felt responsible for shattering. Our kids asked a lot of questions in those first few months after their grandfather’s death. How did he die? Where did he die? Why did he die? Why is there so much food in our refrigerator? Why are there so many people at our house? Why did everyone leave so quickly?

We answered those questions as simply and honestly as we could, given their age and the importance of preserving their childhood. We never used the words suicide or gun. We just simply said that he was sick and in a lot of pain and that now he is with God and not in pain anymore.

We always said we would tell them when the time was right but as time moved on, quickly, and they got older, it never felt right. Until one day, it did. Time didn’t heal our wounds but hard work and a commitment and love for each other and our children created smoother scars. The trauma was part of our past but did not define who we were.

On a cool Tuesday evening in February when everyone had completed the activity/practice/rehearsal for the night, over Chick-Fil-A, Luke told our kids that his dad had taken his life. He said it honestly and beautifully, reminding them that pain is a part of life and there is help out there. And that we will always be there if it feels bad, and that we miss him terribly, but it wasn’t anyone’s fault. It wasn’t anyone’s fault, he repeated.

It wasn’t his.

It wasn’t mine.

It wasn’t theirs.

Suicide is not a reflection of the people left behind. It does not put a measurement on our worth. It is not a rejection or a dismissal.

It has nothing to do with the people living and everything to do with the person who is choosing to die. It took me a long time to have compassion and empathy for my father-in-law who chose to leave us. When I think about it now, I can’t imagine the pain he must have been in to make the choice to leave people who loved him. I hope I never feel that much pain in my life.

I’m not angry anymore and my memories of my father-in-law, alive, are starting to return. I remember him holding both of his grandchildren the day they were born, the pride in his eyes as he cradled their little burrito bodies. I remember when he taught my daughter to walk across the kitchen floor, kneeling in front of her with a wooden spoon as she reached for him and that spoon. I remember when he threw a baseball to my son and hearing the thwack of the plastic bat. I know he would have loved to see him play baseball, watching with Luke as they cheered on another baseball playing generation. I remember all of the Halloweens he came over and he took a picture with the kids at the front door, my daughter, dressed up in fairy wings holding a magic wand out, the two of them grinning at the camera, probably silently telling me to hurry up but smiling like good sports, nonetheless.

I forgave him three years after he died. I forgave myself for being so angry at him and at my husband two years after that.

I’m sharing this story with the hope that it normalizes what others have also gone through. No one wants to talk about suicide and the aftermath because it’s uncomfortable and unthinkable and if you have gone through it, it’s shameful. It made me angry and hard and hypervigilant and scared. It changed our family. But it also made me understand the importance of navigating pain. It made me dig deep and find compassion and forgiveness when I didn’t want to or feel like I had to.

We need to talk about it. We need to wrap ourselves and other families up in so much love and comfort and normalize the feelings that follow a suicide for the people who are still living. They are not solely defined by the end of their lives, and neither are we.

June 5, 2024