Initial gut reaction written shortly after it happened: http://maryploppins-brainpoops.blogspot.com/2011/02/pros-and-cons-of-suicide-note.html
More gut reaction posted shortly after the first blog: http://maryploppins-brainpoops.blogspot.com/2011/03/for-us-it-isnt-over.html
The "few months later" update from June: http://maryploppins-brainpoops.blogspot.com/2011/06/disappointment-and-why-i-might-be.html
The place I was at when I wrote the first two blogs was the point where you still feel like that knife is in your gut, and that someone is twisting it around every time you think about it (which is very often at that point because everyone is still kind of standing in the middle of the "rubble" of the aftermath and trying to pick up the pieces, if you will). It's shock, it's devastation, heartbreak, anger, etc. My brain subconsciously defaulted back to anger a lot during that timeframe because IMO, anger is a WAAYY easier emotion to have and to deal with than sadness and hopelessness is.
By the time of my June entry, those raw emotions had passed, but I was still feeling general disappointment at a broader level, not just with the Amy sitch but with so many tragic situations that have happened in my family over the past 15 years. I was reflecting and trying to figure out how we had wound up at such a crappy state of affairs. Unfortunately I didn't come up with any magical answers.
And now here we are, a year later. Life keeps moving on. Scott and Sam seem to be doing quite well, considering, but of course I have no way of knowing exactly what's going on in their heads on a day to day basis. I'm sure it's still incredibly hard for them, and I also assume that their experience with it is evolving each day, just like it is for everyone else. As for Jim, I honestly am not entirely sure ... he's a very quiet and reserved guy, and not the type to go around sharing his feelings and innermost thoughts all over town. He sticks to his keen sense of humor and he certainly hasn't lost that, which I respect and totally relate to because it tends to be exactly how I cope with things as well. My feeling on it is that he's still right in the midst of the climb out of that hole. It's gotta be an incredibly difficult climb, and I suspect that it will be quite a while before he feels even a semblance of near-"normalcy" in his life.
But yeah, as far as how Jim/Sam/Scott are coping, all I can do is speculate based on my observations. The only thing I can speak to for sure is what's going through my own head, so that's what I'll try to do here:
It seems that in the past several months I've moved somewhat into "numbness". I guess your brain can only take so much, so eventually it pretty much numbs itself from the entire thing. When thoughts of the situation come up, your reaction starts to be to completely cut any emotion out of it. At that point everything starts to become more just like a black and white fact. Grass is green, 2+2=4, Earth is the 3rd planet from the sun, I need to take the car in for an oil change, Amy is dead from suicide, the sky is blue, my first meeting tomorrow is at 9am.
This is frankly how it is a lot of the time these days, except at certain times, which were basically her birthday 2 months ago, and now, the one year anniversary. Thoughts come up more often, your family mentions it and they get emotional, and it's back at the forefront again. Good memories float through the brain and you get reminded of certain things. Just a few examples I can think of at the moment:
- That time before my first junior high dance, I was 12 and she was 22 (or maybe only 21 because it would have been September-ish), and I was scared shitless to go because I had never danced in that type of social setting before. Amy spent quite a good chunk of time with me in the living room of Gmama and Grandad's Ingram Court house prepping me for this event. She helped me practice dancing, she had me figure out which type of music I felt comfortable dancing to, etc. I still remember my main answer to her: Janet Jackson. I also remember getting to the dance and trying to remember everything she had taught me, and trying not to freak out when a couple boys asked me to dance.
- Feeling so cool that I got to be a bridesmaid in her wedding when I was only 13.
- Being super little with my friend Lisa and running doing cartwheels around my backyard in our underoos (Lisa and I) while Amy orchestrated the whole thing (she was probably like 14 at the time).
- Having her teach me how to make a grilled cheese sandwich while I was a teenager babysitting Samantha. Having the drive to her and Jim's apartment be one of the first drives I ever made right after I got my driver's license at 16.
- The great philosophical discussions I had with her during the 2008 elections, and having her explain to me how and why certain views of hers had changed in recent times.
- Finding an old throw blanket that I had stashed away and forgotten about, and remembering that it was Amy who had made it for me
Etc. etc. etc., those are just a few examples I am thinking of while typing this. The bad stuff comes up again sometimes as well - All the crazy and idiotic fights we used to have ... such as that legendarily monstrous fight we got into when I was 14 and she was 24 and I made some really stupid and rude teenagery-type comment to her ... one of those things where I could sense she was already in bad mood and then I purposely pushed her buttons and busted her balls because I was an asshole teenager. She got the maddest she has EVER gotten towards me at that moment, up until that day and ever since. There was a lot of screaming and crying and storming out of the house. It took a while for us to make up after that (a few weeks or so?) and to this day I still wonder if I was ever able to fully recover my reputation in her eyes. Even 20 years later, with me being 34 and her being 44 at the time she died, and a year later, today, I'm still not entirely sure.
Anyway stuff like that comes back to the surface during these times and the emotions come back a bit too. Eventually though, at least as of where I am today, the numbness sets back in. My dad had made a comment on my first blog entry on the subject, referring to the second-to-last sentence in that blog entry: "The only thing I do know is that I'm pretty damn sure that I will never find peace with [her suicide]. But I'm not the one who matters, I'm just the whiny bitch writing this blog." He made a comment-slash-suggestion on that blog entry that was something to the effect of: Try to have more "positive self talk" rather than negative self talk ... and although at this moment it seems like you'll never find peace with this ... maybe someday you will or at least you'll feel differently about it.
And now that it's a year later, I'm checking in with myself to see if the "I'm pretty damn sure that I will never find peace with it" comment still holds up. So does it? Well ... I'd say it has changed a bit. If I'm looking at the situation as a whole, and the fact that she ever had to deal with a disorder that brought her to that moment in the garage a year ago at ALL, then I will most definitely never find peace with that. But if I'm talking about peace specifically with the decision she made, in light of all the other harsh realities that she had to deal with? "Peace" is not exactly the right word at this point, but I think I've at least wrapped my head around it more ... put myself in her shoes so many times and played out the scenario so many times that I think I can come a bit closer to understanding why she'd not only end up there, but actually go through with it despite all the damage it would do.
When I think about it I just keep going back to a song that was released by a band I like, a few months after she died. It takes on the metaphor of the albatross. That's one of those sayings that I've heard many times in my life ("it's an albatross" or "it's the albatross around my neck"), but with me certainly not being a literary genius, I always forget what it represents, and I have to go back and look it up every now and then. Well, all I can say is, now, after all this, I won't forget. Wikipedia gives a concise description of it:
The word 'albatross' is sometimes used metaphorically to mean a psychological burden that feels like a curse. It is an allusion to Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798).
In the poem, an albatross starts to follow a ship — being followed by an albatross was generally considered an omen of good luck. However, the titular mariner shoots the albatross with a crossbow, which is regarded as an act that will curse the ship (which indeed suffers terrible mishaps). To punish him, his companions induce him to wear the dead albatross around his neck indefinitely (until they all die from the curse, as it happens). Thus the albatross can be both an omen of good or bad luck, as well as a metaphor for a burden to be carried (as penance).
The symbolism used in the Coleridge poem is its highlight. For example:
Ah ! well a-day ! what evil looks
Had I from old and young !
Instead of the cross, the Albatross
About my neck was hung.
I'm not sure if the "psychological burden that feels like a curse" refers only to guilt or a penance, which is what it was in the mariner's case, but I'm looking at it in the much broader sense of any sort of heavy psychological burden that stays with you constantly. That is what I currently picture to be Amy's situation with her bipolar disorder. From every way she ever described it ... that seems to pretty much sum it up. It was something that hung there constantly. She carried it with her every single minute of every day of her life as long as she could remember, and she could never get rid of it. She tried everything in the book, all kinds of therapy and medication, but the meds came with side effects that she then had to wrestle with. This caused her to go on and off of various different drugs regularly as none of them quite got her to where she wanted to be. I guess on that Thursday morning a year ago, she just felt like there was no physical way she could carry the burden anymore. No matter how much devastation the suicide would cause, she just felt like that was her only viable option. And if that was the decision she came to despite all the damage it would do, then clearly her situation was severe.
This is the song that got me thinking along these lines, btw. I posted this on an earlier blog too, but here it is again in case you haven't seen it:
These are the song lyrics, for reference:
Albatross, albatross
How callous the ocean you cross
I, I blame you, I blame you
For all of those things I've been through
Don't feel bad, not a pang
It's my neck around which you hang
Like a chain or a tag
I flinch and you fall through the cracks
To the sea and all it bears
The secrets that I should've shared
They drowned then and there
Yeah drowned then and there
Yeah drowned then and there
I, I blame you, I blame you
For all of those things I've been through
Don't feel bad, not a pang
It's my neck around which you hang
Like a chain or a tag
I flinch and you fall through the cracks
To the sea and all it bears
The secrets that I should've shared
Drowned then and there
Yeah drowned then and there
Yeah drowned then and there
Albatross, albatross
Which way to turn when we're lost?
So yeah, that pretty much sums it up. I can't ever actually be in her head, but the feeling of a constant curse is my current estimation of what it must've been like, when I try to imagine it.
And at this point now that things are said and done, there's nothing anyone can do but to keep living their lives, and the way it mentally effects everyone evolves over time, hopefully in a positive direction.
On Friday morning several of my family members sent some emails back and forth acknowledging the one year anniversary, sending each other some comforting Bible verses, and mentioning that they were thinking about Amy. But it was a Friday like any other, and everyone presumably went on with their jobs or their classes and whatever other Friday activities they had going on. I worked all day and then we got dinner and we watched the series finale of my favorite and beloved t.v. show Chuck. Hah. It was a two hour episode and waayy sadder ending than I was expecting (which I'm still kinda bummed about), and it somehow seemed fitting for the day that the thing was sad enough to turn me into a blubbering mess.
Look at our lil' Chuck and Sarah bawling in that pic. It was clear that these onscreen tears were not just that of Chuck and Sarah, but of Zac and Yvonne. They (the actors) were extra blubbery in several scenes; it was very cute. Yvonne said in an interview that she had been crying every single day for the entire month leading into their final day of shooting, ha ha, poor thing. I liked that, because it shows how much the cast and crew loved making the show day in and day out. And also, I think everyone in the world can relate to that feeling of being kinda forced to move on from a great era in your life that you do not want to move on from. No matter what form that situation comes in - a graduation, a break-up or divorce, a change of a good job, a death. Sometimes you have to be dragged to that place kicking and screaming. But then a few days go by and you keep putting one foot in front of the other. More days and weeks and months go by and you start new endeavors. And life keeps on moving, whether you're ready for it or not.
Oh p.s. this is a late edition to this blog post, but this is the song that played in that final Chuck scene (shown in the pic above). I'm fairly sure I already hate this band just from their cutesy picture alone, but I'm just trying to just pretend like this is the only song of theirs that exists, haha. At the very least, it's a very fitting song for both the Chuck finale and the mood of the day.
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