I write posts like this… then I hesitate. I toss and turn things over, tumbling like rough rocks in my mind until they’re smooth and their edges don’t draw blood.
I tumble and test the weight of the memory of a dead person and what it means to respect that. I struggle with the bulk of adding to a stigma that already heavily clouds suicide and men’s mental health.
I guess I recognize that while I have this voice, read by many… the man who used to be my husband has none. And that is certainly not entirely fair.
But then I balance that against an email I received, from a women whose husband survived his own suited attempt, asking– would I have been angry with Tony, had he lived? And the answer is… of course. I’m furious with him, and he died. Had he lived and that anger been less tempered by guilt… he would have been lucky had I not killed him myself.
And I shuffle that email up against the very justified, very real anger my children will probably feel toward their father one day. And how I want them to know that’s OK– the light and the dark can coexist. You can love somebody and hate them, too.
And somehow that all gets too confusing and I think f*ck it, I’ll just tell the truth.
Because if this blog is never anything but the story of a suicide’s aftermath, then let it be the whole story. With every emotion labelled ‘okay’.
And eventually, logically… I have to hate him.
***
For Tony…
You’re stupid and I hate you and I miss you still and I wish you were here. Not for me… I’m OK, for the first time in a long time.
But for your son. For your little boy who starts school this week who needed you and loved you and misses you still. Who looked at your picture on his bedroom wall today and told you “I love you Daddy, I miss you!” and then insisted I do the same. Because he felt your absence far more than I did in this school preparation we’ve been doing he last few days. I wonder if he can picture in his mind, the way I can in mine, exactly how you would acted and what you would have said.
I don’t know if I hope he can conjure a mental image of you like that… or not. If it’s going to hurt him more or less as he grows older, remembering you.
Your daughter (my daughter…) doesn’t remember you, not at all. And again, I’m stuck between an emotional rock and a hard place. And not just for my sweet precious fairy girl, but, in some twisted way, for you too.
Because part of me, the part that’s viciously angry and is finally screaming with a mother’s instinct at how you hurt my babies, how dare you… That part of me hopes, spitefully, that wherever you might be you are watching this, regretting what you’ve missed out on, wincing in pain every time you hear the phrase “My Daddy died.” That it hurts you to watch them grow them up without a father as much as it hurts me.
I think decided, long ago, that dead people don’t feel anything at all. Because I loved you once, very much. And I don’t like to think of you, of anyone, hurting like that.
But you should be here, and my God I am so f*cking furious that if you were here I’d scream and punch and kick at you until I finally made it hurt. Because what happens this morning– my son walking into his first day of school with just his mum, when most kids have two parents by their side… it’s the height of disgusting unfairness.
And right now I don’t blame the universe.
I. Blame. You.
I don’t know what else to write, what else to say to you… as if you’re listening at all. It’s a psychologically accepted fact, Charlie the shrink tells me, that you continue to have a relationship with a dead person. It’s just that its one sided.
Every so often, I talk to you, the way I have done all along. But now it’s different… it always seems to be about the kids. The tone of it is lighter… I rarely cry at you anymore. I was starting to think to that, maybe, myself and the memory of you… we could be friends.
Except for the fact that right now, I can’t f*cking stand you. I think of what you did and its not about me, not right now. It’s about my son and his big wide blue eyes and the look on his face when he sees another kid playing with their father.
Right now… I just hate you for that.
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