Briefcase on the Kitchen Table

My grandmother killed herself when I was two years old. I don’t remember it at all. Over the years I have heard the tale and asked so many questions about how it unfolded I feel like I can see scenes of the lead up and the aftermath on a reel in my head. Then last year my brother-in-law, whom I have known since I was 13, killed himself. Today marks a year since Josh, after spending the entire day at our home with our family, drove the two hours back to Fort Wayne and took his own life. I now know that the silent movie in my mind of the events surrounding my grandmother’s death did not begin to accurately convey the horror of suicide.

Growing up my mother, her siblings, and my grandfather never hid how my grandmother died. She dealt with debilitating bouts of clinical depression in the years leading up to her death. I can recount details of the story; that day she and my grandfather met all of their children and grandchildren at a photo studio to take a family picture, afterwards she went to my parents’ house to see the wallpaper that was going up in the room my twin sister and I shared. After that she drove the five minutes to the house she and my grandfather had lived in for years and consumed weed killer. She immediately called my uncle and revealed what she had done. My uncle rushed to the home and called 911. My grandmother and grandfather were both well-known in the community, she a county official, so she was admitted to the hospital under an alias for fear of public prying. For the next two weeks the doctors monitored her until it was determined that there was no electrical activity in her brain and she was taken off of life support. Then my grandfather, mother, aunts, and uncle began the slow and unending process of learning to live with the suicide of a loved one. Years later when I was helping to clean out the document storage of one of my aunts I found a copy of my grandmother’s suicide note in between a phone bill and a program from a music festival. It was short and to the point; she clearly could not cope with the idea of spiraling back into the black hole of depression again. I think when you have depression like that it must feel like a monster at your heels all of the time, ready to pull you back under if you miss a step. She had done lots of work; medications, psychologists, even a short hospitalization. But just like illness of the body, there are times when illness of the mind is too much. I also know from talking to my family that her death and the way she died greatly dictated the trajectory of my extended family; we are loud and probing and the entire unit takes mental health just as seriously as physical health. Very soon after my grandmother died my mother, her siblings, and my grandfather became involved with a suicide survivor support group. I knew my grandmother and family had been very open about my grandmother’s mental health while she was alive. After her death this openness and checking in on one another seemed to stretch even further.

The photo that my grandparents took that day sits in my parents’ family room. I usually look at it with a smile and only rarely think of what happened later the day that picture was taken. When my mind does wander there, my usual thoughts are of sadness but also gratitude. I would have loved to have gotten to know my grandmother, to not have such a horrible event as a part of our family history. But I have always been glad that I don’t remember her death, extremely grateful that those snapshots aren’t a part of my memory bank. Then last year happened and it has done nothing but extend the gratitude for those non-existent memories.

When Josh died last year it didn’t feel real and to be honest in a whole lot of ways it still doesn’t. Josh always dealt with anxiety. My husband has recounted episodes of panic Josh had at different times. Right before his death Josh was spinning on some personal matters but suicide never entered my mind as a possibility. Ironically, Josh was a mental health professional and knew better than most the resources available to anyone dealing with those ideations. On December 28, 2019 my husband and I were ecstatic to be first-time hosts for our family’s holiday get together. And it was seriously perfect. The house was bursting with people, the kids were playing, the food was fantastic, and the whole scene could not have been more of a quintessential Midwestern Christmas. Josh sat in the kitchen with me while I cooked sipping black coffee out of a character mug. After everyone went home for the evening and the baby was in bed, Avery and I sat on the couch celebrating the day’s success. The next morning I was the first up and I relaxed with the fireplace going, looking at the stockings on the mantle, still sitting in the bliss of the holidays and the feeling of hostess-with-the-mostest glory. My son awoke and I went to his room, changed him, and let him play on the floor. I video-called my twin sister so she could see the baby and I recounted the joy of the day before. I heard Avery’s phone ring in our bedroom and hoped it wouldn’t wake him up. This is the moment that freezes in my mind because it was the moment before the world fell apart. Through my son’s bedroom door I saw my husband emerge from our room with a look on his face I had never seen, moving his hands like he was trying to shake off invisible water. I immediately told my sister I would have to call her back. I hung up the phone and looked at Avery and he said “Josh hung himself.” The words rang in my ears. Our son was still on the floor playing. The house still smelled like roast and pie from the day before. My brain could not absorb what I just heard. And then, unbelievably my first thought was, “Is he alive?” Surely, even if he had tried to kill himself he hadn’t succeeded? But the look on my husband’s face told me everything I needed to know. At that moment a hole opened in the middle of my chest like a vacuum. We quickly did what was needed in order to to get a dog, a baby, and two adults out of the house and up to Fort Wayne. The next week is a complete blur. When we came home the house was still decked for a family Christmas that felt like a distant memory; the dishwasher was still full of all the clean holiday dinner dishes including the mug that Josh had used while sitting with me in the kitchen.

We have had some happy moments this year (for instance, having another baby) but it would be dishonest to deny the cloud over it all. While the global pandemic has been the defining event for most of the globe in 2020, for us it has not. For us, the pandemic has provided a cover for a need to turn inwards. Over the last year I have learned that my gratitude in having no memory of my grandmother’s death could not have been more well placed. I have lost people before in my life. I have lost people far ahead of when nature should have taken them. But until this year I had no remembered experience of the all-encompassing grief that is losing such a close person at their own hand. There are a million little moments from Josh’s death that are seared into my memory; the look on my husband’s face before he uttered those words, the swell of one particular hymn at the funeral, the echo of closing car doors off of the tombstones at the cemetery, the smooth feel of the casket, the brokeness of my husband as we walked together from the grave through the little town of Leesburg to his aunt’s house while gulping the cold January air into my lungs. All of these moments are so heavy and I am more thankful than I can articulate that I don’t have another set of them for my grandmother. I wish to high heaven that I had some living memories of her but I do not mourn for one second having no recollection of her death.

I wish I could tell you I had some grand take away from Josh’s death. That it has made me check in more, made me look at mental health a different way, or that we found some purpose in his premature absence but none of that would be true. What I am left with is a sucking void in my chest, sadness that my children will never know their larger-than-life uncle, anger that he did this to his brother who loved him more than life, and a coffee mug in my cupboard that I can’t get myself to use. The world has continued to turn and with each passing day the hole in my chest gets a little smaller or at at least a little less tender. But as I have seen through my mother and her siblings, this is going to take a long time. Suicide is chaos, it is nonsense and that is hard for the human brain to reconcile. I am intimately aware of the legacy this will leave for my husband’s side of the family and we will try to make sure that Josh’s children and nieces and nephews can smile someday when they glance at a photo of a person they cannot personally remember. I think the best we can strive for is to make sure our family, including those too young to have a living memory of Josh, think first of how he lived and not how he died. My family gave me that gift for my grandmother without even realizing how important it was and I will cherish it all of my life.

If you are struggling with thoughts of suicide or self harm please seek help. Suicide Help Hotline: 1-800-273-8255