I've thought of the title of this post as the first line of a book for many, many years. The question is, how does someone write about something so difficult without literally throwing up? And if one can't, how does one ever put the past behind them? Are we condemned to carry our demons with us throughout our lives?
So, anyway. My life began when I was 12. My dad was dragging my mom through the backyard, yelling for me to get my younger brother and sister and take them to my brother's room so they wouldn't see what was going on. My dad had just gotten back from an overnight shift at the hospital. We didn't know where mom was. My dad put on his grubby gardening clothes and went outside to do some gardening. And that's when he found her. Seventeen years later, when mom did succeed in killing herself and I was calling everyone in her address book to tell them she was gone, one of the people I talked to reminded me that she'd watched me and my brother (my sister wasn't born yet) when my parents went to Europe when I was a toddler. She told me that I shouldn't feel any guilt because my mom had tried many times to kill herself. For some reason, she felt the need to tell me that the first time she knew that my mom had tried to kill herself was when she was pregnant with me.
I could have lived my entire life without knowing that. Instead, here I sit, almost 17 years later, knowing that.
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