My Mother's Gun

After I mentioned a couple posts back that my mother shot herself (in 2002), I got wondering what kind of gun she'd used. I asked my sister, who kept the police records.

Smith & Wesson .38

Turns out there are lots of models of this gun, so I'm not sure it's this one, but my sister told me it was a silver revolver with a light wood handle, so I suppose it was something like it.

The police said we could have the gun back--it was our property. My mother bought it legally, along with a box of hollow tip bullets. She'd even kept the receipt.

I said I wanted it.
I don't know why, really. I pictured some kind of cool tool, something she loved. My inheritance, uh huh.

My sister, who was handling the police side of things, went to get it. She called me from the police station and said I didn't want it. It was covered in brains and stuff. Blowback.
I hadn't thought of that. I didn't even know that word.

So I said OK, I'd pass, because her constricted voice told me I shouldn't burden her. I'm kind of sorry I did. On the other hand, I've got it anyway.

Here's a piece of the police report I find comforting:
there was a bullet hole in the wall.
The bullet that killed her never exited her skull, so my mother must have fired a practice shot first.

I like knowing that she fully understood what she was doing. Not that I doubted she wanted to die, not at all, but that she felt in her hand the physical violence she was perpetrating... well, I like having proof her action was premeditated.

I read an article in the New Yorker years ago about people who jump off the Golden Gate Bridge. [Here's the link.]
Almost everyone dies, of course--the impact turns a body's insides into scrambled eggs--but a few survive. One survivor said that after he stepped off the bridge, all his problems suddenly seemed solvable, except one: stepping off the Golden Gate Bridge.
There's no practice leap, but there can be a practice shot.

Sometimes I think about the clerk who sold my mother the gun. I can see him handing the gun across a counter. While I consider the people who designed, made, and sold the gun to be murderers--just my irrational take on the matter, you understand--I also imagine a my mother doing her best Blanche DuBois on the clerk, acting the fluttering lady who needs protection. Or she might just as well have been in her Dirty Harry mode, wearing sunglasses, coldly confident of her legal rights to this machine. She could be a chameleon that way.

I knew she'd bought a gun that fall. She told me on the phone. It wasn't her first one, and when she mentioned it, I think I said something like, "Oh."
I imagine it's hard for people who aren't intimate with a suicidal person to realize how normal the idea becomes. It's like, chicken for dinner again?

She'd first sat me down and told me she might kill herself when I was fourteen or fifteen. After 25 years of hearing about it, I was bored and resentful.
Once I even told her to go ahead and get it over with. That sounds bad, doesn't it? I should explain that before it came to that, I'd opened my veins to save her over and over again.

Gun or no gun, I expect my mother was going to kill herself anyway.
She had enough lethal medication, godknows, all prescribed by those kind strangers, medical professionals.
When we kids cleaned out her two-room apartment, I gathered all her meds together. She'd tucked them in every conceivable part of the place, lots of them packaged in sheets of foil-backed individual pockets. It took me a while to push each one out. I filled a soup bowl with them and dumped the pretty colors down the toilet.

I had figured I'd get a call saying she'd died of an overdose and I'd never know if it was an accident or not. I prefer knowing she meant it.

Sometimes I think I'm just fine after all this time, free and clear, lucky to have such a resilient personality. Sometimes I think I'm not fine at all, I just closed off a room in the house of life, love, and hope and walked away.