After My Mother Killed Herself

On Winter Solstice Eve, 2002, the longest, darkest night, I'd gone to see the movie About Schmidt with Bink and Maura. I was sitting on the edge of my bed in the dark about 10 p.m. when the phone rang.

It was a conference call from my brother and sister--a first. My sister lives here, my brother on the east coast. Obviously something was wrong. Because I'd just watched a dreadful movie about an old man, I thought our father had had a heart attack.

My brother said, "The coroner called to inform us that our mother has shot herself dead. This is not a joke."

Oh, right. Our mother had talked about suicide for so long, I'd skipped over the obvious. Even though I knew she'd bought a gun that fall. (Not for the first time.)

"Good for her," I said.

Really, she'd wanted to do it since I was fourteen, at least that's when she first told me.

We talked about what we were going to do. Brother and his wife would fly here the next day, and we'd all drive down in two cars; Sister was going to call our father who lived in the same town (our parents had not remained friends after their divorce in 1974). Stuff like that.

I said, "We didn't do anything wrong, you guys."

We hung up.

I immediately called my old traveling pal Allan. We're not very close, at home. But you learn a lot about a person, sharing a Naples hotel room that had a non-working toilet.

"I know your mother did something good with her life," he said on the phone, "because I know you."

Good call.

Then I called Bink. She said she was coming over.

I stood in the middle of the room.
I looked at the liter of duty-free Bushmills Irish whiskey my father had brought me from a trip. It'd been there more than a year and I'd barely touched it. It seemed a good idea to drink some now. Using a glass seemed superfluous.

Bink picked me up and we drove over to Sister's. In high school, I'd seen my dog suffer a glancing blow from a car. Sister's eyes looked like his did before he died.

There wasn't anything to do except confirm plans for tomorrow (pick up Brother and Sister-in-Law, etc.), so Bink drove me home.

I went to bed and lay there.
I got up a few hours later.
I called Oliver's office phone--my former lover who was always saying his kids would be better off if he killed himself--and left a message saying they wouldn't be.

I put on Mozart's Requiem, turned it up loud, and hit "repeat." Oh yeah, I told my house-neighbors, who left me alone. I think it was a Saturday.
I had Bushmills for breakfast.

Bink called. She'd begun to notify people, a brilliant move because I wasn't really tracking.

I told her I was fine and she should come over later. I had to make plans for a memorial Mass at the church where I was working part-time as sacristan. My mother wasn't Catholic or any religion, but I wanted it.

I called the priest I loved, and he said he would be honored to celebrate the Mass. I made plans to meet him at church later. I told him I was fine.

Lots of people started to call.
I loved it that they called, but I felt fine. 
I'm fine, I told them.

I should take a shower and get dressed, I thought.
In the shower I thought, Hey! I should cut off my hair, like the guy in Smoke Signals did when his father died.

I got out of the shower and knelt on the floor with the kitchen scissors, flopped my long hair forward, and lopped chunks off.

Then I got dressed. I decided to rip my black turtleneck over my heart, like in Jewish tradition. I had to make a little cut in the cotton with the scissors to start the tear.
What about this "tearing your face" you read about? I tried it, but my nails weren't really sharp enough.

Sister called. Did I have a certain photo of our mother for her obituary?
I did. I would pack it to bring along.

My apartment is very small, and the photo was on a bottom shelf, behind a dining room table. Holding the bottle of Bushmills, I crawled under the table to get to it. Lying on the floor under the table, holding the photo, whiskey next to me, hair wet, this thought came to me, clearly:
I don't think I am OK.

I called the priest and left a message saying I was not, in fact, fine, and that I would not be coming down but would talk to him later.

I got out beeswax candle ends I'd saved from off the high altar (part of my job as sacristan was tending the candles) and lit them. I closed the curtains.

Barrett showed up. It wasn't in me by then to get up off the bed. She made me toast, which I couldn't swallow, but I liked that she'd made it.

The priest showed up, which surprised me.
"That's good whiskey," he, a recovering alcoholic, said, looking at the bottle next to my bed.
There wasn't anywhere for him to sit so he sat on the bed. He was uncomfortable and I was uncomfortable, but it was comforting that he held my hand for an hour and a half.

He left, and Bink arrived. Deb too, who was unsure if she should come in.
Yes. Come in. Be uncomfortable.

What helped: physical things.

Annette brought a wrapped present--a reindeer pin with bouncy springs for antlers. That sounds wrong, doesn't it? But it was great. Laura climbed onto the bed and lay down next to me, which was perfect. Kate G. brought me some of her anti-anxiety medication. I didn't want any (whiskey sufficed), but the gesture touched me. Bink trimmed up my hair, which ended up looking kind of cute.

People kept calling. Cathy said, "I would do anything for you." Joe said, "We're all thinking of you." It was good, like putting a blanket on someone in shock.

It got dark.
It was solstice.

Brother and Sister-in-Law had arrived in town. Time to go to Sister's for dinner. SJG had made chicken soup. Eating was a foreign concept, so I didn't.

We were like three zombies and their keepers. I have no idea what we said. I know I declared that I would not stay in our father's house, and everyone said I couldn't stay alone, but Bink was coming too, so that was all right.
My father made arrangements for us to stay at a B&B nearby.
He was great.
The whole badly splintered family was kind to each other. [For several weeks, which is a lot.]

We three siblings agreed this was the worst day of our lives.

I went home and lay on the bed some more.

The next day was the second-worst day of our lives.

When we got into town, we met with Lance, the cut-rate undertaker our father had dug up. He looked like a benign Jabba the Hut in a stretched-out, stained cardigan.
I'd briefly studied mortuary science, so it was interesting to watch him work. He didn't inspire confidence.
Sister-in-Law, a businesswoman, asked him to read back the pertinent numbers. He'd written down our mother's social security number wrong.

There was a pile up of dead folks needing cremating before Christmas, Lance told us, so his usual place was booked. We could drive out to Cowsville to a defunct funeral home he knew of the next day, and use their retort oven.
Fine.

We went to our mother's apartment.
She'd been dead about a week before Sheila, the neighbor in the rooming house who'd kept her eye out for our mother, finally called the police.

Sister had been talking to the coroner, who advised that if the place smelled bad--it might smell sweetish, like creamed corn, he said--it helped to heat coffee grounds in a frying pan.
The police had left the window cracked and the body'd been gone by then 48 hours, and it didn't smell. They'd thrown the mattress out too, so really it was OK. No mess, either.

My mother loved the right tool for the right job--our kitchen when I was a kid was full of copper-bottomed double-boilers, quail tongs, and other implements she'd gone to great trouble to find, in those pre-Internet days.

She'd taken care with her suicide implements too. She'd used a hollow-tipped bullet in a handgun. The kind that mushroom on contact, so the bullet hadn't even exited her brain. Death would have been instantaneous.

Sister asked the coroner, "Would you say our mother did a good job?" 
He replied, "She did a very good job."
Our mother would have puffed up with pride, hearing that.

There were lots of details to attend to in a short time: writing the obituary, faxing the photo, choosing the coffin (an "alternate container," I think it's called--basically a refrigerator box); not to mention legal stuff. 

Brother is a lawyer, so he carried file folders around, full of papers. The bank wrote us out a check on the spot for four thousand dollars. I didn't know they could do that, but our mother stayed on top of financial details, though she couldn't even wash her hair toward the end, she was so down.

Sister liked the coroner and the police, so she took care of the morgue side of things--police photos, claiming the gun, etc. I was in my high church days, so I oversaw, besides the funeral back home, a sort of send-off at the crematorium.

Where we drove the next day, somewhere out in the country.
The winter fields were beautiful, brown hillocks with furrows of snow.

A "For Sale" sign graced the colonial-style funeral home. But Lance was there, waiting in a big garage by the retort, with our mother in her box. Pale winter sun came in through an attached greenhouse on one end.

Bink and I had bought a pot of orchids in bloom. Pale purple cymbidium, my mother had grown them when I was little. We set them on the box, along with some altar candle ends I lit.

We'd brought things to send into the fire with our mother's body: dried French lavender, buckeyes from Missouri. We children each cut a lock of our hair. Our father added an origami crane from Manzanar.

I read something from the Bible. Everyone else said formal good-byes. I didn't have anything to say, so I walked up to the head of the cardboard box. It bulged a little, and I could see the black plastic body bag inside. The coroner had talked Sister out of looking at the body, but she had insisted on looking at least at the hands. They were our mother's hands. Our mother had played the piano.
The sun was warm on my shoulders, where I bent over to hold her.

Then we were done.
I was so relieved, I was almost giddy.

That night I was more violently sick than I've ever been in my life.

Sister, Brother, and I still had to clean out our dead mother's apartment. It was small, but it was full.
She'd crammed her bathroom cupboards with expensive soaps and lotions. Back issues of the New Yorker filled her bathtub.

We rented a little truck. Brother took a Persian carpet and a salt shaker shaped like a hen. "Miss Jones," my mother had called her.
Sister took the Limoges china and the pale green Manolo Blahnik shoes.
I took the writing desk Cousin Fern had bought in Damascus in 1919, inlaid with mother-of-pearl, rosewood, and camel bone. I took back the 2003 calendar I'd sent.

We drove carloads to the Saint Vincent de Paul thrift store. But what do you do with the half-used tube of toothpaste?

The nice neighbor brought us pots of coffee.

After, I wandered through my mother's neighborhood, where I'd grown up. I ended up at a beach where we used to swim. The frozen surface of the lake reflected the late afternoon sky, grey and pink.
A flock of Canada geese came in for a landing. When they hit the ice, they slid all over the place.
I laughed. I got up, and walked on.



_________________

For more info on suicide prevention or help if you are struggling:

http://suicidepreventionlifeline.org/# 
or
Call 1-800-273-8255

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Outside of the United States, please visit the International Association for Suicide Prevention for a database of international resources.