Goodbye, My Friend

What the fuck? 

I think I'm still breathing. I know I'm still sitting in my chair. At my desk. Before my computer screen.

But my chest is tight. My heart is racing. My hands begin to tremble and shake. 

What the fuck? I look at the screen again. WhatthefuckwhatthefuckWHATTHEFUCK?

There in the middle of my Facebook newsfeed, after a picture of someone's holiday card but before an old coworker's elf meme, is an obituary.

And that is how I learn that my friend is gone. 

*     *     *     *     *

That night I pray as I google and search Facebook for more information. Please, I beg, please let it have been a heart attack. Let it have been a stroke. An aneurysm. But the biting truth, the thing I think I already know, is gnawing away at me from the inside of my gut, a pit so raw and wildly churning that it sends me running to the bathroom where all I can do is lean over and retch. 

Minutes later, I find it: a comment from a friend of his that affirms what I already know.

He took his own life.

I am shredded anew as I crumple to the floor, the dark, unlit Christmas tree looming over me from the corner of the room while I heave and sob, the unbearable question of how he did it racing around my brain, leaving a string of potential answers, each more devastating to imagine than the last. 

I do not sleep that night. I toss and turn and thrash until the covers are completely undone, until they are simply a heap of blankets that I drag across the bed as I roll over, double over, sit up, curl up. My hair is damp with tears and sticks to my face in clumps. My eyes swell and burn. I lie on the far side of the bed and look up out the window.

Can you see me? I ask him silently, my face turned skyward. 

Why didn't you tell me? Why didn't you call? Didn't you know that I meant it when I said you could call me anytime and I would come? Did I ever lie to you? Did I ever not follow through? I would have come, I would have sat with you, I would have called your doctor with you, I would have taken you to the hospital, I would have done anything to keep you safe and keep you alive. I would have done it. Didn't you know?  

But the sky doesn't respond. It just stares back at me, cold and pocked with stars, and says nothing. 

*     *     *     *     *

I get angry. At everything. At him. At his therapist. At the god he so devoutly believed in. At myself. I read our last text conversation, exactly one week before he took his life, and I pick apart every word of it, scouring for a sign, a clue, something I missed, because this is what you do when something happens that makes no sense. You look for some sense. You look for something that has some kind of goddamn rhyme or reason or rule or logic or predictability to it because surely the world is not so terrifyingly random that your friend can tell you seven days, just SEVEN FUCKING DAYS, before he kills himself that he is fine. Surely he must have said, somewhere, "Jenn, it's all about to come crashing down" and I simply missed it. Surely. He must.

But he didn't.

"I'm doing good" he wrote when I asked how he'd been. "I hope you're well" he said at the start, and then, later, "How are you?" He told me about his Thanksgiving. He asked how my boys were, asked for them by name. He filled me in when I asked how his kids were. He went into some detail about his pride for one of his children who was facing a difficult time. 

I told him I was sorry to hear things were rough for her. I told him my heart felt for her because it's difficult to discover that someone you care about isn't showing up, isn't coming through to be there for you when you need them.

He never replied.

*     *     *     *     *

I write. A long letter, by hand, the things I hadn't said simply because there hadn't been time. You don't step back and take stock, you don't try to gain the perspective of the impact someone has had on your life when they're still so largely in it.  

You don't do that until they are gone. 

Dear John... 

I write and write and write until I'm empty. I roll the letter into a tight scroll and wedge it into a wine bottle. I peel off the label. I grab my hat, my gloves and my scarf. It's the day after Christmas and it's 26 degrees outside. It's supposed to snow later. 

I drive out of Massachusetts, through the winding stretch of road through Providence. I drive south until Rhode Island halts abruptly and becomes the Atlantic. There are only two other cars in the beach parking lot. 

I don't know what I believe happens after you die, I told him once. He believed in heaven, believed his mother was there, believed he'd see her again one day. I wasn't so sure. I told him about the gauzy sense of my father that I could never quite hold on to, like he might be just past the graze of my fingertips, someplace I could not touch. Or, I pondered aloud, maybe it's all just science. Maybe his body is ash and my sense of him is nothing more than a series of neurochemical firings, a trick of the brain. 

I tried to figure it all out before he died, I told him. But I never did. 

As I walk down the beach and stand before the expansive gray sprawl that is the ocean in winter, the broken clouds casting a dull, weary light, I know that I still haven't figured it all out. 

Dear John...I don't know exactly where you are. But I feel like this might be it. 

I watch the waves for a while. I study the sky. I breath in the sharp salt air. I let the biting wind snap my hair. I let my tears roll without brushing them away.   

And then I take the bottle, full of my heart, and I hurl it into the sea. 

I hope it smashes against the rocks. I hope the paper dissolves and my words, the biggest and most important things I will ever say to my dear, beloved friend, bleed until they are one with the water, so that he may know them. 

I hope this is the right goodbye. 

It begins to snow giant, beautiful snowflakes as I drive back home.

And I know then that it was.  

Scarborough Beach, RI  12/26/16

Everybody Hurts

In childbirth you learn to trust your body, to have faith that it knows what it's doing. You surrender to the pain. You let the pain serve its purpose.

A similar thing happens when you get a stomach virus. The body knows what to do: empty. Get it out. And so, as you lean over the toilet heaving your guts out for hours at a time, you reassure yourself that you'll be okay. You just have to let it out. The same is true for emotion. When difficult emotions try to surface, we so often try to avoid them. It doesn't feel good to be angry. It doesn't feel good to be sad. It doesn't feel good to process loss. So we drink. We work more. We go out. We make jokes, we stay busy, we read books and binge TV shows. We distract ourselves in any way possible to avoid feeling the feelings. But eventually these things bubble to the surface. Because your body knows what it is doing. It's pain with a purpose. Your body, your heart, is trying to get it out. We fight it, we numb it, we do all sorts of mental gymnastics to hide from it, when really what we need to do is let it come. Then you breath a sigh of relief once you've ripped off the band-aid. You've felt the icky feelings and had a good cry or identified some difficult truth about how you feel and what you want. You look down and expect to see yourself nicely healed under that band-aid. Only to find another, smaller band-aid that must be ripped off when its time comes. We serve ourselves best when we learn to trust that those unsettled feelings we have deep down are a sign that another band-aid is ready to be to ripped off. When we recognize that this is the only way to get to healing. And when we remember that sometimes what you reveal is a cut that never fully heals; it simply scabs over. If you pick at it, it will bleed every time. But you learn to stop picking. You learn to work around it, careful not to nick it, aware that it exists and is part of you. And you learn that when it does bleed, it will again scab over. You will be okay. You just have to let it out. And trust that your body and heart know what its doing.