Disclaimer: I started thinking about my uncle and this is what came out. Still working with it, but I attempted to avoid high emotion and hot prose combinations.
He wasn’t really alive the night before. More content, comfortable, complacent with his decision. Standing in the kitchen of his home in Carrollton, my uncle Tim and I swapped band stories and talked about the prospect of a Spring wedding in his backyard. My wedding. The idea was abandoned the next when my aunt found him in the basement leaning against the water heater. Gun still his right hand and a note in his left. “I can’t go back to the hospital.”
To this day, the bag of Reese’s Cups he bought the night before remains on the bottom shelf of my aunt’s refrigerator door. Unable to toss them out. The suicide didn’t bother me the most nor did his lack of reasoning in the letter left behind. I can even understand how we misconstrued the smiles into believing that he was getting better. It was the receipt for the gun he tucked away in his wallet—purchased seven days prior. It takes seven days to obtain a permit in the state of Georgia. How could he have been so comfortable with killing himself that he waited seven days without uttering a word? It was probably the best seven days of his life. He made peace with himself and left a broken family behind. I confess that anger came first and still lingers. It’s only natural, right? Selfishly, he left my aunt—his wife—alone in this world.
I think my cousin, Colin, handled it best. He carried the weight that a child of fourteen should never have to bear. But wisdom came from it. A few weeks after Tim’s funeral, Paula underwent her daily breakdown, and he mentioned something I had not considered for anger blinded me.
“Mom, why are you so angry?”
“He left us alone, and that makes me so angry.”
“He couldn’t help it. He was sick.” What if Tim saw this as his only escape? What if he believed that he was relieving of headache and heartache? Can we blame him for wanting to stop his treatments, to stop feeling trapped by his own mind, to find peace? Two years have passed since that Good Friday. I have a son now and couldn’t imagine him fading in such a manner. I surround him with love and ensure that he knows the support that will follow him for the rest of his life. Perhaps suicide isn’t entirely selfish. It is us, the broken left behind, who are selfish to ask them to remain miserable? Once they are committed, who are we to stop them from becoming free?
Ashley,
ReplyDeleteFirst of all, let me say that I really see you trying to keep several of the things we've talked about in class in mind as you write this; cool prose for high emotion, trying to navigate away from sentimentality, finding the flip side of a situation (trying to see the freedom rather than the anger and abandonment), etc. I'd encourage you to take a look at how Lynch talks about suicide again, granted he doesn't relay the loss of a close family member, but his detachment could help you here. I don't think you'd want to take detachment as far as he does, but the moves he makes, his sentence structures, etc could help you with your pacing and structure. Also, think back or take a look at Jo Ann Beard's essay again. How does she handle the murder of her friends? What other experiences does she toggle between? I think this piece could definitely benefit from a toggle to take some of the immediate weight away from your uncle's suicide and distribute it throughout the piece, making the main event a more contextualized whole. Also, take a look at your language here. While you want to remain cool, you want to be wary of lapsing into the expected or cliched. Phrases like "made peace with himself," "left a broken family behind," "alone in this world," "anger blinded me," etc. may be a little expected in a piece about suicide. Try, instead, to focus on the details surrounding the event. I loved the inclusion of the Reeses and how they still sit in the refrigerator. It is details like this that are unexpected and that could help to distribute the heft of such a subject. Also, while you would have to be careful that the inclusion of your son doesn't become a little heavy-handed, I like how your describe your uncle as "fading." While a euphemism, this idea of erasure could become more architectural and could provide a different way of talking about his suicide. Does it erase him? Does it erase his pain? What could be beautiful about non-existence? Or is the fact that it is erased the problem? It's gone, but we all know it was once there. This could help you keep a lot of the reflection you are playing with here,and we all know we need to keep the reflection :), but it could give you a different frame possibility for it.