I was in a wreck this Saturday.  Not a big deal, really — the damage you see on the left is the worst of it.  My fingers are jammed and it hurts to type because the airbag deployed into them.  My neck and shoulders are actually pretty sore too, and random parts of my body.  Everyone else was pretty much fine, and the cars were covered by insurance.

Have I mentioned being discouraged?  I am.  It’s funny, because that night I was feeling pretty good.  I was even in the middle of a conversation when the wreck happened about plans for 2010, and how things were going to pick up really soon.  Christmas had worked out pretty well, with the kids being royally spoiled by grandparents, and I was seeing a glimmer of something better.  It’s typical.  I dare to express hope and *BAM*!

Oh my gosh, I’m pulling up as hard as I can!  I’ve got to be levelling off soon, right? I need someone to pet me; I need to catch a break; I need to remember how to breathe.  2009 isn’t over yet, but I hope the worst of the damage is over.  I think my resolutions for 2010 are already written for me. I just need to fix just about everything in my life, starting with my outlook.

Not super talky tonight in general.  I’ve been a bit blue today, because it’s not really all that weird to hate goodbyes.  My visitors are off to their Thanksgiving vacation, and I’ve already been missing them something fierce.

To top off the blue feeling, I just watched a video for survivors of suicide.  My brother is conspicuously absent too, and with the upcoming holiday and game I feel it keenly.  There was a little mnemonic presented to anyone wanting to help anyone else who was grieving or dealing with a loss that I thought was particularly insightful.  The three Hs were to Hug, Hush, and Hang out. That sounds just about right to me.

Of course, being showered with kisses by a kindergartener helps too.  So does watching a second grader be goofy with his new foam bullet gun, and arguing about which Teenaged Mutant Ninja Turtle everyone in the family represents.  I highly recommend borrowing a couple of grimy little boys the next time you’re feeling sad.

Close to it, anyway.

For today’s post, I bring you pictures!  These are the freckly arms of my family, all marked up for To Write Love On Her Arms Day!

At least 15 people I know participated, and a lot of them were doing simply to show me they cared.  That helped me through a rocky day today.  I am so grateful for the kindness of those around me.  Love and hope are a wonderful message.

Tomorrow, probably a million people will be writing the word “LOVE” on their arms. To Write Love On Her Arms is a movement that started in 2006, in an effort to help a suicidal girl who had been turned out of a treatment center because she was too high of a risk. She’d written “FUCK UP” on her arms with her razor. For five days, her friends worked to give her hope, and to remember the reasons to live. Tee-shirts with “to write love on her arms” were sold to raise money to help her, and this movement was born.

Every year, on November 13, out come the Sharpies. The title of the story was not really intended to start so many people literally writing the word “love” on their arms, but that’s one of the ways it is being supported and expressed.  The goal is to support those battling drug addiction, depression, self injury, and the culmination of it all, suicide. Last year I was invited to do this. I remember thinking it was a noble cause, and such a small gesture to help so many. But I forgot, because it really didn’t hit all that close to home. This year I can’t forget.

The effect that this movement has on those who need it is heart-warming. On the Facebook group, there’s a gallery of pictures of people who have written their love on their arms. There are pictures of groups of friends, some of them with healing scars from suicide attempts or self-mutilation openly beside healthy, whole arms. There are people posting that tomorrow is their favorite day of the year! My mind boggles at that thought, but it is so wonderfully hopeful! If this outpouring of love is truly nurturing the seed of love and self-worth in their hearts, it’s a tiny gesture for me to express it. I do have love and compassion for all of those suffering out there.

Renee, the young woman whose life was saved in 2006, hoped her story would help others. Her words seem to speak directly to me now. “The stars are always there but we miss them in the dirt and clouds. We miss them in the storms. Tell them to remember hope. We have hope.”

The Out of the Darkness Walk was a huge success in terms of turnout and money raised. Personally, I cried my head off. I cry easily anyway, but I felt terrible about it as everyone else seemed to have a smiley face.  Out of all those people, almost all of them were walking because someone they knew had been lost to this.  A few were just being supportive, of course.  But all those people were changed somehow by suicide, and so many of those hearts had this awful burden to bear.

So I couldn’t find it in me to smile or put on a brave face. It’s awkward and bizarre walking to benefit the prevention of something I knew next to nothing about just a few months ago. I suppose I should feel a kinship with all these people.  Instead, I found myself feeling alone.  I have felt very much alone in the last few months.  I try to reach out, and people will meet me halfway, but I feel my trust in nearly everyone is so damaged.  I mean really, who is going to burn me next? Working past that feeling is a real struggle.

To make matters worse, an acquaintance on FaceBook is telling the world how he doesn’t want to go on living.  At the same time, he claims not to be suicidal, but he sounds so familiar.  I’m not sure if he’s being melodramatic and trying to get attention, or he really needs help.   My brother was very melodramatic.  Suicide seems melodramatic to me, still.  Of course I have to reach out to the friend, and I am trying.  And naturally, he won’t even respond to my appeal.  I just want to talk to him, to tell him… something.  I guess I’ll try to write him a simple message and hope he understands I really do care.

It was an emotional day, and I’m tired and drained by it all.   I am glad I went, though.

This Sunday, the Birmingham chapter of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP) is hosting a walk in Heardmont Park, on 119.  It starts at 3:00.  So far, there are 369 registered participants, but I’ve not even registered yet.  I’m sure there will be more.

There are many purposes for this walk.  Some people will be walking to raise awareness and hopefully save lives.  Proceeds are going to the AFSP to fund research, education, and services for those in crisis and to survivors.  There’s so little known about suicide.  Those who are the sickest aren’t around to answer questions  anymore.  Yeah, we know some confusing stuff about dopamine levels, and serotonin, and of course there is what little we understand about the mental illness that is often associated with suicide.  But it’s a sickness that often hides itself until it is too late.  The only way to make things better is to shed light on the issue.  Thus, “out of the darkness.”

I’m sure there will be those there that want to show support of suicidal loved ones and show they’re not alone.   And of course, there will be the group that I’m a part of, those struggling to make sense.  We’ll be doing what we can to honor the memory of those who actually completed the act.  Later this month will be the Survivors of Suicide Day, and programs to go along with that.  Those will be things to help me.  This is about little lost Lauren.  I still see him as a kid.  It makes me so mad still.  I’m so strong. For a while there I wasn’t sure if I really was, but now I know.  I would have helped him if I could have, but he didn’t give me that.  I found out fairly recently that he threatened this regularly, but then he’d be embarrassed and say he only said it to be manipulative.  That sounds like shame to me.  He didn’t want to be seen as crazy, or weak.

The stigma of suicide is very strong.  People don’t talk about it very much, not really.  Yeah, people say they want to shoot themselves, or get irritated when someone threatens it.  It’s an evocative word, suicide.  People use it to describe all levels of self-destructive behavior. But actually talking about the act, why it happens, and the aftermath, is rare.  Now I understand partly why, though at first I didn’t.  It’s so hard to make sense of and survivors don’t want to inflict the bewilderment on innocent bystanders.  It’s bad enough that we’re dealing with it.  We love our family, we don’t want to besmirch the memory.  It’s uncomfortable to others, too.  It’s hard to wrap your head around, not wanting to live. But the survivors need to talk, to mourn, to grieve openly.  We need ways to honor our lost ones, especially because they didn’t honor themselves.

There’s so little I can do for him now.  But I’ll be there.

This morning, walking the kids to school, I had the most gorgeous brainstorm!  I’ve got a lot of basic coursework to make up, and the admissions department encouraged me to do the catchup work elsewhere.  Basically, it would be a good idea not to prejudice my profs against me by starting off from the very bottom of the rung.  If I showed up able to place higher in math and physics, in particular, they’d show me more respect.  As it is, I’m to expect a certain amount of bias because of my age and humanities degrees.  I’ve been trying to figure out how to get the money and time to do a Princeton Review type course, or go to a community college and take courses to get ready to go to Big Girl School.

Such an obvious solution was staring me in the face.  I’d been twisting this idea around, inside and out, and the easy thing to do is right there.  I’ll homeschool myself!  So, for the next quarter, I’m back to school, but at home.  Since my brain is really kind of fried right now, I figure this will be a good way to ease myself into the whole rigorous world  of academia once more anyway.  I’m really excited, honestly, but I also know I’ve been absentminded and foggy lately.

I figure I’ll start with the basics and work my way forward.  If it’s easy, then I’ll just fly through it.  Thrift stores around here should have text books that will do me well, on top of what I find online to help me. A friend of mine referred me to a Cliffs Notes homework help page to help me brush up.  I’m trying to ignore the spectre of Dr. Vance who is in the back of my head yelling, “These are terrible.  They contain factual errors!”  Another friend pointed me in the direction that lead to some free online Aeronautics and Astronautics courses and lectures from MIT and St. Petersburg College.  I’m trying to remain hopeful that these will be of use to me.

The main thing, though, is the schedule.  The structure of my typical day is nonexistant.  I just do what I need to do, when I feel like doing it.  Right now, I really need a more rigid schedule.  It doesn’t have to be ironclad, but I keep trying to drift through life.  If it weren’t for that coffee addiction that I’m cultivating, I don’t know what I’d be doing.  I considered getting a part time job, because of course more money would be nice, but I know that I would use that as an excuse to keep from doing this.  To that end, I have worked in plans to address the money issue in other ways, without going out and getting a boss.

I’m so excited; I have a real plan!  It’s a very simple one, and doesn’t address much more than the next few months.  I’m aware there will be distractions, or times my decisions will be all wrong, and I’ll have to rethink everything. The important thing right now is that I’m moving.

Who else is going?  We’ll be there at least Saturday and Sunday. We’ve never made it before, but this summer wasn’t so hot for vacating or relaxation of any sort. It’s going to be a bit of a tight squeeze for the budget, but we’re going to make it work. We all need this.

We do have a Braves game we’re going to Saturday night, though. So we’ll miss the aquarium event, which kind of bites, but we’ll have fun anyway.  My Mom is a huge Reds fan, and the rest of my family are Braves fans. (I hate baseball, but I’m a trooper.) So, it’s a tradition to go to at least one Reds vs. Braves game every year.  There’s only one this year. It often falls on the weekend of Dragon*Con, and we see all the people dressed up in their costumes as we drive through downtown and pine for the fjords.

So are you going?  Would you like to meet up?  Let me know.   I’d love to at least be on the lookout for crazy internet people to dying to mug me in a very public, crowded venue.  Plus, there’s gonna be Felicia Day, Bill Shatner, and Patrick Stewart!   And others!  Go look!

Last night, I went to the Survivors of Suicide group for the third time.  It sucked.   It’s been a rough couple of weeks, and I needed to go.  I needed to talk about things, but when I got there, I found myself unable to articulate anything.

What the hell is there to say?  My brother is dead.  His youngest daughter’s FIRST birthday is next week, and he’s dead.  I was thinking about it, and before this happened, if I had been asked about grieving for suicide, I’d have probably said something along the lines of, “Dead is dead.”  Meaning that the why doesn’t matter, if someone is gone, that’s all there is, and why complicate it? But it’s not true, everything is more complicated, and dead is more than dead.  There’s all this OTHER to deal with. Skeletons keep tumbling out of closets.  Reasons he hated his life come leering at me, complicating my dreams, interfering with normal life that is supposed to not be about him.  Yes, he was part of who I am but I shouldn’t be so fixated on him.  I should not have to go talk to my kids’ teachers and counsellors about how something my brother did is affecting their lives!

I’ve been screwing things up lately.  Mostly money.  Have I told you all how I wrote a check to the water company for the account balance on my checking account?  Yeah, good times.  I’m still waiting on the check back.  I get lost, and forget where I was driving.  I forget to eat.  Actually, I don’t forget, because I see the clock and know it’s time.  I just still don’t care about food, so to trick myself into eating, because I’m such a tightwad, I’ll eat out.  I’ve been so wasteful, but if I pay someone to fix my food I’ll eat it.  I say the wrong things to people.  I’m usually very careful about my words, but I’ve been living with the taste of shoe leather for a while now.  Or I’ll forget to talk altogether at other times, and think I’ve said things when I haven’t.

I’m all full of rage at the moment.  Just white hot anger and frustration.  Impotent, twisted, gnarled, defeated vexation.  I can’t direct it! It’s so useless.  Anyway, tears keep on coming, and it’s hard because the kids aren’t here to distract me, and maybe that’s good?  To have to face it, I mean.  I go back to almost vomiting at times, if I sit still for too long with nothing on my mind.  It’ll pass, I know it will, and later there will be sad, or happy, or whatever.

I’m learning to ride out the emotions somewhat. I started playing this game that somehow gives me a way to focus my brain just outside of where I want so that I can think through things without crying.  The family knows now that if they see that on the computer screen, just to give me a bit of space.  How do I keep living with this daily?  I want to get on the other side, see this making sense, and at the same time I want to totally avoid it, deny it, walk away.  And I see people at that meeting still coming after 6 years, and I know that this is how it is.  I’m forced into this weird depression place, and all this pain.  It’s like the energy of his own personal pain was not destroyed at all, just displaced onto all of us.

Part of the reason that the children going to school is hard is because I run into other parents who expected to see me over the summer.  And I missed all the play dates, and so they know we did something.  When I have to answer how my summer was, I’m unable to lie to smooth it over, because they’ll ask next what we did and I just can’t say a trip to Virginia.  So I’ve been simply telling people he died, and leave it at that.  If they start asking details, I give them, but I don’t seek it out.  But I can’t bear to be the cause of their discomfort.  It hurts to write here, because I feel like I’m causing people who read my pain to feel a piece of this horror I have to live.  But to deny what’s going on with me is to deny my brother, and I refuse to do it.  And if I hold it in, the buildup of emotion is too bear. I’ve got to displace some emotion myself, to share it.  According to my counsellor and my reading, it’s a normal part of the grieving process that is stunted by suicide because of the associated stigma.  So telling folks is a good thing, and I remind myself of that when I’m tempted to clam up for everyone else’s sake.

I’ve been trying to journal, to write, and it goes into these spirals and I can’t get hold of it. I write a sentence and I delete it.  I try to reword it properly and the emotion changes.  I flay myself for feeling “wrong” but I know I shouldn’t do that. I try to feel the way I feel and I get mired into it and have to rip myself out of it to do the next thing. Someone at the group last night suggested I write to Lauren when I write.  Maybe that’s good.  I think I may try it, because it’s been 2 months.  We should have had anywhere from four to eight telephone calls that were two hours long in that time.  And I want to talk to him, so maybe that’s a way to go.  I miss hearing his voice, though.  And his wife deleted his myspace account, which was her right, and I’m not mad, but all my letters from him are gone, except a couple of emails I kept but they’re so full of hope and “it’ll be alright”-ness that it breaks my heart, and my voicemail deletes messages after ten days so that’s all long gone!  So I think I’ll try to start writing him.  But dammit, he won’t write back, and that just pisses me off.

But it’s not all terrible, right?  It’s not. I’m writing this, for one.  I may have had a hard time articulating last night, but in the course of writing this, I went through one of those gut-wrenching grief bursts and came out the other side and feel peaceful again.   I actually missed the realizing it had been two months exactly until a day after.  Little signs point towards an integration on the horizon that is bittersweet, melancholy, but somehow reconciled into the beauty that life breathes.  In some ways, I’m learning to like myself a whole lot more than I ever did.  Asserting myself is simpler. People have always told me I’m unduly hard on myself, and I’ve never really believed it til now, but it’s true.  Forgiving myself for whatever gaffe I’ve made is necessary, so I’ve learned to extend the compassion I have for others towards myself.  So that trite cliche that keeps being passed around is true. I’m not dead, so I’m getting stronger.

The blog is about to undergo one of those major overhauls that everyone else’s blog gets from time to time. I’ve decided I don’t like the width of the paragraph, because I can write forever and it seems like I’ve written nothing.  My screen is a widescreen, and then I’ll see the same blog entry on someone else’s monitor and think I’ve written too much.  I came across a recommendation of no more than two alphabets wide, anyway, and this way blows that.  My feel of what I’m doing here is very different now than in April when I started on this thing, anyway.   So the construction signs will be up and I’ll be fiddling around a lot in the next couple of weeks.

For now, though, there was a ray of sunshiny news from the Montgomery Advertiser last week, so I thought I’d share it with you.   The largest tree in the state of Alabama is an American chestnut!   It’s estimated to be 25-40 years old, and is producing nuts.  The really neat bit is that this wasn’t a study tree, planted by conservationists.  The only special protection it had was being part of the Talledega National Forest.

The American chestnut was nearly destroyed by an Asian chestnut blight, and researchers have been working my entire lifetime to restore it.   They’re getting closer to restoring the once dominant tree back to its home here in the Eastern US.  When I was a child, I’d go to the Arboretum at Auburn University and be all cooled out about the research they were doing to make the tree more resistant to fungus, including creating hybrids with Chinese chestnuts. I’ve always wondered what the Appalachians looked like when they were in their full glory.  I’ve only really seen images like these.  I hope I will get to see them in their full glory by the end of my lifetime!

Relatedly, here’s an article on 10 Most Magnificent Trees in the world.  Enjoy!