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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.”

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.