**Before you read – Trigger Warning** This piece talks about suicide. If you or someone you care about is dwelling on dark or suicidal thoughts or contemplating suicide, please reach out. Call the suicide prevention hotline at 988, or reach out to a friend, loved one or anyone who might listen.
This month marks the 14th anniversary of when my sister Elizabeth took her own life. I haven’t talked or written a ton about this part of my life, and well, if what I experienced or went through can help anyone then maybe it’s worth sharing…
There was this moment when I knew that my family was going to crumble into dust and that I’d be sitting, alone, sifting through piles of their cremated remains. I mean, I didn’t think it was going to be literal at the time, but in the end, it sure was. I’d just come back from a whirlwind weekend trip in 2010 where I’d experienced a chaotic mixture of highs and lows. I’d taken part in planning and executing a single-day, comic book art & writing event called the Up Fair in Lexington, Kentucky. It was a passion project spearheaded by several artists and writers to celebrate the medium of cartooning, and my then-wife Carrie and I were excited to be a part of bringing it to life. We spent a year planning for the event, managed to get dozens of cartoonists, artists, and writers to table, we drove six hours one-way to get there, spent about a thousand dollars we didn’t have to help make it happen, and when the day finally came to open the doors only about 12 people filtered into the library where we were hosting the celebration. The entire day. It was kind of devastating. A disaster. Sure, we met a bunch of great artists, folks I’m still friends with to this day, but ultimately the outing was a huge failure (for all sorts of reasons that aren’t worth digging into.)
So, my wife and I drove home, picked up some food with the sad amount of money we had left in the bank account, ate dinner, unpacked, and settled in for the evening before getting ready to call it a night. We both had work in the morning and we were exhausted.
That’s when the phone rang. It was November 2oth, just under a week before Thanksgiving (which we were going to skip out on this year since we’d just invested all of our free time and money in the Up Fair and didn’t have enough to scratch together to make the drive from North Georgia to Central Florida to visit my family. I let the phone ring six or seven times before I picked it up, hoping whoever was calling might give in and hang up. But it kept ringing, so I picked it up and, said “Hello,” and within 10 seconds knew that my life had changed forever.
I honestly do not remember what was said in the short conversation, just the gist. My brother-in-law’s sister (Jenny) was telling me that my sister Beth had hung herself, and that her husband (Chris) was too afraid to call my parents to let them know what had happened and that she was dead. Apparently, he was too afraid to call me either, but I’m not judging.
I didn’t cry. The tears didn’t come until almost a week later at my sister’s wake. I wasn’t angry or exasperated. I was mostly numb. Numb, forgiving, and understanding of my brother-in-law’s cowardice, and filled with dread. The dread wasn’t because of the news I had to deliver to my parents, it was because I was the one who had to deliver it and I knew in my heart what both of my parents would be thinking when they heard the words come out of my mouth.
It should have been me.
My brain works in a weird way where I associate so many of my experiences with moments from films. It’s this constant match game in my head that I have to literally will myself to stop. In that moment, talking to my sister in-law (sibling in-law?), the longest I’d ever spoken to her in the 22 years I was (kind of) related to her, and having a conversation about my sister’s suicide and I could not help but fall into the character of Gordie LaChance from Stand By Me.
“It should have been you, Shawn.”
Neither my father nor mother would ever speak those words. I mean, as people they weren’t that cruel, at least not at the time (that would come later.) But I guaran-fucking-tee that some form of that phrase was going to pass through their minds when I’d tell them their daughter was no longer alive.
Now, I’ll be the first to admit that writing this is wholly unfair to my folks as they’re both now dead as well and can’t defend themselves. I mean, I have the power to put whatever damn words in their mouths I want. I can make them the meanest bastards; I mean, they’re basically just characters now as there are so few people still walking this earth that knew them well enough to even remember they were once alive. I’m the guy left at the end of the story holding onto my memories of them, keeping them in some form of partial existence.
No, they weren’t cruel enough to say those words. But they were cruel enough to think them. I know this because I know them. I know how selfish they both were when it came to family, hardships, and placing blame. I know this because just a few years before my sister took her life, my mother suffered a pretty serious stroke at a time when I was the only person geographically near her who could help. After physically forcing her to go to the hospital, a process that took 3 hours because my mother insisted she was “just tired”, we learned that she’d lost about 25% of the use of her right side. That night after the rest of my family made it to the hospital, my father (who had been out of town preparing my folk’s move out of state to be near my sister) cornered me in a secluded hallway and, to my face, said none of this would have happened if he’d have been home. He’d have gotten her to the emergency room fast enough that there would have been little to no brain damage. He looked me dead in the eyes and said that this was my fault, but then tried to temper the statement by saying that he didn’t blame me.
People say some stupid shit in times of crisis, but I could see in his eyes that he meant it and that he did, in fact, blame me.
As for my mother? Well, let’s just say that Beth was her favorite and it was impossible to not know it. There’s a long history between the two of them that predates the family I grew up with. My sister was eight years older, and had a different father (who had also committed suicide coincidentally, or maybe not), and the two of them became a survivalist team. They had a bond that was vastly different than the one I had with my mother, at least until the end of her life when we’d both “been through some shit.”
So, when I received the call from Jenny that November night, I knew that the family I’d known for 33 years was no longer. My sister not only took her own life, but she also killed my parents that night. It just took them a decade to realize it and to crumble into dust. Cremated remains that sit in rather plain cardboard boxes on a shelf in my office marked with “Contains Human Remains.”
If you’re wondering, yes, a scene from a movie is running through my head. That scene in Se7en where Brad Pitt is begging Morgan Freeman to tell him what’s in the box.
Except it’s three boxes and they contain my entire family instead of Gwenneth Paltrow’s head.
