Nothing To Give

06 Monday Jun 2011

Posted by in boundaries, conflicts, grief, guilt, Post-Traumatic Stress, PTSD, reactions, relationships, suicide

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At its best our mother/daughter relationship was an intense flip-flop thing.  One moment we bathed in each other’s love and attention, sharing laugher and friendly conversations.  Then—flip, one of us penetrated the other’s skin-thin edges and we got mad, or hurt, or both.  Sharp words crystallized into sudden swords stabbing.  Then—flop—we would start a conversation about Daddy or gardening or birds, the whole time smiling those there-you-go-again grins.  It had always been like that for us.  We were close. 
My mother and I shared the brunt of finding my father’s body.  The first year after Daddy’s suicide, we reminded each other of that day just by eye contact.   Traumatic shock affected our relationship. 
  I felt angry and guilty toward her.  I didn’t want to talk to her about my father after his death, good or bad.  She had trust-issues and leaned on me for too much emotional fuel.  I erected reinforced wall-boundaries. When she crawled over them, I felt angry that she wouldn’t seek support from anyone else.  Sometimes I even hated being around her.  Then I felt guilty—thought myself uncaring.  To keep from hurting her with these feelings, I kept an emotional distance.  And truth be known, I think she felt the same way around me.
I wished that our relationship would snap back to its original innocence and felt a spinning anger at my father that his action had set Mom and me haywire.  At least we still had gardens and birds to talk about.
           Some things shouldn’t be measured in terms of good or bad.  They are as they are.  Suicide takes its toll in relationships and each person is responsible for their own grief.  When the well is empty, does it apologize to the dropped bucket?

Memories

04 Saturday Jun 2011

Posted by in dreams, energy, memories, miss him, suicide

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            I awoke one morning with clear visions of Daddy teaching me how the guts of an AC unit worked and then another memory of his sitting at the kitchen table trying to drum into my head the notion of compound interest.  In the first, he pointed to black tubes with his grease-covered fingers, and though his brow beaded with sweat, his eyes smile-crinkled at my understanding.  But in the next, he sat upright with a pencil eraser tapping impatiently at the examples that made no sense to me.  “Look here,” he said, his voice raised and frustrated, “you mean you can’t understand this?”  I never wanted to talk to him about money, but always, I loved helping him work out there in his garage. 
            After his death, such nightly memories sucked away my energy.  Throughout the day, I felt like bland food with no added salt, no pepper, no spice.   Come nightfall, thoughts and memories of him flickered behind my eyelids like a movie-marathon.  I saw him laughing, talking, or just looking off into thin air.  I saw his hands petting his dog or holding my mother’s hand.  I saw him sitting on the couch with his elbow on the armrest.  I heard him cuss under his breath when something he fixed broke.  I heard him whistling when things he worked on went right.  I missed him so much—I still do.
            At first, those memories hurt.  Leaded with the pain of his suicide, they came with extreme sadness and wild, horrible imaginings of the seconds before he shot himself.  Later after time healed the rawness of my grief, my true memories helped me understand that his life meant far more than just how he died. 
Memories are a pathway that connects us to others.   Memories help me hold my father in a gentle and real place now.

Jealousy

03 Friday Jun 2011

Posted by in father, feelings, jealousy, love, suicide

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            I was stingy for his love after he died; he was, after all, my father.   But memories of his attention seemed always to be for someone else.
Reacting with sibling competition, I envied that Daddy had once apologized to my older sister.  When she was a child, he had mistreated her.  I guessed the reason was because she had taken all of Mom’s attention.  But I had been his little buddy.  Perhaps he felt there was no reason to apologize for his behavior toward me.  After his death, the thought of his need for my sister’s forgiveness angered me as if lightening had struck white heat through my heart.
Jealousy of Daddy’s love for Mom overpowered me, too.  I felt he loved Mom as if she were the only person in his world.  “Don’t you think your moma has such a good way about her?” he would ask me, grinning, always telling me how pretty she was.  I remembered the times he held my hands out to the light, turning them this way and that, and then with a smile declaring them “just like your moma’s.”
Even the affection he felt toward his dog tore at me.  The sound of Dad’s gentle talk to that dog echoed in my ears after his death.  Every day for years, he had taken it for a walk in the woods on the hunt. “We scout ‘em squirrels out together,” he bragged.  On my visits home, those squirrel hunts were his funny stories.
My family relationships suffered from the resentment that wiggled in and out of me like worms.  But, it seemed that as grief ever-so-slowly abated, my feelings evolved into something more respectful.  I became grateful that Daddy had given my sister a chance to forgive him.   I became thankful that his life was filled with a love that many never find.  And I was glad that he taught me how to be an honest and forthright individual.  That was his attention to me; he was, after all, my father.
Grief turns on the basic emotions like switching on all the lights in the house.  Jealousy is one.  Listen to it.  It is saying you have every right to hurt.  Talk to someone who can help you find a healthy release.

Important Relationship

02 Thursday Jun 2011

Posted by in anger, marriage, professional help, relationships, suicide

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            My marriage was only three years old when Daddy died.  It was my second marriage.  I was frightened my grief would tear it apart.  Those intense emotions of heartache, traumatic stress, and fury funneled their way down to one emotional pipeline and spilled out in angry, watery, aggressive reactions.  I couldn’t control my feelings and acted like a tired, cranky two-year-old child.   I felt embarrassed to cry, but tears traveled down my face in rivers.  Grief left me looking sulky.
My husband became a safe target.  Most of my anger was focused at him over trivial things.  We painted the house together and I furiously blamed him for leaving a paint-can in my way.  He worked a split shift and was sleep deprived; I yelled at him for not listening.
            My father’s suicide taught my husband and me how to communicate.  We had a lot to digest.  He didn’t understand why I was so quick-tempered, and he would react defensively.  I didn’t recognize how tremendously angry he was with my father for hurting me.  He tried to keep those feelings to himself; they came across to me as condemnation.  We had a lot of conflict—and, thank God, ended up going for professional help.
Anger, I realized, had always been my method of dealing with uncontrollable things.  That realization and my husband’s loving concern may well have been what saved our marriage.  A counselor helped teach us both how to interpret our feelings.   I learned it was because I felt safe enough with him that I centered much of my grieving fury at him.  It wasn’t fair of me to do that.  He learned that I needed to be held when I acted like a child, not walked away from. In counseling, we talked out our feelings without so much emotional-fuel.   
Afterwards, he was there for me all the way.  He hugged me, and gave me space when I needed it.  But most importantly, he listened to me when I experienced my anger-disguised emotions of helplessness.  At a support group for families affected by suicide, he learned that my anger wasn’t as unique as he thought.  My tears came with less anger after they stopped meeting his resistance.  
            After a suicide, communication and emotional support is as necessary as water and air.

Helplessness

01 Wednesday Jun 2011

Posted by in control, helplessness, suicide

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            My husband had rotator-cuff surgery on an outpatient basis.  On the second day that he was home, he lost consciousness when I took off the surgical bandage.  Not armed with enough medical knowledge, I felt scared for him and didn’t know what to do.  My hands shook as I frantically held him upright in the chair and called out his name.  Later, after my husband had regained consciousness, we laughed.  He fainted because the bandage came off with most of his chest hairs. 
Nonetheless, that inadequate feeling I had with my husband that day reminded me of how I felt when I found my father.  I felt helpless, afraid, and called out his name.  After my husband’s bandages were changed, I lost myself in a ton of housework.
Even before I saw my father’s body, I knew something wasn’t right.  His garage was strangely quiet.  The old, manual garage-door was lowered too much; the dog tied-up outside the door looked too sad.  I had a dozen questions running inside my head.  Where was he—on a walk?  Why hadn’t he taken his dog?  As if reacting to a premonition, my heart pounded when I pulled up the door.  My hands shook and time seemed to stop.  When I stepped inside, I called out, “Daddy.”  That one word echoed off the walls of my mind since he died. 
My mother and sister said I took control that day, arranged things.  It was my way of fighting off what happened to me in that garage.  I came up against the core of what was horribly uncontrollable; my mind disassociated from reality.  Later, I went on auto-pilot and made a to-do list.  Organizing, making calls, watching after my mother as if she were my only concern—all that was an effort to stop feeling helpless.  I actually felt heartless because I couldn’t feel anything, but I wasn’t.  I was just in shock.  I was a vulnerable adult-child hiding behind tasks and to-do lists.
          Sometimes just listening to my own breath brings me to the realization that many things are uncontrollable.  I do not have to be afraid of everything that I can’t control.  If I hold my breath, mostly I will just pass out and breathe again.

God Tied His Own Hands

31 Tuesday May 2011

Posted by in faith, God, hell, suicide

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            “Poor God,” I thought.  “God gave away all control over us when God gave us free will.”

          It was one of my first thoughts when Daddy killed himself.  I felt sorry for God and thought God helpless.  I imagined God crying along with my family, grief-stricken.  Everyone loved my father and thought well of him.  Everyone was hurt by my Dad’s death, including God. 

            I foolishly worried that God would have no choice but to send my Dad to hell.  From the first day, I started bargaining. I remembered rationalizing that certainly as my father’s Judge, God would have to take into consideration mental illness—even human judges did that.  Didn’t they?  Surely, my family and I were about pay enough of a hell-debt to get Daddy into heaven.  I wasn’t the only one with this worry.  One aunt said she was almost sure that Daddy had been baptized, as if that saved him from Hell—as if God would have sent him straight to hell. 

            That fear of my father going to hell was covered over later with feelings of hurt and anger.  My husband and I were invited to a neighbor’s party.  All the women chatted together for a while in the kitchen.  One woman talked about her love for God and stupidly said how sorry she felt for people who kill themselves because they would never get to heaven.  Such judgmental words about God flowed out of the same mouth that had just described a loving God.  I wished, at the time, that I could have said my thoughts to her, but I hurt too much to speak.  And I was too afraid of what I would say. My stomach ached from swallowing my words.

            It took me a while to get a handle on God’s power over death since Daddy’s suicide.  I started reading the Old Testament; I wanted evidence of a powerful God who could save my father.  What I learned really didn’t have anything to do with the business between God and Daddy.  The day after he died, an Episcopal priest told me that she believed God gave redemption even after death.  She said that she felt God would heal his mind and give him time to make amends.  Daddy’s impulsive actions, sins if you want to call them that, were now between him and God. 

          I learned more about my own relationship with God.  God wanted me to always ask, to always seek, to always find courage.  God was a tough old character who weathered my anger, despair, and even my lack of faith.  God wanted me to be happy.  But even a Higher Power couldn’t make me happy or make me live in the Now, the kingdom of heaven where God is, without my consent.  That was (and is) the gift of free will.  It was (and is) my choice.

“Do we really worship a God who is unable to be God when people need God the most?  None of us have kept the commandments.  Do we really believe God’s hands are tied by anything?”

…Rev. David Sawyer

Going Back

30 Monday May 2011

Posted by in dread, post-traumatic, suicide

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            Visiting my mother after Daddy’s suicide was more than difficult.  I varied from extreme emotions of fear and anger to numbed-out feelings of procrastination and passivity.  I forced myself to make those trips.  Driving there, I couldn’t count the number of times I wished she would sell their home of nearly a half of a century.  Nothing seemed changed to me.  She said that wasn’t true.  She was right, too.  Mom had repainted the house, had changed the household into her own place.  Still, for me, the house was stained with unthinkable memories. 
After we had found my father’s body, the police asked us to wait inside Mom’s house while they roped off the garage with yellow crime-scene tape and waited on the coroner.   Mom and I sat and just looked at each other, speechless, helpless.   Then the medical examiner came and pronounced his death as a suicide.  Screams spilled out of the both of us.  That was when her livingroom furniture became stained from my own drowning emotions.  Days, months, and years later I tried not to sit in the same chair anymore when I went there.  I tried not to look at Mom out of the same corner of my eye.  I tried so many ways to avoid the lapsed silences when our eyes would meet, for me, in that one great memory.  When I went there constant, nervous conversation poured out from me in that room, along with arguments, cut-off attempts of answering the ‘why’ question.  Or I sat white-knuckled with the same trapped-fear I have in a dentist chair.  Many times, I cut that trip so short it broke off into the quick of both my mother’s heart and my own.  For a long time each and every element of my mother’s house, as well, sometimes as my mother, filled me with dread.
            Many times I took my dog with me if my husband couldn’t go.  They distracted the demons lurking in the furniture while my mom and I laughed.  I was not aware when the dreadful feeling subsided, but it did.  It honestly did.  She and I have strived to retain our love that had always been influenced by Daddy in one way or another.   I didn’t lose a relationship with my mother just because I wanted to hide from the memory-stained furniture.
Feeling the feelings of post-traumatic fear and dread is worth the effort.   

From The Other Side

28 Saturday May 2011

Posted by in faith, miracle, numinous, spirit, suicide

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            My father, several years before he shot himself, told me where he wished to be buried.  It was during the trip home from my grandmother’s funeral.  He said he wanted to rest in my mother’s family-cemetery out in the country where there were trees and birds and farm sounds—not the cemetery plot that he and Mom had picked out two decades ago.  When Daddy died, I felt a great need to honor his wishes, but chose not to go against my mother.  She wanted him in the in-town plot.  It was closer and paid for.  There was enough stress without my making a big deal.  But still, I felt that we had put him in the wrong place.  It nagged at me.
            One day driving to work, window down, I heard bird songs along the country road.  My mind worked on a ridiculous plan to dig him up when Mom died and bury him in the right place.  That’s when I actually heard my father’s voice speak with that same grinning-tone that always tried to talk me out of things.  “Don’t worry about that, Karen,” he said, “I kinda like hearing the traffic.  It’s ok.” 
Hot and cold at the same time, I pulled over to the side of the road to let sink what had just happened.  For the last few weeks, yes, I had heard the memory of my father’s voice, but today—I felt him actually near me.  I heard his voice.  It was different from remembering it.
            I never knew how to explain that moment.  I gave up the particular worry over where he was buried.  The rest of the day felt light and easy.  It was probably the first light and easy day I’d had since I had found my father’s body.  Later in the evening, I wished he had of explained what in the hell he was thinking.
            Who’s to say what’s real?  It’s faith that gives a miracle its nourishment. 

Family Relationships—Overprotectiveness

27 Friday May 2011

Posted by in family, guilt, overprotectiveness, worry

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           The emotional bonds to my family had always been convoluted.  Strands of affection, anger, joy, love, rebellion, untold concern, and knots of pure, seething frustration had piled up over the years like heaps of tangled rope from an unfinished project—in such a mess that I had stopped trying to sort them out. 
            The night after Daddy shot himself, I had a dream that all my family were cave-explorers.  We were linked together with nylon ropes and walked cautiously into a cavern that went deep within the earth.  On a plateau which only feet away dropped-off into a dark abyss, we pitched our camp for the night.  In my dream, I awoke to see Daddy standing close to the plateau’s edge.  He turned to look at me for a moment and smiled sadly.  Then he jumped.  His still-attached ropes nearly pulled us down with him.  I dreamt that I frantically secured my sister and mother to a rock so that we wouldn’t be carried over the edge, too.  I awoke wadded-up in bedding, struggling, screaming out instructions, trying desperately to get him back—trying urgently to secure everyone else.
            The rest of the year after my father’s death, I lived that dream.  When my mind wasn’t muddling over Daddy’s suicide, I worried over family members.  I was afraid of my mother and sister’s grief and tried to ignore my own.  I called, daily; giving out advice to adults capable of living their own lives, and never believed them when they assured me that they were ok.

“…overprotectiveness in relationships is one of the possible consequences of trauma-related guilt.”
                                                            Trust After Trauma,
                                                                        Aphrodite Matsakis, Ph.D

Family Relationships – Sibling Arguments

26 Thursday May 2011

Posted by in conflicts, family, grief, siblings, suicide

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Mom called us her little hummingbird warriors.  When I was five-years-old, I wanted my older sister to read to me, but she wanted to watch TV.  I got mad and cracked her over the nose with the book spine.  She retaliated and slapped me.  We sat there in front of the TV with tears running down our faces, whimpering, and patting each other’s leg in comfort.  For nearly forty years, we had resolved our thorny problems with arguments.
            After Daddy’s suicide my sister called and wanted to talk out her feelings.  She wanted me to listen—that’s all.  Each time I tried to share something of my feelings, she cut me off.  I got angry and told her “if you want to talk, the street should run both ways.”  She got quiet and said in a hurt voice, “I think so, too,” and hung up. 
Our grief triggered each other’s despair, ruthlessly.  One weekend my sister spent the night with Mom; my husband and I went down there, too, just for a day visit.  I took some tools for Mom out to the garage—where I had found Daddy’s body only a few months before.  My breath caught while I was out there, but I shoved down my pain.  Maybe my sister had listened to too much of Mom’s talk about Daddy before I got there, or maybe she had spent too much time looking at the walls.  Everywhere in Mom’s house were painful reminders of Daddy—pictures, tools, memories.  Her broken heart, I’m sure, ached.  Seeing the pain on each other’s face, we misjudged it, thinking the other was angry.  Anger and grief looked a lot alike in my family.
So we did what came natural.  We argued—loud, outside in front of the neighbors, in front of God.  Even when we tried to make up, we just got into another argument.  My chest heaved; her face flamed. Our pinpricked eyes gouged at each other.  I’m not sure how we restrained ourselves from hitting.  Strip away our adult veneer, and there we were again—Mom’s two little hummingbird warriors.
Twenty-four hours later, we apologized and meant it.  We grew up. 
Family members can and do trigger the grief process.  Expect conflicts; it’s natural.  Grief is a process for the whole family.