I’ve been distracted from the ’stages’ and before moving on to stage 3, I want to share a little about the experience of being left behind by someone who dies by suicide. What is was like in the numb of back then.
The aftermath of Mottsu’s death was traumatic. There was shock and loss, and trying to tell his friends (our friends), colleagues, and family, his parents who lived overseas. There were too many people to tell. First round I rang, then calls came. I recounted what I knew over and over and I didn’t know much. It was a relentlessly demanding period. He was missing for four days before his body was found. It was a ghastly surreal period, trying to find him without knowing where to search, the tears, the police, the coroner, the funeral director… tears.
Then everything went quiet, I found myself alone. It was nowhere near Christmas and I kept thinking “…and all through the house. Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse…” Hushed, I wrote the following few paragraphs while trying to absorb the force of the blow.
My life has slowed and I’m surrounded by what we had but not feeling a part of it. The funeral is done, the people are gone and the phone has stopped ringing. The remnants of our life together, furnishings and belongings, are inert and silent. The house is large and empty. Unnaturally still and quiet.
I sit on the couch and breathe, not conscious of breathing. There are no eddies created by breathing in and out, the stillness is heavy, movement impossible. I just sit with the unnatural quiet in the eye of the storm trying to summon the resolve to move. Feeling like (I imagine) a quadriplegic person might feel, I grimace inwardly unable to summon a wiggle from a toe or a finger.
I have nothing to do and nowhere to go so I sit. I heard it’s possible to die of a broken heart. I know anecdotally of husbands and wives who follow each other to the grave, one unable to continue without the other. I wish it were possible to be absolved of the responsibility of going on. I could sit here and not move until even breathing stilled. Vanish, leaving just a crease on the couch to show where I sat. I could dissolve into the quietness and just not be anymore, without breaking the silence.
I can’t will it to happen and I continue to sit on the couch.
Going on will be hard but is indisputably my only option. Wishing myself away won’t provide an escape from reality. Still, sitting is as much as I can do. I shut my eyes to experience the quiet and open them. Again I close my eyes, there’s little difference no real change in state. Experimenting with my surrounds, I note that nothing else moves or changes. My eyelids open and close soundlessly while my limbs are heavy and unmoving. My mind is rendered useless and unable to anticipate time beyond the nest blink. There’s nothing that must be done, if I were to rise to my feet I wouldn’t know in which direction to step. The lethargy is like a dream that can be woken from.
Time is frozen too, it must be passing but there’s nothing to mark it. No ticking of a clock, no changing of the light through the glass. Eyes open or shut it’s the same day and maybe even the same minute. The world must be turning and it will continue to do so. It hardly seems to matter if I sit here as everything else will continue to go on. It feels like I’d not be missed in the world.
The refrigerator shudders and something inside it clunks, then there’s a ripping noise like an ice floe breaking from a glacier. It starts to hum and hiccough with mechanical tics. I sit, sphinx like listening to the fridge. I feel stuck, in a place akin to a tundra wasteland, unable to make the transition into starting a new life and unable reclaim the one I had.
It occurs to me that I am listening to the fridge. It seems a vaccuos thing to do, and a little funny and pathetic in a helpless sort of way. I don’t smile outwardly and continue to sit. There isn’t anything that has to be done. There isn’t anything I want to do and no one to do anything for.
The telephone slumbers, and a helicopter flies low overhead, its steady whirring blocking out the noise of the fridge. The spell is broken and time starts to tick again. I reconnect to reality and start to weep, for myself, for the inescapable horrors that exist in the world, for the uncertain future I face, for all that can’t just be willed away, and for the grumbling of my empty fridge.