Choose Life

 TRIGGER WARNING:  Discussion of suicide, death, and loss.

Two weekends ago, I sat between two very dear friends, behind the parents of a friend who could be better described as an acquaintance, a well-loved acquaintance but a woman to whom I'd never gotten very close, at a memorial service.  I was sad, I was angry, and I was very hurt and didn't know how to communicate these emotions.  I was sending X-ray beams to the back of her mother's head, pleading with her to see her, understand her, care about her.  And was then angry with myself for feeling that way.  For blaming her.  For wishing she'd cared more, tried harder, had given her daughter a break, just let her be.  That wasn't fair.  I know that.  

I'd run into this woman just a month before at Trader Joe's.  I was walking out as she was coming in and just starting her shopping and the exchange was brief, head nods and smiles, a wink.  I was in a rush and she seemed lost in thought or her list.  I'm really not sure.  I didn't think much of that exchange until a few weeks later when I learned that she'd taken her life.  She was dead.  I kept seeing her face looking down at that list.  I replayed every moment we'd been together, her asking me about something or other, talking about the wine at a party.  She was dead.  And then she was standing over me doing my make up as she'd just started selling Mary Kay cosmetics and needed someone to practice her technique and her sales pitch.  I'd said, "I didn't think you wore make up."  To which she replied, "I'm trying something new.  My mother always said I'd do better to wear some make up."  And I resented her mother for putting the idea into her head that she was not enough and reassured her she was.  At least that's what I think I did.  Maybe she thought I should just shut up because she was trying something new.  

She'd been a lawyer and was incredibly intelligent, more cerebral and intellectual than I (or so it seemed).  I'd met her through other friends and saw her most often in the company of the others, except for the afternoon that she did my make up and we talked about trying new things and make up and raising children, daughters in particular, (She has a daughter and a son.) and how beautiful my own mother is and how incredible my mother's skin is and that maybe she'd try Mary Kay.  This was nervous chatter.  Having her there doing my make up, so up close, trying to convince me to buy the lipstick, the shadow, and the face creams when I rarely wore make up and if I did I sought products that would look good on my brown skin, which to my mind Mark Kay was not such a product, made me uncomfortable.  I told her as much in a series of emails after our meeting.  I did not want to let her down, didn't want her to waste her product on someone who was not going to buy anything.  I wanted her to win.  I felt her need for approval, for acceptance.  And I was upset with her mother for saying she'd do better to wear make up because she clearly did not feel comfortable in it.

And she now was dead.  I hurt her hurt and retraced the steps I'd imagined she'd taken before that last, sudden, violent moment.  And as sublime as the moment seems in poetry, in story, in song, the truth of it, the starkness, the finality, and the violence broke me.  I thought I should have spoken to her at Trader Joe's.  Should have looked into her eyes and said something to her, whatever it might be, that might make her choose life one more day.  I thought of the acting exercise, "the private moment' where the actor lives a moment where he'd not expect anyone to see him, lets down his guard, experiences the moment unapologetically, unself-consciously, and I hurt all over again imagining those last moments.

Her family and friends were in tears, completely shattered and stunned.  There were photographs of her at various stages of her life and I racked my brain trying to recall if we'd ever taken photos at the dinners and parties we'd attended together.  I closed my eyes searching for her ghost in photos of us that were never taken.  I felt her loss in the world, in my world, but didn't have the proof.  Couldn't find a photo in my mind's files.  Looking across the aisle at her children, I thought of my own and those years ago in Barbados when the daily routine seemed impossible.  I remember the despair of postpartum depression and the loneliness of my marriage and the daunting prospect of attempting to live each day.  And I felt that cold breath, that sigh between here and somewhere else and the pull in my chest and the ache in my core as I struggled to choose life.  I don't feel at all close to that edge now but that feeling has never left me.

In a bedroom community outside of New York City, the sound of the passing trains is a common occurrence and every time I hear it now, it gives me pause.  I think of the photo of her as a young girl in a brimmed hat, looking so like a character from a novel, a kind-hearted innocent, a girl from another time and place.  Her eyes in that photo were so gentle and soft and sweet.  She, full of promise.  There is yellow light around her, framing her in a memory of a perfect moment in a perfect day.  I didn't know her then.  I also didn't know the young girl in the short hair that flipped at the sides, snuggling a bunny to her chin.  But I recognized the woman that she became in her gesture.  She was warm.  She was kind.  She was sweet and loving and good and she seemed, in that moment of love, so truthful, so vulnerable, and so present.  

And now she is dead.  I say dead because gone doesn't do the loss the justice it commands.  Gone could mean that when ready she could return and she won't.  I sat behind her mother who did not, could not speak at the service and searched her father's face as he spoke of her, his voice cracking and faltering as he tried to hold her in this world with a sweet memory,  for some answer that would explain why this happened.  I looked at her ex-husband and her children and all of her friends and colleagues.  I did not look in the faces of my dear friends who sat next to me but I did squeeze their hands.  

It is so lonely being a human being sometimes.  Even when you are sitting next to someone and holding their hands, when you are in a crowd, when you are being feted and loved and surrounded, when you are on a beautiful Caribbean island living the fantasy of so many, there can be illness, depression, pain, and despair that those around you cannot know unless you share, tell them, trust them.  It is truly a risk to take.  I get it more than I care to admit.  But it's a gift this life.  I believe it and I continue to choose it.  I hate considering making a decision that ends with this choice.  I hate that there is no one to blame no matter that I was clearly searching for someone.  That no one knew how deeply despaired she was, how she'd tired of it all, how what haunted her began to share this earthly plane with her and that her dreams were no longer a safe place to escape.  I hate it so much that I replay every breathing moment I know of her life and imagine the moment she took her last.  I want to be there for her, be her witness, acknowledge her just as she was and in my magical thinking, will her back to this plane.  But she is more than gone and she won't be back.

If you have suicidal thoughts, please seek help.  You can call 1-800-273-8255 twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

(c) Copyright 2016.  Repatriated Mama:  Back to the Suburban Grind. 

Our brother's keeper

My three year old is quite precocious and wise beyond her years.  I love talking to her and her big sister about whatever interests them, though we don't talk about murders or attacks or death of any kind which terrifies Lily and leaves her reeling for days.  But we do tell them honestly how we feel about certain things, in an age appropriate way.  No questions are off limits.  Complex subjects are broken down but not dumbed down.  We talk about God, religion, sex roles and gender stereotypes, marriage, politics, money, meditation, spirituality.  I trust that my people can find the center, the core concepts.  Tonight as we were going to bed, her big sister long ago fast asleep due to the cold that is kicking her little behind, Virginie said to me, "Do you remember that boy (Virginie still refers to all males as boys.)who was lying in the street when we went to New York City?"  I did remember the man but was rather surprised that she did, as we'd been there together more than six months prior for a birthday party. 

"Yes," I answered.  I do remember that man.  He was homeless.  Remember that I told you that he had no home?"

"The street was his home.  He lived there," she announced.  She wasn't proud, just stating matter of factly that he must live somewhere, so the place where he lay must be it.  She sat quietly for a moment, which for anyone who knows my dear girl knows is no small feat.  Then she said, "Can he drive his car to his house somewhere else?"  To which I replied, "I don't think he has a car either, baby, or a house somewhere else."

Her little brow furrowed and she stared into the darkness for a minute before she said, "We have to help him, Mama.  Papa gets jobs.  Maybe he can show him how to get one too."

"Maybe," I said while brushing her hair from her face and trying to gently lull her to sleep.  I lay there in the darkness, missing my husband who is working through this holiday season, and thought, This baby is right.  We have to help this man.  We have to help people.  We have to help each other.

I, too, have been guilty of turning in, working on my own issues, my own problems, my own story.  I have gotten used to letting go of my community, not asking of it, and being slow to offer my assistance or service, assuming either that someone else will do it or fearing calling unwanted attention to me or my action.  I have figured that the connections were too personal, too scary, left me too vulnerable to attack or to love.  Whenever I have had the chance to participate, I've felt so incredible, so alive, so connected, so tangibly, vibrantly, extraordinarily human.  I have been reminded by this small girl who somehow saw the connection between us all and asked not if we would help, but demanded we should.  I say this so much when it relates to real tragedy, to the furthest reaches of human suffering and need, but it is also true in our every day.  We are our brother's keeper.  We need to see each other, consider each other, support each other.  Want to.

Strangely, I too, could not get that particular homeless man's face out of my mind.  Maybe it was because I could see him in the distance as the girls and I were about to pass and I mulled just what I would tell them when the question was inevitably asked.  But for days after, when I thought of the conversation between us, I wondered how I'd found it so easy to explain that there was a man, red-faced and cold, clinging to a box, sleeping on the sidewalk in the city of their birth, and that I was able to say it so matter-of-factly. 

I remember as a child, seeing my first homeless person.  It was the early eighties and we'd gone into the city to do something, probably see a show or go to a museum as was usually the case.  I was older than my girls are now and homeless people we not commonplace. As more and more people found themselves unable to keep up with the excess and striving of the 80s, coupled with the closing of mental health facilities that saw many with mental disabilities actually released to the street to fend for themselves, an invisible, underground (so to speak) population grew alongside those of us living above ground.  I was terrified of the man and woman I saw.  They seemed out of a movie.  Which is, frankly, why it was probably so easy for so many adults to consider them unreal.  It was hard to look at them and see their faces, to look them in the eye, let alone consider their stories.  Their real life, human stories.  Stories the same as those I or others I knew might tell.  I never forgot them and my feeling that as a society, as a community, we were choosing to allow these people to live out of our sight, rather than bringing them back into the fold.  I was just a kid but I knew that this just didn't seem right.

I'm not sure when and where we let go of each others' hands.  Maybe we were never holding them in the first place, and it is a fantasy of my youth that we were meant to care for one another, to look out for one another, to try to lift each and every one of us from our place on the sidewalk, physically and metaphorically, to allow even those living in parallel universes to be seen and acknowledged from time to time.  Some people think when we are young we can still see ghosts and spirits and as we age, we lose our connection to that world, overwhelmed are we by the material world.  We cannot see what children see right in front of their faces.  "We have to help him."  We have to help each other because we need each other.

Inherent in all the struggle we have meeting the demands of the modern world, striving for a level of success equal to that of our parents, raising our children to be decent citizens while giving them everything we can without making them completely spoiled, must be the sense, if not the realization, that we cannot leave all those people behind.  That there has already been too much of that, too much "going for mine," and that it has not brought comfort or peace.  The "otherness" of homeless people, black people, white people, foreigners and expats, gay people, straight people, people with disabilities of any kind, people who think differently than we, rich people, poor people, anything that doesn't look, on the surface, just as we envision ourselves, has allowed us to ignore each other, to step over each other, walk around each other, justify killing each other, justify fearing each other, set up communities where we don't have to look at each other or be with each other.  But that does not negate the fact that this man was lying down on the ground, living, breathing, sleeping and that many others actually and metaphorically are doing the same.  And we should help them.

My baby wants to help him.  It's my job to keep it that way. 


(c)  Copyright 2012.  Repatriated Mama: Back the Suburban Grind.

Reposted: Massacre of the Innocents

As the 365th day since the Newtown massacre loomed and images of those lost were flashed on screens with soft music playing in the background, as interviews with their friends and families aired, and stories of even more gun violence continued to spatter any news cycle at any time, my sadness and sense of helplessness began to surge.  I wanted to say something but found myself mute.  Shaking my head and muttering to myself over again what seems to be so obvious.  We have to make this stop.  I share again my post from last year.  Thank you for reading.


Though a requirement for my Master's Degree, statistics have never been a strong suit for me.  I remember when first learning basic stats in high school there was mention about considering the stats rather than sample stories or examples because while the stories are compelling, they often do not show the bigger picture.  I know this to be true, and yet when I see statistics showing that gun violence is down since the 70s and 80s, that supposedly gun assaults and the US obsession with guns and other destructive weapons is on the decline, I am not put at ease.  I respond to the sample.  I see the killing, the killing, the senseless killing and have a hard time taking comfort in the decreasing numbers.  Though I do accept the mathematical equations showing decline, I wonder if there is not more to review here.  I am concerned about the causes of the new type of killer.  I remember our fears in the 70s and 80s because I was a child during that time.  We were afraid of gangs, the thriving, illegal, and suspect trade in crack cocaine, a drug that seemed to take over inner city neighborhoods in a season and then spread throughout the United States.  During that bloody terror, a war on drugs was declared and it was fought out in the streets.  This is not what we are experiencing here and the stats don't say anything of it. 

I am frozen, but not numbed, boiling inside, acid rotting my gut, my heart bleeding out of my chest. The phrase "the slaughter of the innocents" has been much used in the murder of those 28 people in Newtown, CT and it is so appropriate.  My oldest daughter is the same age as many of the victims of this crime and my anxiety was not well served by this news.  I envisioned her walking through the hallway, dragging her hand along the wall as she daydreamed and walked to or from the bathroom, thrilled at the little bit of freedom she'd found in the middle of her day.  I have seen so many of her peers do exactly that on days that I have visited her school.  They look with wonder and trust and awe at nearly everything in the world.  This is the age where kids are not quite jaded or "bored" by much of anything.  Where their curiosity is peaked by almost everything.  They pay attention because they are studying, learning, analyzing and don't pay attention for just the same reason.  The thought of all those little, peering eyes trying to compute what was unfolding before them makes me faint.  I mourn the massacre of these innocents and the loss of innocence of the poor, wide-eyed children who witnessed the murder of their classmates and teachers and professionals.

I cannot stand the argument that "we" care only when the tragedy, the massacre, the deaths of children and innocents hit close to home.  How can anyone know that?  How can they claim that?  Yes, it is true that the media chooses what to cover, works its angles to keep us all interested in their particular network.  I would support the idea that the networks and cable news channels make assumptions about what the viewing population wants, finds sensational or exciting, but I don't believe that there is a collective "we" that doesn't care about murder, massacres, and human suffering wherever it happens.  I believe there is a greater "we" that does.  Death, destruction, war whether in reality or in television, film, gaming doesn't appeal to us because we fear the darkness it dredges.  We hope, pray, occupy in the hopes that the world can rid itself of its blood lust.  Let's not insinuate that we only care about our homies as reason not to discuss what is wrong.  And indeed, something is wrong. 

Some of us may take our temperatures and find that we don't feel well, but others are burning up with fever, sick.  We are the kind of sick that we don't even want to talk about in our homes so we surely do not want to discuss in relation to the culture of our great nation.  The debate about how great, how marvelous, how special the United States of America is in so many ways is not in question. What I am talking about it the overachieving, over-reaching, striving, proud, miraculous image of strength that goes home and sees something entirely different in the mirror.  Emotional and spiritual wounds left unchecked for lifetimes.  Heavily medicated but not brought to light.  We spend so much time on our projections that we have lost how we truly feel inside.  We don't even talk about how we feel and if somehow you are someone who does talk about it or want to, you are considered the one who is fucked up.  There is no dialogue here, no discussion, no honesty, no admittance of our fear, our frustration, our concern for ourselves and for others, even on the small scale, so how can we begin the conversation about healing the American spirit, the American soul.

It is hard to argue that culturally and collectively, we like guns, cars, wide open spaces, our individuality, and what we consider our freedom, the right to do whatever we want, however we want, beholden to no one.  We are proud and we have reason to be.  It is no surprise that to much of the world, we are considered cowboys.  Ye,s there is the love of the wide open space, the hard work, the commitment, the dedication but there is also that stubborn, risk-taking, man-on-my-own, my-way-or-the-highway attitude that gets in our way.  It is hard to address our fears and our shortcomings when our pride refuses to allow us to even admit them.

The state of our mental health is terrifying.  If we suffered physical wounds as traumatic as some of the wounds we are carrying, we'd stop immediately to salve them, heal them, warn others how we hurt ourselves in order to prevent the same from happening to them.  But when we are hurt or damaged or in psychic pain, we don't want to talk about it.  No one around us wants to talk about it either.  We want to take something and hope that whatever it is we've just put in our mouths will make that hurt go away.  That's not working.  In the mass murders in Newtown, CT at the Sandy Hook Elementary school where a clearly wounded boy from a family that looks like many that I grew up around took from us all, but specifically from the trusting parents and families and friends who felt that they had the right to send their children to school to learn, the most precious, the most sacred gems of our community.  The babies.

Targeting children, aiming at the very physical symbol of our hope, our dreams, our joy, he ripped out our souls and showed us how we are all truly strung together.  Our souls pulled out like a string of paper dolls from a cut out.  In our children, some of us have found the only place for true, pure love.  We have given to them all in our hearts.  They have mapped on our souls.  We delight in their innocence, their openness, their trusting nature, the purity of their minds, hearts, and spirits.  When children are hurt, even accidentally, we are distraught.  When they are aimed at, when they are the target, we know we are dealing with a sick individual or a sick community or a sick state, country, world.  We fail them and ultimately ourselves, if we cannot admit this.  If we cannot find a way to make this different.  If we will not try to heal ourselves.

My daughters are now trained at school how to handle a "Code Red."  The first time my oldest described just what that entailed I stood, mouth agape, with tears coming down my face.  At 5 1/2 years old, she was prepared to stand on a toilet seat in the bathroom if she found herself in there alone and heard gunshots or the sounds of shouting or escalating violence.  She stood in closets, under desks, and contorted her body into large cabinets with her classmates and teachers "just in case there was someone who wanted to see his/her child so badly that they came into the school to get him," what she'd been told would be the reason for such a situation.  She knew if the teacher gave the class her "most serious face" then she and her classmates were not to make a sound or pass notes or try to run to one another across the room, the hall, the building, but were to stay put until a "real police officer or good person" came to get them.  She practiced this with the same ease as I long ago practiced the fire drill.  I tell myself, "we never had a fire at school.  All those drills.  More than likely, my kids will have only drills. 
. 
"That's what the statistics say," they will assure me.  But in the random sampling, young children, babies, and the people trained and hired to guide them, lead them, teach them, are dead.  And to me, no matter the numbers, we are more than the numbers.  We are human beings.  We are our brothers' keepers and we must do better than this.  We must still.


(c)  Copyright 2012.  Repatriated Mama: Back to the Suburban Grind.
(c)  Copyright 2013.  Repatriated Mama: Back to the Suburban Grind.