By Kay Marie Porterfield
Remember the night before I cleaned out your apartment? You slipped between me and my dreams as stealthily as you’d once snuck into my room to cut the hair from all my dolls. “Find the green spiral,” you insisted all night in the motel room where I rested from the 900-mile road trip through Texas. “Find it. Read it and you’ll see,” you said. And because you’d visited my dreams to say goodbye a month before you donned your homemade suicide hood, I listened.
The notebook lay on the floor, probably kicked beneath your bed by the detectives who retrieved the two helium tanks for evidence or the coroner’s crew who zipped you into the body bag and drove you to the morgue. But that really wasn’t you anymore. You were out there somewhere weaving your way between my dreams and God knows where else.
Did you know two days after you died, your best friend’s little brother from high school back in Michigan, a man I’d never met, found me on the internet? He called to say he’d inherited his parents’ house years ago, and suddenly the night before he called, he’d thought of you sitting on a stool by his breakfast bar playing your guitar like you had so many nights thirty-five years before, a thought so strong, he could almost hear the music, so strong he’d call it a vision if he believed in them. When he asked how you were doing, I told him the truth – you had killed yourself, and I didn’t know how you were doing. And he said, “Oh,” and hung up before I could add that I didn’t know how I was doing either.
Did you watch me in your apartment? I sat on the edge of the bed where you’d drawn your last breath, holding your green spiral notebook on my lap, letting myself sink against the big lone star quilt I’d made you for your birthday seven years before, the quilt with the blue diamond patches bunched against the wall. I tried to imagine how it was to be you lying there dying, what you saw, how long it was before you stopped seeing through eyes, what it was like not to breathe any more. I remembered how we’d play funeral when we were kids, how you’d lie in the cedar hope chest with your eyes closed, hands crossed on your shirt, while I preached your sermon. Lying on your rumpled sheets, I reached out to touch the brown woolen bear with the blind button eyes, I’d made you twenty years back when we were working our way past our miserable childhoods beneath the same farmhouse roof. The blanket and the bear who lay beside you were your only comforts I could find, two pieces of evidence meant for me to see, like the notebook, a coda to your suicide email sent automatically to my inbox after you died.
Did you know what I was feeling in the spot where you lay dead until I called the police and read them your email? Nothing. As I touched the rough fabric on the stuffed bear’s belly, my anger at the unanswered letters and emails went away, leaving only emptiness. The calls you never picked up. The unannounced moves with no forwarding addresses gone. Little brother, you must have known if I’d found you, I’d have tried to stop you even if it meant wrestling you to the floor, twisting your arm and slapping the crap out of you.
Your depression was bigger than both of us. The notebook bore that out. I read through your timelines detailing the darkness that finally swallowed you whole like a never-ending eclipse, your lists of justifications: you would turn 50, your health would decline, a cataclysmic recession was on the way. (It was, but we survived.), there would be a war and your eyesight would weaken, as would your joints. Next came the shopping list: plastic bags, duct tape, tanks. And the to-do list that ended, “Let Kay clean the apartment.”
Last of all, I read how your fate hung on the I Ching – six tosses of three coins. The first hexagram, Earth above, Mountain below. Modesty – “The superior man carries things through” changing to Mountain above, Mountain below. Keeping Still – “Keeping his back still so that he no longer feels his body, he goes into his courtyard and does not see his people. No blame.”
After I finished reading, I could not blame you even though I knew then, and know today, I’ll never understand your suffering or your choice to end it. In a way, I am grateful for perpetual ignorance. Some days it’s probably all that keeps me going. After missing you, blame remains my cross to bear. In random moments, self-doubt insinuates itself, and blindly I search to see if there was something, anything, I could have done to ease your pain.