My Love Letter to the Suicides

My Love Letter to the Suicides

Nathan Wagar

 

Mom and Babies

 

My mom had three abortions from the ages of 13 to 15, and I was supposed to be the fourth. The doctor refused to perform it, because it would cause complications due to reopening old scar tissue. My mom, ever the problem-solver, tried to use a coat hanger, unsuccessfully. She told me this to my face in front of the court mandated therapist; a therapist we had to see because I got taken away for extreme child abuse. The therapist’s jaw dropped and my mom was kicked out, but not before she told me again, as she was being dragged away, just before the door slammed shut. “I never wanted you.”

 

 

She went on to have seven more kids, one with my dad and six more with my stepdad, but she always had a special place in her heart for me. She hated me. I still don’t know why.

 

My dad had a theory that she kept having babies that she couldn’t take care of or love because she felt guilty for the abortions. She didn’t like children, she liked babies, and once a baby was old enough to talk and grow annoying she promptly replaced it with another one. I think there was something to that idea, because my mom was, and is, a profoundly evil woman. But she is evil in a real, human way. Wrong is wrong, but there is always a reason guiding and driving our behaviors even if it is secret from ourselves. My mom was driven by her mistakes even if she didn’t know why, as am I.

 

I’m telling this, and a couple other seemingly unconnected stories, because when it comes to suicide they always pop up in my head together. It doesn’t flow with the writing and I don’t really care. Make connections as you see fit. I’m sure I will as well in the future and write more on the issue as I come to understand myself.

 

I was locked in a closet sometimes hours at a time, with the lights turned off so I couldn’t read. Books were my salvation as a kid; I could survive anything and did as long as I had them. She took those too with the dark. 

 

I never liked the dark ever since. I had some bad experiences in Iraq in cache tunnels underground that compounded the issue, and to this day I am very claustrophobic in very specific situations. I usually need some kind of light at night. I prefer the Virgin Mary candles from Walmart. I like the dark pink ones because they smell like roses, and cast a soft flickering light on the ceiling. When I have nightmares the light and smell draw my senses and bring me back to the real.

 

 

Iraq and Babies

 

In Iraq, one night the recon section was taking hand grenade contact on top of a roof in the city. Their presence was compromised, and they were chucking grenades back as they were getting thrown at them. We were their quick reaction force, and as we were extracting them a vehicle barreled down the road and I lit it up. We opened the doors and there was an old woman in front with a male driver, and a pregnant woman in back with a little girl.

 

The old woman’s leg bones had splintered into her legs, and as we pulled her out the meat fell off her legs like soup. The pregnant woman had a bullet stuck in her forehead, and the little girl had a bullet in her knee. That was the part I remembered, or at least how I chose to remember it. The part my friend reminded of years later was that I had shot the baby out of the woman’s stomach, and was clawing at the ground and baby bits and trying desperately to put it back into her stomach. “It will be okay, we will fix this, I’m putting it back.” Or something to that effect; memory is weird. The male driver was unharmed.

 

I’ll never forget the little girl. She didn’t hate me and she didn’t scream. She looked at me as I held her and carried her away, and I tried not to look her in the face. But in my heart she was telling me I was going to pay for what I did. She didn’t hate me, she felt almost sorry for me. But I would pay. And nobody could tell me different. Arab eyes are the most expressive eyes in the world, and the women spend a lifetime with their faces covered and learning to tell you exactly what they mean without words. I know what she said.

 

Marriage and Babies

 

Almost a decade later, in a dead marriage and after infertility and other issues, my ex wife was pregnant. I saw her, my daughter, in a dream, and handed her the piss stick. It tested positive. There was no love left, but my wife danced and said over and over, “We have a baby, we have a baby,” singing it in a soft song. A symbol of my hopes and dreams, of a way to make the world right. I was right, and it was a girl.

 

Late term, she texted she was bleeding. When the doctor said we lost her, my ex said she watched my face die. They did a surgery, and she passed the rest on the toilet later. She kept the door shut, she was hurting, it was very painful like going into labor, and as she cried out I also heard her whispering “Don’t leave me. Don’t go,” with my ear pressed against the door. She didn’t flush, she opened the door, walked past me, and laid down.

 

I went into the toilet and fished around in the water, and put anything I could find of her into a small plastic bag. I thought of the little girl’s promise in Iraq as I did.

 

Later I put her into a small treasure chest. In Irish, or I should say Irish-American culture, when you lose a child before it’s born, there is a ritual. You face East in the morning, bury it under flowers, name it “Baby,” and say a Hail Mary in Gaelic. I never buried her. She’s all I have left now, and her chest stays on the same shelf that I turn into a Día de Los Muertos altar on my birthday. I know I have to bury her, I just can’t yet, even nine years later. I had learned to be powerful and kill, and I couldn’t protect the one precious thing I ever had. She was my greatest failure. The love of my life, who I knew before she was ever born. Everything good in me was in her, and God took her. And I’m left.

 

 

Their Suicides

 

The suicides started when I was still in the military, then seemed to stop, then started again about a year after. They all talked to me first before they did it, and whatever I said wasn’t the right thing. I understand; because then when they were all gone, I didn’t have the right words for myself either.

 

The first I should have seen coming. We were chatting in the motor pool parking lot while we were sweeping, and he said his wife was leaving him and taking his kids. He said he was having problems. He looked me in the eyes.

 

“I like killing people.” Sure, I mean, so do I. “No,” he said, “I like it. I need it.” He said it different. He meant something else, and it was changing him. I know the technical term for it now, it’s called appetitive aggression. I eventually got it too. But I have yet to hear the VA talk about it or even acknowledge its existence in therapy. He needed to kill people. His body needed it. And he was scaring his family.

 

When he got his leg blown off later, I should have known, but I guess I didn’t. I thought maybe he’d be happy as a cop, because you could still play Army with a prosthetic leg. But no. He needed to kill, and the infantry was where he belonged. War was his home, and it got taken away.

 

He texted goodbye and we got there too late by a few minutes. His brains were out but his face wasn’t fucked up; he looked like he was sleeping. I kicked his body and called him a nigger, then hugged him while the other two guys were circling around saying “Oh God” over and over again.

 

I left the Army, and over time there were more. I even got social media so we could try to be a support group. One by one it seemed like they all left. I had degrees in philosophy to make me not stupid and I couldn’t stop anyone with the right words. I never did have the right words. I didn’t talk much or stay connected to people so it got to the point that when my phone rang, I would just stare at it for a few minutes. Finally I’d pick it up and as soon as I heard the words “Did you -” I’d ask who it was. Who killed themselves. Tell me. Click.

 

Eventually I got numb to it. I alternated between anger, indifference, and understanding. But mostly, I was just lonely.

 

When you love people, and they leave, it’s like sitting at a table playing poker except one by one the seats disappear, until you’re sitting there playing solitaire. The people don’t disappear, they just stop responding, standing there where the seats should be. You carry them with you, frozen in time, and play a shitty card game that only losers play. Nobody ever fills those seats. I don’t know where the seats go. I just know that they were reserved in my heart, and nobody else gets them. New ones maybe, but not the old ones.

 

My Suicide

 

A lot has happened in my life, and I am barely scratching the surface even in the articles I have already written. Eventually, I tried to kill myself as well. Several times in fact. I was fine for 33 years, until one day I wasn’t, and I decided I was done. Then when I found a reason to live again, it was even worse. It’s a lot easier to give up; when you are most in danger of ending it isn’t when you have nothing left, it’s when there’s just enough in the tank to give you hope, but not enough to make you feel like you can get up the hill.

 

That’s when you start thrashing. It’s amusing because I’m a Scorpio, for all you hippies out there, but I’ll use the imagery for the sake of this analogy. When a scorpion is on fire it contracts, and as it is dying it stings frantically, sometimes even itself. It can’t harm itself; it’s immune to its own poison and the stinger can’t penetrate its exoskeleton, but it can kill something near it.

 

I’d take my gun, my daughter, sometimes some liquid courage, and drive out to the mesa or other remote places and spend hours trying to work up the courage.

 

 

I had never failed to squeeze a trigger in my life; I used to replace people in fire teams that couldn’t because I was reliable. But I couldn’t ever manage to squeeze it all the way when the gun was pressed to my own head. I placed it right, had the trigger pulled part way, and I had excellent +P hollowpoints loaded. I wanted my brains out, and I definitely didn’t want a bullet to curve around my skull or go part way through and make me still alive but retarded. Arguably nobody would even tell the difference.

 

Instead, I couldn’t, and just like the scorpion, I harmed everyone around me with my efforts except myself. It’s like squeezing the trigger and watching someone you love next to you drop. I couldn’t seem to fucking die. I was on fucking fire, and I couldn’t put myself out; the only thing I could do was set everyone around me on fire too.

 

People get tired of that shit. I got tired of it too. Every time it felt like crying wolf. I’d come home and my body was exhausted like I just finished a 10-round fight. I wanted it desperately, I wanted the void. It was already in me, I just didn’t want to feel it. I wanted to plug the hole with a bullet. And I just couldn’t. I get it now, why some people say suicide is cowardly and others say it’s brave. Suicide is the one thing I couldn’t do, and it revolved solely around some sort of internal revulsion from fear.

 

I don’t know what I was afraid of. Nothingness? Or worse yet, something. Maybe the faces I saw every night in my nightmares would be real, in front of me, for eternity. The burning people and the dead demon babies and the corpses and blood and smells. Or maybe it would just be dark, and I’d be alone.

 

I tried different methods of making myself squeeze the trigger. Calling myself a coward, getting angry, hurting myself with memories, making myself sad, making myself drunk, you name it. I’m Catholic, albeit a horrible one, and I know suicide is a mortal sin. All of the rationalizations, reasons, and theory had gone away. I just wanted to not exist. Whatever was inside me needed to die and be nothing. I had already given my best to God, and now the shit that was left needed to go poof. I was his to do with as he pleased anyway, and boy had he done so up to this point. I just hoped he understood I was only a man, and I dearly loved his mom.

 

Still couldn’t do it.

 

The irony is, it was always small things or coincidences that stopped me. Sitting on a cactus with a red flower that reminded me of a woman I love. I looked all around, and there were many cacti but only that one had a red flower, and why the fuck was it on the rock I chose to sit on? Another time it was a sunset. I watched it until it disappeared, and then I was sleepy. Once I get sleepy I want to go home, and suicide seems best when well-rested. Stupid, I know. But hey, sometimes it’s that simple.

 

 

In the Catholic faith there’s a rich spiritual tradition, where the spiritual journey is divided into three ages, with different ways that you pray and experience God as you move from spiritual childhood to maturity and sainthood. In the first stage, called the purgative way, you see God mostly through things he has created. He touches you through the world around you to sustain you through his presence. Your prayers tend to talk at God in a dialogue, and asking for the things you want.

 

Gradually you move to the contemplative way, and then finally the unitive way. I never met a mortal sin I didn’t like, so I am perpetually in the purgative way if not completely lost. I will say though, that when life beats you down, it’s like you regress. The lofty concepts and theology, philosophy and “right words” seem very far, and sometimes it’s the five senses that make or break you. Everything goes back to basics; to what is most immediate.

 

A sunset can make you or break you. I know of a good man that shot himself under a tree, with his back to the sunset. Maybe it would have been different if he had been facing the sunset. Or maybe not, maybe the warm sun on his back should have done it, and it just wasn’t enough. Life, and death, are fickle.

 

 

That’s the thing with suicide. Life is relentless. It never stops. It just comes at you over and over and depending on the life, you can break. All it takes is a moment. For such a serious action, it seems so unfair. Life is so easy to take. The one blessing I had in failing so many times is that I got to see what the people that kill themselves don’t see: I got to see what it does to people that I love. I didn’t like myself much, so as odd as it sounds I never really looked at myself as an example. I never looked at what the suicides did to me; I only really understood what it did to the ones I cared about. Specifically, a woman.

 

 

So this, Oh Suicides, is what you did to me.

 

To the Suicides

 

You fucking shattered me. I had nothing except husk and you took even that. I gave my entire life to this country and you made every single fucking thing worthless in reverse. You made me question my fucking reality because at any moment, I could get a phone call and find out that some old achievement was all a fucking lie and meaningless. I have a bad fucking back from a hand grenade I took trying to keep you alive, and now I don’t even have the fucking back to carry the weight of your death. And I do carry you. I carry every fucking one of you like a fucking weight on my fucking shoulders.

 

I remember your faces. I think about you when I wake up, before I go to sleep, and I see you in my dreams. I tear myself apart asking if I could have done something different. I ask if I should have shot myself first to make you all feel it and stop. I’ve tried fucking hating you, and I fucking do and I don’t. I hate you with a burning fucking lovehate that only someone that loves you could ever have. I have never hated anyone in my fucking life as much as I hate you for what you did.

 

You made me fucking worthless. You stole from me and the family I have since tried to have. I passed the war on to a woman I love because you fucking destroyed me. I can’t bury my fucking child because I miss you so fucking much and she is all I fucking have. I’d probably drag your fucking coffins around Walmart too if they were small enough just so I could talk to people that understand me.

 

You took the best years of my life and they were in your fucking heads as memories, and you shot them out all over the fucking floor. You made me take fucking meds that fucked my dick up and set my joints on fire. You made me get degrees in fucking philosophy to answer your questions and didn’t listen anyway. You owe me money for my fucking student loans. You ripped my skin. You ripped my skin like my stepdad and mom used to, until there was just scar over fucking scar, and I couldn’t feel any more and had to look at the ground to see the blood to know if I was still getting fucking hit.

 

You were the only ones that know me. I can’t share the war because it wounds my loved ones. I only had you. I couldn’t talk to you either because it hurt too much and there was too much there. But you owed me to be okay, and live, day by day.

 

You took my fucking empathy. You made it so when others around me lost their own loved ones, I couldn’t fucking care because you made me hate weakness. I’d mock and scorn others for caring and being weak. I even told others to kill themselves because of you, and they fucking did. You cracked my fucking heart clean down the middle. Then you smashed each individual piece, over and fucking over again into dust. Then when someone else needed it, there was nothing to fucking give. You killed others through me. 

 

You made me worthless. You made me fucking worthless. I failed you in every possible fucking way. I let you into my home, I stayed up all night talking to you, I made you go through school, I cried, I yelled, I bullied, I threatened, I even beat the shit out of some of you. And I fucking failed. Some of you fucking pussies I had to replace because you were too much of a bitch to shoot someone else and yet you could squeeze on yourself.

 

I hate you for being fucking braver than me. I hate you for being more of a fucking coward than me. I loved you more than words could articulate and you hated me so fucking much you did the one thing worse than shooting me with a bullet your fucking self: You left me alive.

 

For what? For this? Seriously?

 

I hate my fucking self and scare away anyone that could ever love me because you fucking wounded me. You made me a fucking rabid animal. You stole my life, not yours. You made my past rise up like a wolf to eat me when I thought it was dead and buried. You fucking made it all come back. Over and over. Every fucking time. You stole my future from me. You even stole hypothetical fucking futures from me. You left holes in me that can never be filled, and can only be built around, and I’m all out of building supplies. Some other poor dumb fuck has to love me enough to help lend me some material.

 

The worst thing is, all you fucking pussies did it first like you fucking knew I’d be left to stay and carry on your fucking bullshit memory. You were supposed to do that yourself. You fucking owed me. You even fucking said you owed me. I never fucking signed up for this. You should have told me how much you’d fuck me over so I could have let you die or fucking shot you myself.

 

I wonder if you feel nothing or if you’re in hell. I bargain with God and ask to take your place. I lost my faith and gave up my soul just so you could send yourselves to one hell anyway and leave me alive in a separate one. I’ll burn just like our three guys did in the humvee for all of fucking eternity if your bitchasses can be okay. I’m used to the dark. I’ll take it. I’ll take it for you.

 

Some of you were fucking better than me. You had living children. Families. People loved you. I’m shit. I’ve hurt everyone I ever loved. I have nothing. No legacy. No family. No love. Nothing. You fucking helped make me like this. I’m just a Frankenstein of you, all stitched together trying not to scare people.

 

You kept me alive. I hurt for you. I bled for you. I sweated for you. I pushed through God knows how much so you would be safe, to keep promises to your parents, to make sure you came home safe. I trained for you, I committed crimes for you, I covered shit up for you. I carried giant fucking millstones of secrets and guilt around my neck and walked on the bottom of the sea so you could live, thrive and be happy.  You fucking murdered me. I miss you, but you’re such pieces of shit I don’t want to join you anymore either. I will never forgive you and I forgive you every moment of every day.

 

I love you. You are my heart.

 

I’m so fucking lonely.