Abandonment

Every time I walk down the basement steps to do laundry I still find myself wondering what thoughts were going through your mind as you took your final walk down those same steps. Did you think back to the first time we met when Melinda was in the second grade, or down the path of years spent with Ashley and Matt; softball and baseball practices and games; boy scouts; Kansas Youth Choir with Ashley; school band and orchestra concerts,  all the other school events or the vacations through Colorado strung along seventeen years. Or did you simply not think at all, having already made your decision to cut off your life and afraid you might alter that decision if you thought to hard.



It haunts me still, but what haunts me even more is not the cost to you, but to the rest of us.  So many times that last year, when I was home between jobs, or even when you called me incessantly at whatever hotel I was staying at or what state I was working in during the hours after midnight when I needed to sleep so badly, you would swear that I was strong and could help get Melinda, Ashley, and Matt through the aftermath.  And no amount of argument by me could convince you otherwise.  We never really expected you to finally go through with the threats you'd made about suicide after so many years, and there was nothing they, or I, could have done to have altered the course.



I knew, following Labor Day, when I walked into the house as you'd requested the day before so you could take a look at my car, that you had followed through on your threat, the two letters taped to the back of the bookcases built as part of the house, could not have been anything else.  The request not to let the kids go down into the basement if they were with me, the note stating you had left letters of goodbye and avowal of love for each of us, and the feel of silent emptiness that accompanied my hollow steps, said it all.



I went to the open basement door but couldn't bring myself to go down those steps, I wasn't sure I could keep my sanity intact when I saw you hanging there or if I would sink into some unfathomable darkness that would swallow me as it had you.  And so with cowardice, I went next door and asked Paul if he would check for me, so I would know what to do. I had this stupid thought that I was wrong, that you were still alive and maybe only unconscious although I knew by the palpitations of my heart that this would not be so.

Paul came back in what seemed hours later but was only, in fact, not even five.  He too didn't have to courage to go all the way to the bottom of the steps, but only far enough to be able to see over the railing that your knees rested on the concrete floor, your hands dangling by your side, gray with a hint of blue.



I wanted to cry, to scream, with the agony of love and loss, but another, more primal emotion demanded that as a mother, I had to stay unemotional and calm since I had to tell the kids.  If they had seen me fall apart mentally and emotionally, it would have only been harder on them.  I called the High School, had get Ashley and Matt ready to come home but not the reason they were being retrieved early, and I called Melinda at the hospital where she was working as a nurses aide and told her what had happened.  Linda, Paul's wife, went and picked all three up without an explanation so that I could call the police and have them send the coroner.



I remember the hollow echo of the kid's steps on the varnished wood of Paul's front porch, they still reverberate in my brain like the slow march of pall bearers.  A fire engine was parked in front of our house and a sheriff's patrol and the kids made the assumption their had been fire at the house.  Only Melinda recognized the long white station wagon parked in the drive and she looked at me, shook her head no, as if she were seeing something that couldn't be so.  I refused to allow the tears to spill out of my eyes onto my cheeks as I told them all that you had hung yourself in the basement, I was afraid that if I did, I would drown in them.  Ashley burst into tears, but Matt, dear Matt who was barely sixteen, his eyes grew so wide it was as if the eyeballs would pop out of the sockets, and were rimmed with red in disbelief.  No tears, just a look as if I was pulling some horrendous joke on him, on them.  Paul verified the news, yet still, Matt did not cry, he just shut himself off as if he were afraid to feel, afraid to admit to the truth of the situation.



Ashley called one of her best friends, a young man named Mikey to join her there at Pauls.  I found out later that she had sensed with a level of maturity no seventeen year old should have to know, that I had more pressing matters to deal with, and needed to focus on those things.  Although Melinda was only your stepdaughter, she loved you as a father, since hers was in Ohio and hadn't been around for most of her life, and she simply collapsed into deep retching sobs that seemed to come from deep in her stomach.



And this is what you left me to deal with, keeping the kids intact, calling your mother, helping make things okay as you put it.  Okay!!!!!!

There was nothing okay about this; the emotional devastation, the wondering if somehow they were to blame for your choosing suicide, that they should have been able to have stopped the forward march of those events that led your death. And, me, how could I grieve, how could I cry, when I had to shove that all aside to help them.



And that is indeed what happened.  Since we had lived in separate homes for two years because you didn't want the kids to be exposed any longer to your bi-polar, yet wanting to keep our marriage and family intact in some semblance of complete normalcy, there were instances when you spent hours at our apartment exposing them to your constant tears, your avowals of love, your telling them they would be better off with you gone when I was away at work for a week, and occasionally two weeks at a time in another state.  They love you, I think sometimes, with a depth uncommon to many children because your mental health made you vulnerable, and you depended on us all for an emotional support much deeper than most parents need.



Ashley took on the burden of guilt like it was her mantra.  She told me that after several times of your coming to apartment crying, and even blubbering, talking about how much you loved them, but ending with how you didn't want to live anymore with the bi-polar when you left.  How finally, in frustration she told you, "If you hate your life that much, why don't you just go ahead and kill yourself and put yourself out of your misery."  While Matt, on the other hand, having remembered those words said he hated Ashley because if was her fault you killed yourself."



Yet you expected me to help them cope with the hurt, the longing and loss, and grief as if there were some kind of magic potion, or spell I could cast to make it all okay when I had my own feelings to sort through and overcome?  You burdened me with the weight of all of this, how could you do such a thing?  Later, at the funeral service, at the light meal the church had set up for us there, Tyler took me aside and said that Matt had asked him how you could abandon him, us, and that he felt like you hadn't loved us at all to make such a choice.  And your mother, who herself has bi-polar disorder but more of the manic piece, who stood beside you all those years, defended you against your controlling father who tried to run your life even after you were married and gone from the town you grew up in, and your brother.  She was lost, adrift, her life without the protective, coddling, she had always bestowed on you. 



You had cost me my job.  I only had two more trips following your death and cremation, but the damage had already been complete.  Your late night hotel phone calls sometimes lasting two or three hours that left me exhausted and in an emotional turmoil and unable to do my job properly during each day following the calls, my having to use much of my pay and expense checks to support both you at the house, and me and the kids at the apartment after you lost your job forever following that last paranoid manic period and that after the teamsters union representative got your job back after the first one with stipulations you refused to follow.  I could not afford the right clothing, or right fitting clothing, or some new false teeth that fit, having to support two households befitting a professional who met with the public or the agencies as a major part of my job.  And so my consulting contract was ended and I too, was left adrift by you.  Consultants are considered to be self employed so there was no unemployment to draw, and my bank accounts had been depleted.



But you never thought of the cost to me at all, did you, only that I "was a strong person and capable, and could get the kids through this?  In fact on the last two jobs, Ashley would call me at work just to see what I was doing, and this was an annoyance to the rest of the team and the team leader, afraid of losing me too, afraid of having no one at all.  I am still so terribly angry with you, that you could have done this to me, to us, and then leave me the job of cleaning up after your suicide, trying to find the way to helping Ashley, Matt, Melinda, and even your mother, move one and cope with the emotions and the inability to understand the why of it all.  You gave me way too much credit.  I don't know if I'll ever be able to shed the rage, the hate, I have for you.  Yet in some odd way, the anger makes me stronger. 



Matt took on your role, thinking he had to become the male head of the household.  He took a job at Wal-Mart at seventeen, dropped out of school.  There was this need, this drive to work full time, but even more than that he had come to hate the endless condolences from teachers and peers, how he was given special considerations because of your suicide.  They were a constant reminder of how much his life, our lives, had changed and that nothing could ever be so simple, so casual, and so full of life and energy ever again. 



And in the end he was taking money out of the till, only a few dollars here and there, that he would put back after his got paid each time, and got caught.  The money was always to put gas in Ashley's car so she could get to and from her own job, home, and college classes.  Or for extra food.  This from honest, quiet, well mannered, Matt who would never hurt anyone.  The cost?  $1,000 retribution to WalMart, probation until the debt was repaid, the loss of his job, and a stain on his record at seventeen.  And another $500 to get his record expunged at eighteen.



And Julie, her best friend as you know, from third grade on told me Ashley had posted on Xanga, I think that was the social media site she was using at the time, that her father wouldn't be able to come to her graduation and see that defining moment in her life as she moved from childhood into adulthood, that  her father would never see her go to college, walk her down the isle in marriage, have children if she decided she wanted them, or any of the other joys and successes in her life.  Especially high school graduation, after she had worked so hard to move beyond the drug use early in her junior year, getting her grades back on track and her accolades in theatre to make us, you, proud.  And nothing, nothing, I could have done after your suicide could have given her that back.



Ashley enrolled in college classes three different times following high school graduation at the local community college the year after you so selfishly ended your life in that basement.  Then dropped out each time.  She was so lost, and nothing I could have said or done would have changed that.  I don't know if she simply quit caring, still blamed herself for your suicide and didn't think she was deserving of success, she's never said.  Later she moved to Albuquerque, got a BA from the University of New Mexico in 2013 and is now the Director of Research for UNM at the Albuquerque Hospital, where she also does research for two doctors part time with hopes of getting into graduate school.  Matt now has an applied science certificate in computer technology, with hopes of eventually landing a tech support job.



Your mother kept your ashes until four years ago, taking you with her when she travelled and in her bedroom when at home.  Although you could not have known, your brother died five years later when he fell asleep at the wheel of the semi he was driving and the big cumbersome vehicle went off the road and hit a concrete culvert.  Then your mother had no one, both of her sons and her husband gone.  I have been forbidden from writing a book about our lives by your mother, she is so terrible afraid the public would think poorly of you, would think she'd been a bad mother for not stopping you.  How could you have done that to her?!  Such a selfish act.  She was there the day you took that final walk down those basement stairs after the weekend with you because she, like I, felt something had shifted in the fabric of your life and was worried because you kept to your room most of the time.  She left that evening after you assured her emphatically, that you were feeling better and would be fine. 



Although you already knew what you were going t do, the decision had been made, the letters written, pictures of the kids throughout the years of their growing up strung out across the dining room table, and your bible open on your bed to a verse in Psalms that told us you would be forgiven by God because of the reasons for your choice.  So heartless.  I remember calling you at around eleven p.m. that night.  You were eating something, and you said you were okay not to worry.  What was that, an hour or two before.  The only thing I find forgivable is that carefully folded that towel, and pinned it around your neck before pulling the noose over your head, jumping high into the air and letting yourself fall.  That action, and that action alone, was the only humane and loving thing you did for your children so rope marks would not be embedded in your skin like a collar or a necklace.



Every time I walk down the basement steps to do laundry I still find myself wondering what thoughts were going through your mind as you took your final walk down those same steps. Did you think back to the first time we met when Melinda was in the second grade, or down the path of years spent with Ashley and Matt; softball and baseball practices and games; boy scouts; Kansas Youth Choir with Ashley; school band and orchestra concerts,  all the other school events or the vacations through Colorado strung along seventeen years. Or did you simply not think at all, having already made your decision to cut off your life and afraid you might alter that decision if you thought to hard.



It haunts me still, but what haunts me even more is not the cost to you, but to the rest of us.  So many times that last year, when I was home between jobs, or even when you called me incessantly at whatever hotel I was staying at or what state I was working in during the hours after midnight when I needed to sleep so badly, you would swear that I was strong and could help get Melinda, Ashley, and Matt through the aftermath.  And no amount of argument by me could convince you otherwise.  We never really expected you to finally go through with the threats you'd made about suicide after so many years, and there was nothing they, or I, could have done to have altered the course.



I knew, following Labor Day, when I walked into the house as you'd requested the day before so you could take a look at my car, that you had followed through on your threat, the two letters taped to the back of the bookcases built as part of the house, could not have been anything else.  The request not to let the kids go down into the basement if they were with me, the note stating you had left letters of goodbye and avowal of love for each of us, and the feel of silent emptiness that accompanied my hollow steps, said it all

I went to the open basement door but couldn't bring myself to go down those steps, I wasn't sure I could keep my sanity intact when I saw you hanging there or if I would sink into some unfathomable darkness that would swallow me as it had you. 



And so with cowardice, I went next door and asked Paul if he would check for me, so I would know what to do. I had this stupid thought that I was wrong, that you were still alive and maybe only unconscious although I knew by the palpitations of my heart that this would not be so. Paul came back in what seemed hours later but was only, in fact, not even five.  He too didn't have to courage to go all the way to the bottom of the steps, but only far enough to be able to see over the railing that your knees rested on the concrete floor, your hands dangling by your side, gray with a hint of blue.  Paul's face was this sickly grey and I noticed beads of sweat trickle from his forehead in slow motion.  He kept saying that you had seemed fine when he talked to you the evening of Labor Day, when you were out watering the lawn.  That if only he'd known.  But of course in your single minded focus, you never thought that your friends would be impacted by your suicide, as well did you?  It was all about you, you, you.



I wanted to cry, to scream, with the agony of love and loss, but another, more primal emotion demanded that as a mother, I had to fiercely protect the kids, which meant remaining unemotional and calm since I had to tell the kids.  If they had seen me fall apart mentally and emotionally, it would have only been more difficult for them.  I called the High School, had get Ashley and Matt ready to come home but not the reason they were being retrieved early, and I called Melinda at the hospital where she was working as a nurse’s aide and told her what had happened.  Linda, Paul's wife, went and picked all three up without an explanation so that I could call the police and have them send the coroner.



I remember the hollow echo of the kid's steps on the varnished wood of Paul's front porch, they still reverberate in my brain like the slow march of pall bearers.  A fire engine was parked in front of our house and a sheriff's patrol and the kids made the assumption there had been fire at the house.  Only Melinda recognized the long white station wagon parked in the drive and she looked at me, shook her head no, as if she were seeing something that couldn't be so.  I refused to allow the tears to spill out of my eyes onto my cheeks as I told them all that you had hung yourself in the basement, I was afraid that if I did, I would drown in them.  Ashley burst into tears, but Matt, dear Matt who was barely sixteen, his eyes grew so wide it was as if the eyeballs would pop out of the sockets, and were rimmed with red in disbelief.  No tears, just a look as if I was pulling some horrendous joke on him, on them.  Paul verified the news, yet still, Matt did not cry, he just shut himself off as if he were afraid to feel, afraid to admit to the truth of the situation.



Ashley called one of her best friends, a young man named Mikey to join her there at Paul’s. And Pat, another male friend. I found out later that Ashley had sensed with a level of maturity no seventeen year old should have to know, that I had more pressing matters to deal with, and needed to focus on those things.  Although Melinda was only your stepdaughter, she loved you as a father, since hers was in Ohio and hadn't been around for most of her life, and she simply collapsed into deep retching sobs that seemed to come from deep in her stomach. And a couple of months following your death Melinda saw a tall man walking down the hallway at the hospital with long silky blonde hair tied back in a pony tail and swore that it was you, or your ghost. 



And this is what you left me to deal with, keeping the kids intact, calling your mother, helping make things okay as you put it.  Okay!!!!!!There was nothing okay about this; the emotional devastation, the wondering if somehow they were to blame for your choosing suicide, that they should have been able to have stopped the forward march of those events that led to your death. And, me, how could I grieve, how could I cry, when I had to shove all that pain aside to help them.



And that is indeed what happened.  Since we had lived in separate homes for two years because you didn't want the kids to be exposed any longer to your bi-polar, yet wanting to keep our marriage and family intact in some semblance of complete normalcy, there were instances when you spent hours at our apartment exposing them to your constant tears, your avowals of love, you’re telling them they would be better off with you gone when I was away at work for a week, and occasionally two weeks at a time in another state.  They love you, I think sometimes, with a depth uncommon to many children because your mental health made you vulnerable, and you depended on us all for an emotional support much deeper than most parents need.



Ashley took on the burden of guilt like it was her mantra.  She told me that after several times of your coming to apartment crying, and even blubbering, talking about how much you loved them, but ending with how you didn't want to live anymore with the bi-polar when you left.  How finally, in frustration she told you, "If you hate your life that much, why don't you just go ahead and kill yourself and put yourself out of your misery."  While Matt, on the other hand, having remembered those words said he hated Ashley because it was her fault you killed yourself."



Yet you expected me to help them cope with the hurt, the longing and loss, and grief as if there were some kind of magic potion, or spell I could cast to make it all okay when I had my own feelings to sort through and overcome?  You burdened me with the weight of all of this, how could you do such a thing? Demand I be their savior. Later, at the funeral service, at the light meal the church had set up for us there, Tyler took me aside and said that Matt had asked him how you could abandon him, us, and that he felt like you hadn't loved us at all to make such a choice.  And your mother, who herself has bi-polar disorder but more of the manic piece, who stood beside you all those years, defended you against your controlling father who tried to run your life even after you were married and gone from the town you grew up in, and your brother.  She was lost, adrift, her life without the protective, coddling, she had always bestowed on you. 



You had cost me my job.  I only had two more trips following your death and cremation, but the damage had already been complete.  Your late night hotel phone calls sometimes lasting two or three hours that left me exhausted and in an emotional turmoil and unable to do my job properly during each day following the calls, my having to use much of my pay and expense checks to support both you at the house, and me and the kids at the apartment after you lost your job forever following that last paranoid manic period and that after the teamsters union representative got your job back after the first one with stipulations you refused to follow.  I could not afford the right clothing, or right fitting clothing, or some new false teeth that fit, having to support two households befitting a professional who met with the public or the agencies as a major part of my job.  And so my consulting contract was ended and I too, was left adrift by you.  Consultants are considered to be self-employed so there was no unemployment to draw, and my bank accounts had been depleted.



But you never thought of the cost to me at all, did you, only that I "was a strong person and capable, and could get the kids through this?  In fact on the last two jobs, Ashley would call me at work just to see what I was doing, and this was an annoyance to the rest of the team and the team leader, afraid of losing me too, afraid of having no one at all.  I am still so terribly angry with you, that you could have done this to me, to us, and then leave me the job of cleaning up after your suicide, trying to find the way to helping Ashley, Matt, Melinda, and even your mother, move one and cope with the emotions and the inability to understand the why of it all.  You gave me way too much credit.  I don't know if I'll ever be able to shed the rage, the hate, I have for you.  Yet in some odd way, the anger makes me stronger. 



Matt took on your role, thinking he had to become the male head of the household.  He took a job at Wal-Mart at seventeen, dropped out of school.  There was this need, this drive to work full time, but even more than that he had come to hate the endless condolences from teachers and peers, how he was given special considerations because of your suicide.  They were a constant reminder of how much his life, our lives, had changed and that nothing could ever be so simple, so casual, and so full of life and energy ever again. 



And in the end he was taking money out of the till, only a few dollars here and there, that he would put back after his got paid each time, and got caught.  The money was always to put gas in Ashley's car so she could get to and from her own job, home, and college classes.  Or for extra food.  This from honest, quiet, well mannered, Matt who would never hurt anyone.  The cost?  $1,000 retribution to Walmart, probation until the debt was repaid, the loss of his job, and a stain on his record at seventeen.  And another $500 to get his record expunged at eighteen.



And Julie, her best friend as you know, from third grade on told me Ashley had posted on Xanga, I think that was the social media site she was using at the time, that her father wouldn't be able to come to her graduation and see that defining moment in her life as she moved from childhood into adulthood, that  her father would never see her go to college, walk her down the aisle in marriage, have children if she decided she wanted them, or any of the other joys and successes in her life.  Especially high school graduation, after she had worked so hard to move beyond the drug use early in her junior year, getting her grades back on track and her accolades in theatre to make us, you, proud.  And nothing, nothing, I could have done after your suicide could have given her that back.



Ashley enrolled in college classes three different times following high school graduation at the local community college the year after you so selfishly ended your life in that basement.  Then dropped out each time.  She was so lost, and nothing I could have said or done would have changed that.  I don't know if she simply quit caring, still blamed herself for your suicide and didn't think she was deserving of success, she's never said.  Later she moved to Albuquerque, got a BA from the University of New Mexico in 2013 and is now the Director of Research for UNM at the Albuquerque Hospital, where she also does research for two doctors part time with hopes of getting into graduate school.  Matt now has an applied science certificate in computer technology, with hopes of eventually landing a tech support job.



Your mother kept your ashes until four years ago, taking you with her when she travelled and in her bedroom when at home.  Although you could not have known, your brother died five years later when he fell asleep at the wheel of the semi he was driving and the big cumbersome vehicle went off the road and hit a concrete culvert.  Then your mother had no one, both of her sons and her husband gone.  I have been forbidden from writing a book about our lives by your mother, she is so terrible afraid the public would think poorly of you, would think she'd been a bad mother for not stopping you.  How could you have done that to her?!  Such a selfish act.  She was there the day you took that final walk down those basement stairs after the weekend with you because she, like I, felt something had shifted in the fabric of your life and was worried because you kept to your room most of the time.  She left that evening after you assured her emphatically, that you were feeling better and would be fine. 



Although you already knew what you were going to do, the decision had been made, the letters written, pictures of the kids throughout the years of their growing up strung out across the dining room table, and your bible open on your bed to a verse in Psalms that told us you would be forgiven by God because of the reasons for your choice.  So heartless.  I remember calling you at around eleven p.m. that night.  You were eating something, and you said you were okay not to worry.  What was that, an hour or two before?  The only thing I find forgivable is that carefully folded that towel, and pinned it around your neck before pulling the noose over your head, jumping high into the air and letting yourself fall.  That action, and that action alone, was the only humane and loving thing you did for your children so rope marks would not be embedded in your skin like a collar or a necklace.



Recently on a trip to celebrate your mother's 50th wedding anniversary that was attended by your brother's two adult children, me, Melinda, and Ashley and Matt, me and Ashley spent the night in a Wichita Marriott together before I had to take her for her flight back to Albuquerque and the subject of you came up in a casual reminiscing of what your mother said about wishing you and Blaze were alive to been a part of the celebration.  Ashley's voice got thick with tears and quivered like a small bird held captive, and I wanted to cry for her when she still felt guilty by those frustrated emotional words she'd spewed back when she why didn't you go ahead and kill yourself if you hated being alive so much.  Nothing I said in reply that day in the hotel, following your suicide, or even now can make that memory go away for her. She has been branded by her words just like the heart tattoo with your birth and death date, and Ashley will forever wonder if those words drove you over the edge and if you thought those words meant she didn't love you.



Matt still tries to be you, with me, but you stole something from him with your suicide, or is hidden so deep even he cannot bring it back.  He never talks about you, still, he doesn't date or let himself get close to anyone as if he fears they would leave him too, like you did.  He doesn't mingle much with strangers when he goes out, leaves birthday or anniversary gathering for his friends because of that choice, and I cannot help him.  No matter how much I wish that I could figure out how to make him feel again.  He is funny, still, warm and loving towards his family, would do anything for us and Melinda's children, especially sweet Alexis with her Cerebral Palsy.



And you?  You took the cowards way out and in a sense you did, abandon us, and left me alone to make things right.  Things that can never be made right.    And what was it you said in the letter that was for us together as a family unit.  Something about sitting on a bench someday in heaven, together again with you happy and at peace, and all of us happy with you?  Well, I hope you're at peace since your death, but you didn't seem to think about, or care, that you were robbing us of our peace.



And when I finish this, in just a moment, I will once again head down the basement steps, and still wonder what thoughts were going through your head when you walked into death.   Oh, and by the way, to this very day when Ashley and Estevan come to visit or she comes along, Ashley will not go into the basement even to do her laundry.  Your ghost linger down there for her