Early 1990s, Massachusetts

By Courtney A. Walsh

My feet are dangling in the water of my best friend’s pool. There is that oily slick of dead bugs and leaves swirling on the surface, and I’m mesmerized by the play of light and shadow, and by the circular movement of my feet in the water.

I don’t feel connected to the feet or the bugs or the leaves … yet somehow, I am at the center of it all … though my mind hovers and takes in these details with numbed detachment. The breeze gently ripples the trees, making that shhhhh sound … a librarian’s stern warning translated through a sudden summer wind.

It’s my 17th summer, and my best friend’s father has recently hanged himself - causing us all to stop and wonder at this lonely death in a crappy, dark basement, surrounded by empty beer cans and a lifetime of disappointment, a stark contrast to these gorgeous, sky-blue summer days.

At the funeral, my friend seemed old. So much older than her 16 years. Sorrow had quite literally aged her overnight so that she appeared more like a bent-over grieving Italian war widow than the bubbly cheerleader I’d known for years. Her brother, a few years older, was clearly in shock. His strength, born of that nameless New England stoicism, bore her up as they received waves of relatives they had met once, or in some cases, never.

Their mother had died of cancer at a young age. They were now teenage orphans, facing the world at large with the defiance of those who survive a family member’s ultimate shame.

Suicide. The word never spoken, except in hushed whispers at the edges of the cloying-scented flower-filled room - the smell of shame, the pall of it - settled over the room like an itchy wool blanket and over all of our lives briefly with its relentless accusations.

All the usual clichés were tossed about: selfish, weak-willed, martyr, victim. I swished these thoughts around in my head as my feet did their eggbeater dance in the water, banging occasionally against the concrete edge, hopefully hard enough to leave a bruise - or to at least bring me back to myself, my body and its physical solidness. It’s aliveness, not dead, like the leaves or the bugs or my hair or a myriad of other dead things.

His corpse was bloated, and the coroner’s makeup barely hid the rope burn on his neck. One of my friends had the macabre need to share with us that my friend’s father would’ve soiled himself - hanging is an ugly business. We just glared at his insensitivity and tried erasing that image from our fear-soaked thoughts. Letting go of life voluntarily and the indignity of your bowels letting go involuntarily was too much to comprehend. Too much.

A dragonfly lay on its side on the water’s surface, struggling with a broken wing. Some predator, no doubt, had ripped the silken transparency, rendering its owner disabled and drowning as it struggled. I tried scooping it up with both hands cupped around it to give it that buffer of water between those delicate, damaged wings and my unintentionally clumsy hands.

I poured the dragonfly onto the concrete and watched it die a slow, no doubt, painful death, all the while seeing the metaphor for the suicide that none of us could’ve prevented, no matter how gently we cupped our hands around my friend’s wing-injured dad. He was lost the minute he hit the water. Sorrow’s oily slick had snared him, and now he, like the dragonfly, was gone.

My feet dangled and stopped their figure eight motion. I envisioned another set of dangling feet. I couldn’t avoid that image, no matter how hard I tried. We all dangled between life and death daily. Our feet barely touching earth, we would go through the next few weeks just trying not to drown with him. It was like he was pulling us from somewhere just beyond visibility into that world just beyond pain.

Soon, autumn would come, and the pool’s navy nylon cover would be pulled over it, just as his eyelids were closed gently for the last time by a stranger’s hands. It seemed bizarre and frightening and surreal and awful. Yet it was his choice, and we all knew that. It was his choice. We all knew that whether he had chosen wisely wasn’t the question and that there could be no other answer but no. He had chosen recklessly and thoughtlessly. Without care and definitely without love. On that we were all agreed.

So why, throughout my 20s (and into my early 30s, even), did I sometimes envy his quieted dangling feet and the dragonfly’s final wing flutter? Why did I want to switch places with a corpse and stop my own inner swirling?

These questions terrified me so much, I had to cut them off at their own knees. I couldn’t allow them to dangle. I couldn’t allow them to beat their dying wings against my teenage fears of immortality. I just couldn’t let them in.

So I slammed the door on these thoughts, locked the key, and swallowed it. Over time, decades after the dragonfly and years before my own suicide attempt, I swallowed some more with each passing year. I had a lump in throat, bulging like an ugly goiter, but I swallowed the grief down like a thirsty baby at her mother’s breast.

The problem, as any pediatrician can tell the parent of any toddler, with swallowed things is that they always find a way out. It may take a long time for them to work their way through your system. But they will always come out, seeking the light of day, waiting for the tiniest ripple of a breeze to dare them to be silent.

Courtney A. Walsh is an experienced blogger, communications professional, freelance writer, adventurer, seeker, and gypsy. With an extensive background in marketing, advertising, creative writing, film, cultural studies, and languages (not to mention having mastered the art of overblown self-aggrandizement), Walsh has worked with the U.S. National Park Service and on a project for MTV’s Real World. Recently, between proofreading ad circulars (which is exactly as glamorous as it sounds), she completed a memoir, Lipstick and Thongs in the Loony Bin, soon to be available for purchase on Lulu.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Friday, July 20th, 2007 | Email This Post

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