Echoes of Loss

[TW: family conflict, mental illness, suicide]

A frantic scratching comes from the front door, echoing through our living room. Claws scrapping against hard wood. A sound I know well– Bilbo, our cat, trying to get in. Bilbo died a year ago.

Next second, my dad opens the door and Mr Johnson, the principal of the Oakdale Middle School, where my mom teachers, is standing there. (I must have been imagining the cat's scratching). His face is grim.

He says my mom died, and in the next sentence, says she killed herself. Happened after classes ended. I won’t bore you with the details, but it didn’t have anything to do with the school or the students. Or, maybe. I don’t really know. My dad doesn’t look as surprised as I feel he should be.

Dad. I blame him They used to argue, all the time, ever since my earliest memory. She’d shout at home about him about being ten minutes late, and after a while he would start shouting back and tossing things off the table. After that, there would be a tense quiet in the house for days. Why did Dad need to argue? He could have just let her win.

And Mom didn’t get much help from her parents. Her mom (grandma) is old school. Strict, stand straight, clean your fingers nails, that sort of thing. Not one for showing affection. Grandpa is what they now call enabling, just nodding along and never speaking up. Maybe it's their fault. She didn’t grow up in a balanced environment.

Mom wanted to be an artist when she was young. Her oil paintings are amazing. But Grandma said that’s not a real career, and pushed her to take a job teaching. If only mom choose a different career, she might have had less pressure.

And you know what? I can’t stand to hear about ‘mental illness’. It's all nonsense made up as an excuse for weak people, people who can’t act properly. I vowed not to be like her. I will have my shit together. Be successful. Everyone is a new person, can do anything they want to. We don’t need to be like our parents. Not at all.

Three years before that, before Mr Johnson showed up at our front door, mom had made another suicide attempt. My mom and dad were arguing a lot (I mentioned before), and when he was outside, she took a lot of pills. When my dad found her he called an ambulance. At least that’s what I heard because I was at school. When I got home, I sat around at home with grandpa, wondering what was happening to mom.

She was in the hospital for a month. They said she had organ damage. She survived but spent the rest of the year in bed. My grandpa would bring me to talk to her, but she looked weak and frail in bed, like a ghost. I don’t remember what I said to her, but I don’t think it was nice. The other children at school had mothers that baked cookies and smiled at me when I visited their houses. Why couldn’t my mom be like them?

Eventually, my dad found a doctor that could help her, and she began taking the right medicine for depression. After a while, she started getting out of bed and going to the supermarket, and acting like she could function like a normal adult. My dad looked relieved and started being especially nice to her after that.

With her energy back, she started complaining about noises from the neighbors. She couldn’t stop pacing the house. Everyone thought it would be best for her to get back to work. We didn’t tell the school the full story about what happened, just told them that she had a fall, so they hired her back. First as a temp, then as a full-time teacher at Oakdale Middle School.

Mom was still mom. The day before her last day, we had a fight. She was yelling at me about not cleaning the kitchen table. I yelled back all the worst things I could think of. She tried not to cry, and called my dad. After she talked to him on the phone in her bedroom, she came back out with a tight face and told me to go to school.

Maybe we had lots of fights like that, but I always feel bad that was the last thing I said to her. What if I had been a better son? “You were nine years old” they tell me. But I still remember it, and it feels like yesterday, not like I was 9 years old.

In a meeting with her doctor after she was gone, her doctor told us, “Depression is biological. She had a sickness. There was nothing you could have done to prevent what happened. You just need to stop thinking about it.”

Twenty years later, I can’t stop thinking about it.