So thus begins my recollections of the past year and a half in no particular order. I was trying to figure out exactly where to start, and the first thing that popped into my head kinda surprised me. Here goes.
The first thing I want to work through is the death of my neighbor's daughter.
I brought Téa up to Maine for the first time in October. When I got there, my mom informed me that Kristen had killed herself. I thought she was joking at first. I searched her eyes for any sign that she was kidding. She wasn't. I started crying.
The story goes, Kristen had a jerk of a husband and two sweet little daughters, aged 3-or-so and 10 months. She'd been struggling with depression for several months, and was getting worse. She begged her husband not to go on a fishing trip he'd planned for a weekend, because she didn't feel good, but he went anyway. Her mom came by to visit, and she was just about comatose with depression. Her mom (who's lived across the street from my parents since before I was born) brought her home and tried to get her into counselling. Apparently she was hospitalized for a while and then released; I'm not sure when that happened. The night of her death, her parents put her on a 24-hour suicide watch. Her mom even brought her into the bathroom to keep an eye on her. At some point, she was out of supervision for a few minutes (I don't know exactly why this happened, but I certainly can't blame her parents-- watching someone every minute is difficult, and I'm sure they thought she'd be fine by herself for just a moment). She shot herself with the one gun in the house they had neglected to dispose of.
I don't know why they took their eyes off her, why they had guns in the house, why they had so many guns in the house that they could possibly forget one, or how she got a hold of that gun. It doesn't matter. She had it planned; it would've happened one way or another.
Her jerk husband now won't let Kristen's mom see the little girls. She loves her granddaughters and spent a lot of time with them when Kristen was alive; they would obviously be a great comfort to her now that she's lost her daughter. But the asshole won't return her calls. It's a tragic situation all around, and it couldn't have happened to a less deserving family.
I grew up with Kristen and her brother. My mom wrote them into my baby book as my "first friends." Kristen's mom babysat me. I hadn't really talked to Kristen since I was 12 or so, but we saw them across the street, her daughters playing in the yard. She seemed happy. I know she was a very intelligent and kind person.
Her suicide hit me hard, especially since she left behind two little daughters and I had just given birth to a little girl of my own. She was still nursing the younger one. She must've been so miserable, so ill, to take her own life and leave her family. Not just her daughters, but her brother, a year older than her, her mother and father (she was especially close with her mother) and her 12 year old sister. This will impact them all for the rest of their lives.
I can't imagine leaving my daughter behind. She freaks out when I take a shower. Even though she's only 3 months old, I think it would really traumatize her if I suddenly disappeared. She knows my face, my smell, the sound of my voice. I comfort her best and I'm her only source of food. It's amazing what a unit we've become in 3 months; we'd be devastated without each other.
I have thought long and hard about Kristen's suicide. I've run the scenario over and over in my mind. The blast of the gun. Her parents running into the room to find her dead. My parents heard the screams from across the street. Several emergency vehicles came to the house. Kristen was rolled out in a body bag. My parents saw the family bringing out chairs and pieces of carpet. Things that got messy.
I try to figure out what her state of mind must have been. And what it must feel like to find your daughter dead, when she was alive just moments before. And where Kristen is now. I'm not religious, but I can't think of her soul as being in the same place with my grandfather and aunt Sam. I don't feel her watching over me. She just feels gone.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I think if she had any sense of consciousness now she would be so devastated by her actions and that she can't be there to raise her children . . . to experience that kind of guilt and regret for an eternity is too tragic to fathom. So I hope she is just gone.
ReplyDelete