02 June 2003


Stony-Hearted

A suicide happens roughly once every 17 minutes somewhere in the United States. People who have never experienced it up close tend to focus on the pathos of the deceased. Your mother must have been in so much pain.

Which is true.

On the other hand, picking up a handgun powerful enough to send a bullet through the engine block of a car, putting the barrel into your mouth and pulling the trigger instantly ends all pain for the deceased while leaving one hell of a mess for survivors to work through for the rest of their lives.

In my case, I was laboring alone. No adult acknowledged the horror of what I’d seen in that bedroom. Not one—not my father, my parents’ friends, teachers, or clergy—approached me to talk about what had happened or about my mother. If I brought up the subject, which I did on occasion, especially in the days immediately following her death, people changed the topic.

I remember one time in particular, at my mother’s funeral, “I don’t know what’s the matter with me,” I said to one of her closest friends, a woman who had known me since I was six years old. “I can’t cry. I can’t feel anything. I feel like I’m completely stony-hearted.”

“Oh, dear, don’t worry,” she said. She patted my arm in a kindly fashion. “You’re not stony-hearted.” Then she turned away.

I stood there, heart pounding, willing her to turn back. But she didn’t. Finally, I turned away, too.

I was rewarded for going on as if nothing had happened. “She’s doing so well!” my father praised when I returned to school almost immediately after we put my mother in the ground. He left me alone a lot. I came home to the house where I’d found her almost every day in the eleventh and twelfth grades. I took over her chores, cooking, cleaning, shopping for food, and doing laundry. I even started making my father’s brown-bag lunches every day for work.

In the weeks, months, and years following, I was told in countless, indirect ways, that if I fell to pieces, no one would be there to put me back together.

So I quickly learned to stuff my feelings and, as a coping mechanism, I started stuffing food too. I became a secret binge-eater, consuming a half-gallon of ice-cream here, a quarter-pound of M&M’s there. Bologna sandwiches on white bread, french-fries, donuts, packages of cookies, the saltier, fatter, sweeter the foods, the more I wanted them. All was consumed in a sort of trance, alone, glued to the TV-screen or with my nose buried in a book. Dune, Stranger in a Strange Land, The Carpetbaggers, I preferred trashy, escapist novels.

On the one hand, the ritual was comforting. But after each binge, I struggled with overwhelming feelings of guilt, shame and self-loathing. Still, that was far better than facing the piercing feelings of horror, grief, betrayal, rage and loneliness.

A little more than a year after my mother’s death, I graduated from high school with absolutely no plans for the future. So, in response to an invitation, I up and moved to Omaha to live with my older cousin’s family—an impetuous decision, I soon came to regret.

My cousin, a lieutenant-colonel in the Air Force, was of the old school. The last thing he needed—or wanted—influencing his four young children was a depressed 18-year-old who’d lost her faith and had quit attending mass.

Beyond apostasy and binge-eating, I was keeping pretty much on the straight and narrow. No alcohol, no drugs, even though in the early 70’s, both were readily available. Unlike many of my peers, I hadn’t even had sex yet. In Omaha, I was maintaining nearly straight A’s in three college courses and holding down a part-time job at a hamburger joint, despite being so depressed I frequently called in sick rather than going to work.

My overeating and depression got under the skin of my cousin’s wife. One day I was puttering around on the second-floor while she and my aunt chatted downstairs in the kitchen. They didn’t know I was there, and when I overheard my name, I paused to listen.

“I don’t know what’s the matter with her! ” My cousin-in-law’s sharp tone froze me. “It’s been over a year since her mother’s death! Why can’t she just get over it?!”

I stood there, mortified. Before I could hear my aunt’s reply, I fled to my bedroom and closed the door. I withdrew even deeper inside myself, and as soon as the semester ended, I retreated to California and moved back in again with my dad.

Only one time did I break down following my mother’s death. I was home alone fixing dinner two weeks after her suicide. I opened the refrigerator and scanned its contents, my eyes alighting finally on a platter of cooked hamburgers on the bottom shelf, protected beneath a layer of taut, fogged Saran Wrap. Without thinking, I grabbed the platter and reheated a couple of patties.

Within an hour of eating them, I was kneeling on the cold linoleum of the bathroom floor bent over the toilet-bowl. The impact of what I’d done, of what had happened, had hit home. My mother made those hamburgers. The same mother I’d found, lifeless in a pool of blood in the room just down the dark hall outside the bathroom door.

She had bought the meat at the supermarket, shaped the patties with her hands, and fried the burgers standing over the stove in the kitchen where I’d brushed off her final kiss.

Never again would she shop or cook for me. Never again would I feel her hands on me, fixing my hair, adjusting my clothing, smoothing my forehead before kissing me goodnight. Never again would she do any of the big or little things a mother, even an emotionally messed up mother, does for her daughter.

The tears came then, as I heaved into the toilet. Not enough tears—not nearly enough—to express the magnitude of my feelings. Not enough, either, to begin to heal me. That would not happen until many years later.