tell me one of your grief stories...

are you asking for more grief stories?

(i didn't want to post one if you werent.)

yeah I am. comiserate with zilly!

My senior year of high school i came home to my mother curled up on the bathroom floor, half hanging over a pile of laundry, cradling the phone in her shoulder and bawling her eyes out.

keep in mind that my mother does not cry. when i was 17 my boyfriend broke up with me, i was crying on the phone with him (yes, he broke up with me on the phone because he was a spineless piece of shit) she grabbed the phone from me and slammed it down saying "never. EVER let them see you cry." and she stormed out.

but i digress.

i've never seen my mother cry before. when i asked what was wrong, she just sobbed "david. david."

my first thought was "Who's david?"

David was her cousin. a very close cousin. i'd only met him once or twice, but they'd grown up as practically brother and sister. family life had made them grow apart a bit but she loved him very much.

David was the father of 2 beautiful little girls, then 7 and 9. he had a little ranch house in southern michigan with 4 horses and a beautiful wife. one day david fell off a ladder and broke his arm. bumped his head, too.

he was in the hospital for the bump on the head. against doctors orders, he left the hospital.

he drove his truck into some woods until it ran out of gas. they found two beer cans on his seat.

he walked further into the woods where he sat down.

..and put a bullet through his head.

at his funeral, although i didnt know him barely at all, i cried and cried. i hyperventilated. his two daughters sat quietly.

suicide is... I don't know how to put it. its hard. so fucking hard to deal with, weather it was your your twin and you were joined at the hip and shoulder or if it was a friend of a friend of a friend or someone you didn't know at all. it tares us apart.

my cousin tried to slit his wrists and ended up cutting one of his hands off before deciding to stab himself in the chest on mothers day. he worked in boston in a book store and I used to see stay with him when i went to the joslin clinic. we talked on the phone ever couple days, wrote letters... my family always looks at me woried that I'm next because we were so alike, skitzo, depressed, intelegent, quiet, book freaks.

one of my friends hung herself from the banister in the back stairway of her house a couple weeks before we graduated.

its one of the hardest things in the world to let go of. as the one who is suicidal and as the one left behind.

it is hard. i even get choked up thinking about it still. i felt like it was so selfish of him. his daughters - their faces. they still haunt me. now that i'm a little older i realize that yes, suicide can be viewed as selfish, but isnt that selfish of me to think so? so, you're right, it's hard.

in high school, shortly after this happened, i read Kate Chopin's "The Awakening" and i had to write something for it. i wrote a sonnet about Edna's suicide. it's angsty teenage crap in retrospect, but i still have it online, sadly :P

sadly? feck no! even the angsty teenage crap has its place. :-)

and it's place is crappy self-centered websites written in 1997 with�a bunch of outdated pictures and information! YAY! :D

yay! :-D

what if we're still crappy and self-centered?

well, i mean, that's why we have LJs :P

is it a coincedence that I just reopened mine today? I htink not!

When I was about 16 my friend Jayce came and lived with me in the basement I was living in at a flop house.� He'd made comments about wanting to die but so did the rest of my friends and I didn't take it very seriously.� He went to go visit his parents�who were being very cold toward him since he'd come out.� I hadn't seen him for a few hours and went down to the basment to see if he was sleeping.� I found him with his wrists slit lying on the basement floor.� He had been there for over an hour.� There is nothing more horrible than seeing your best friend lying on the cold basement floor surronded in blood. I didn't know what to do, I sat on the stairs and stared at him.� I didn't cry right away I just kept wishing he would have laid on the bed I couldn't stand the idea that he died on the cold floor.

*hug*
a friend of mine used to find the cold hard cement floor comforting. as if the thought that because she noticed the cold and felt the hard it ment she wasnt as cold or hard as it. as she usually thought. maybe there was a reason. more often then not there isn't. he was prolly too lost in his mind to factor that in. I have no idea if I'm making any sense.

I hope so..� It still makes me sad to thinking of that cold floor.

You used the plural. Probably you meant for multiple people to tell you their story, but I'm telling two. It's the frame of mind I'm in tonight. I guess I'll go in the order they happened.

My grandmother's second husband killed himself with one of his handguns. I don't remember how old I was - not very, I guess, because it was sometime before my one-and-only experience with girlscout camp. (Yeah, I was a girlscout for a while. So what?)

Mom and I got to my Grandmother's (it was the house on Tyler street) pretty quick. The drive up, I was sort of surprised at how I felt. Sad, yes, but sad for everyone. And very very angry. The coroner's people were still there when we arrived. I remember sitting in the blue family room (the "front" room of the house) and watching them wheel the body out.

He'd done it in the living room. I watched my mother scrub his blood out of the green carpeting, and I remember I thought that the way the water turned pink looked like kool-aide.

He didn't leave a note. To this day his family swears it was an accident that happened while he was cleaning his gun. That man loved guns and had been around them his entire life. It was not an accident.

He told cruel jokes. He smoked a pipe. He was a boyscout leader. His family makes pens, and there is a football field named after them.

He didn't leave a note, and I was so angry. I'm still angry.

The second story - the more relevent story to my frame of mind tonight - is what I still consider the hardest thing I've ever done. I spoke at my Grandfather's funeral. (This being my mother's father, not her mother's second husband.)

I hate funerals. I go to them because it is expected, and because others appreciate it. (Note that I do go to visitations - or whatever they call them in your part of the country - of my own accord, but not funerals. I can respect that others need to gather to grieve soon, but I prefer to do my grieving in private. Others do not respect this need, and it would be disrespectful for me not to attend the funeral of a close family member. I'm digressing.) My Grandfather's funeral was an exception to this. I went because I wanted to - because I needed to. The minister who was going to give the service didn't know my Grandfather. I couldn't stand the idea that my Grandfather would leave the world with no one speaking "officially" who knew him. So I had asked to speak at the service.

According to Talcott, my essentially last-minute offering read as very polished. According to me, I don't know how I got through it at all. A lot of relatives asked for copies. My mom still keeps some on file for them, in case they realize they wanted one and didn't ask at the time. I ended by reading Tennyson's "Crossing The Bar" and to this day I tear up when I encounter the poem.

I should be sleeping now. I have a funeral to go to in the morning. The older I get, the more aware I become that as I continue to get older, there will forever be more funerals to attend.

the last funeral I went to was my brothers. and I can't do it again. no more funerals. I'm glad you have the strength to do it. that you can observe and respect other people that way. you're awesome, lacy. period.

I just do what I can. It's easier to be strong for other people than it is for me. I guess it's kind of how I live my life. When my parents divorced, I think somehow (we're not going into the discussion of someone *coughGrandmothercough* mentioned in my second-grader earshot that I was "adjustng well") I got the idea that I needed to be strong for her. But somehow doing things like that just became what I do. So now it's like I need to do it as much as I want to.

I'm rambling.

*wanders off*

Funerals are horrible.� The last funeral I went to was for Willis Johnson who was my french teacher when I was really young.� I had a really hard time going through the door to the chapel where the funeral was being held..� I could fake that everything was alright and that I wasn't a total bastard for not visiting him because it hurt knowing that this person who I'd loved more than most adult male's in my life couldn't remember me. As long as I didn't through the door I knew I could still fake in my mind that it wasn't too late.� I could pretend that I had read the paper wrong, that I wouldn't have known anyone in there, that it was someone else in the casket.� I ended up going through the door after a long time of sitting in the car sobbing... I'm not a strong person.. Christ that was a horrible day.

Irish funerals are somewhat better. ther is a lot of drinking involved.