May 2024

TW: Suicide

May 2019

I wonder if it’s the fact that I am getting older or that I am just finally healing the broken parts of me that cause me to feel the world so deeply. As I’ve talked about a million times I cannot believe how numb I had been for so many years. Floating aimlessly through my life in a survival mode, blocking out any real feelings vs. what I logically expected myself to be feeling. Now, to go to bed every night and have difficulty distinguishing if I had a good day or not depending on the emotions I felt throughout is a wild experience. Is this being a human or am I finally losing it? The roller coaster of emotions felt in one week, in one day, in a matter of hours. This must just be what authentically letting your guard down can look and feel like. So many parts of me just want to be writing, but once I’m sitting down to do it I don’t know where to start. I can’t believe in one week I could celebrate my 31st birthday, miss my mom on mothers day, meet my best friends brand new baby, and attend the memorial service of one of my closest friends.There is so much I need to get out, to write, to say, and instead I’m avoiding all of it. I had all these thoughts while traveling last week, and I couldn’t bring myself to pull out my journal except to stuff it with flowers I found along the way. 

I could write a novel about all of these topics, so what’s stopping me? I couldn’t possibly tell you. Everything I write keeps unfolding around the topic of love. I think it’s just what I’m clinging to in an effort to keep moving right now. I once told Sara I was always nervous when I posted something publicly on my substack, she told me that people were probably falling in love with me through my writing because that’s what happened to her every time she read something new. I’m clinging on to that too. Part of me wants to talk about suicide, and the other part wants to talk about how incredible it is to witness motherhood from the lens of someone without a mother on the planet. It’s really all so intertwined once I get down to it. How the cycle of life just keeps moving forward in different ways. I recently saw this post online of 100 reasons to stay alive, in a promotional purpose of May being mental health awareness month. I stopped reading after the first few because they were focused on making the people around you proud. Suicide has been a conversation on the table a lot lately, and for anyone to have so much judgement towards someone who chose to end their own life is so far beyond my comprehension. Anyone in a position who thinks that, makes me think that they must be so fortunate to not understand, to have never been in such a dark place that your brain has tricked you into thinking the most selfless act you could do for the people you love, is to no longer burden them. Suicide may feel selfish to the people who are left behind, but I know that that is not what led that person to the choice of taking their own life. I know that list was filled with good intentions and out of 100 options I’m sure there were good ones, and I just didn’t give it a chance. I know suicide is a sensitive subject, but isn’t that why we need to talk about it?  Isn’t that why people who feel as if their lives aren’t worth living need to be seen, to be heard, and for those feelings to be partially normalized in a sense despite how difficult it might be to swallow that? Isn’t it a lot harder swallowing the fact that someone you loved ended their own life? If we could become so open that when your brain tricks you into that scary little corner that people know how to reach out, or to ask for help, I don’t have an answer for any of these things, as if I do for anything. So many parts of life are permanent, and we can’t go back, and we can’t change things, but sometimes looking back makes the answers seem so painfully obvious. Someone at my bar recently asked me if I had seen the signs leading up to Matt choosing to end his own life. What a stupid fucking question. Grief is so much guilt in so many forms. To ask such a ridiculous question to someone in the thick of that is

I don’t even have a word for it. I want to be in a space where I am just vomiting my fucking brain onto this paper and I feel like I can’t. My brain isn’t aligning with my heart and my hands aren’t doing the work quick enough. I’m just typing to type. I want to put something out in the world, I want to touch on these topics of love, and suicide, and motherhood. As if what I have to say fucking matters. I just am afraid, afraid once I think I’m ready to talk about all of this in a positive and constructive way my heart won’t be behind it the same way it is right now, it won’t feel as authentic and raw. So for now I guess I just keep on clinging. I keep clinging on to the feeling of getting a birthday I finally wanted. Handfuls of hand written notes reminding me that someone loves me, that I’m still important here. To have another mothers day roll around, remembering both my own mother and my grandmother who raised me. For mothers day to be the first day I get to hold a new baby that pushed me to bawl my eyes out in the car because how beautiful it is to be 31 and still experience a new feeling even if so much of it is twisted and murky. A feeling of so much love for this new tiny little being, and how I actually cannot understand how Matt doesn’t get to meet him because he chose to end his life too early, but that this kind of love I’m feeling is in a long winded way the exact reason I choose to get help and keep living mine. To see two people I love with their new baby, to know that 31 years ago almost to the day I was born in a hospital just right down the street, with two brand new parents in their 20’s, hopefully as happy as I picture them being. For my heart to swell because I get to watch my best friend in her first few days of motherhood, and to miss my own so much while not being able to remember what her voice sounded like pulls on my heart, to think that I’m one of the last parts here to remember her and so many parts of her are missing. I wonder which parts of me are like her. For years people told me how similar we were, more so after her death. How my kindness and love all came from her, my ability to see the world in a softer way when it’s been cruel came from her. I wish that was the woman I had been able to get to know. I wish she would have realized how fragile her life was, and how important it could have continued to be. I wish I could ask her when she noticed that that had shifted, that she was giving up slowly over the years. When did getting strung out and lying in bed for days become easier than living a full and happy life. I know some of these traits are inherently in me, from both of my parents. I have spent so many years recognizing the bad ones and working my best to be nothing like them. Forgetting that their makeup is forever part of my being, and it isn’t possible that it was all bad. 

Last week I’m sitting on a boat in the Bahamas. I’d thought about Matt so much on that trip, painful the way the dead leak into the living like that. The way the living will grasp at straws to to still feel connected to those people we’ve lost, how once they’re gone they appear everywhere. His family gifted the Dark Horse a wind chime in his honor, every time I look at the wind chime I feel guilty because I can’t help but hear him make fun of it. How there were skittles at his memorial because they found a packet of them in one of his jackets, and me knowing Skittles weren’t his first choice, and that Matt would have never left a good snack in his pocket untouched for too long. This is how people feel closer to the people we’ve lost. It’s easy to look at other people's actions in grief and not understand how that brings them comfort. Or you can be like me, feeling ridiculous crying a little on a boat because I just fed a fish a hot dog and couldn’t help but think of Matt. I’m sitting on a boat in one of the most beautiful places on the planet, and yet my heart is breaking from the parts that are all missing, to think the world can just continue on without all of these people that I loved that don’t get to be here. Do we miss the memories or are we afraid of creating all the new ones without them? A different memory came back to me of being four years old. My dad lifted me up above his huge fish tank that held Oscar, a big oscar fish who would eat the chunks of hot dog I’d be throwing into the tank. It made my dad and I both laugh every time. Memories like this sometimes don’t feel like they were actually my life. This was when my dad was well, when he was the person I wish I could have spent my life getting to know. It’s when I was so small and my heart hadn’t shattered a million times yet. Even writing this now I’m crying missing them, and the innocence of life. I’m sitting on a boat chucking hot dog pieces into an ocean and angry that Matt isn’t here to do it too, even though it was never part of the plan. It feels unfair, it feels unfair that I get to float among the living and these people I love don’t get to experience these little pockets of life that are still good. It’s not fair that I don’t get to do anything like this with them again. How ridiculous that I’m wanting to cry for the two of them when I’m out experiencing the bucket list trip of a lifetime. How sneaky grief can be. 

I keep replaying this memory of Matt. It was my first day back to work after my dad had decided to give up on his own life in the hotel across the street. Matt said, “I know it’s stupid to ask if you’re okay, but are you going to be?” One of the only people to talk to me without that look of pity, to not apologize, or tell me some cliche about death I had already heard. Matt knew my dad, in both good and bad lights, and he knew how earth shattering this was for me on so many convoluted levels. He was genuinely aware that this might be something that broke me beyond repair. Matt was someone I met when I had just turned 21, just hanging out at the Dark Horse because I lived down the street. We played dice in his kitchen, pulled cigarette butts out of baby Stan's mouth, and ate cheetos and he let me play Fidlar too loudly in the living room. Eventually I joined the Dark Horse full time and continued to spend five days a week with that man in that building, and millions of moments outside of it. We celebrated most Thanksgivings and Christmas’ together with our chosen Dark Horse family and always Halloween, since it was our favorite. One year we were in charge of the turkey and got too drunk. We had to get a ride to the dinner, because you can’t have Thanksgiving without a turkey and you can’t have Thanksgiving without Matt Poppens. We each held a lot of guilt in our own lives, both existing in constant caretaker positions in our own families, but feeling a little solace in the comfort of being able to understand what the other was going through with true empathy and honestly wanting to help if possible. Our friendship was so much more than coworkers at a bar, he became my family, Matt was a brother to me. Whether he was mocking me for my new haircut, or I was making fun of his tattoo that I and so many others are now adorning, calling each other out over shitty behavior, and having to tell each other some brutal truths when it came down to it, we grew up together. So many of us shared this similar dynamic with Matt, so much so that it will pain me for the rest of my life that in his final moments he wasn’t able to see that, just how important his life was to me, and so many other people who loved him. How much love was strung between all of us, whether it’s the people who celebrated the holidays with him, or the ones who looked forward to seeing him behind the bar. 

When Matt asked if I was going to be okay, he felt like the only person I could answer to honestly. I told him I didn’t know, but I hoped so. He didn’t give me some bullshit advice or any glimpse of optimism. All he said was, “Well. I’m still here for it.” That was all I needed to hear at that time, that I wasn’t going to be alone. A few months ago I checked on the back bar and Matt was sitting on a milk crate at the end of the bar during a lull in the karaoke crowd, staring at the ground, looking defeated. I went over and pulled up another crate next to him to check on him, sometimes you just need a second to sit, to breathe, to know someone is there. Our boss walked by and asked what the fuck we were doing, I’m sure we looked ridiculous. Matt held his hand out to me as a fist bump, a silent gesture that we both knew we were going to be okay. Of all the things Matt was, he was that. He was someone who showed up when you really needed him, and he wouldn’t go anywhere. Someone you’d feel better just being around. I can only hope that I filled that role for him the same way he had for me. That man would help you clean up whatever monstrous mess you created of your life, all the while laughing and telling you what a stupid decision you had made. I wonder how long it will haunt me to walk into a building where he took up so much space, when I’ll stop seeing a stranger out of the corner of my eye and thinking it’s him. 

Did I see the signs? I grew up in a survival mode forever looking for the signs, and kids are smarter than we give them credit for. Because of being raised like this I am continually reading into things too deeply, in my best efforts to never miss the signs. I have to remind myself that life isn’t that easy. You can see the signs over and over and over again. It doesn't always mean you can fix things. To think if any of these people had just called me before making their final choice, that I could have done something to change the outcome is an unfair thought for me, or anyone to hold onto. It’s not the way life goes. It’s not the “what if'' to hold onto for the rest of your life. People make choices, and in so many ways most of us don’t understand them. We as humans so naturally need a conclusion, we need a place to put the guilt and the blame. Sometimes there just isn’t anywhere for it to go. It just lingers, lingers until it shrinks, or maybe grief stays the same size and we just keep growing. Part of me was delusional enough to think that grief would somehow become easier over the years, when in reality I think each loss will become more painful. I read a book once that talked about a belief that when bad things happen, no matter how tragic, it’s something happening to prevent something even worse from happening. I have carried that with me through a lot of parts in my life, it’s easier to reflect on traumas that have happened years ago instead of the ones I’m actively working on growing through. I sometimes don’t know if I actually believe this or it just feels like a little temporary band aid when I feel utterly fucking hopeless. Other times terrible things happen, like someone you love choosing to end their own life, and there is no possible way you could ever fathom how that could be preventing anything worse from happening. In Matt's death I think a lot of us have found and felt a lot of love that we needed. He isn’t here but somehow is still pushing us to be better than we were before in his absence. I have never been part of a shared experience of grief like this, to feel so conflicted. When each of my parents died I felt so alone in that struggle, I returned to my day to day life because I had to, and I felt like a zombie. I felt like a person working so hard to hold myself together when all I really wanted was to let everything I was feeling out of me, and for someone to tell me how to fix it. Yet I dreaded the thought of someone I wasn’t close to, asking how I was, because the only thing I hated more than crying in front of people was how uncomfortable everyone around me seemed to be, to be tiptoeing around and feeling as though I needed to comfort them, to let them know I would be okay. The isolation in grief is so real, so to share this pain of losing Matt with literally hundreds of people is surreal. It’s equally as heart breaking as it is beautiful to see the way people show up for each other, to openly cry and be there holding hands in the thick of it together. To be reminded of what is so important in our lives, and how showing up for the people we love is the most important of them all. 

That’s it for me. If I’ve learned anything in my 31 years on the planet it’s that life is so short, and it’s fucking cruel, and you don’t know when it ends. Every year for my birthday I’ll make a list of goals I want to accomplish, I take time to write and reflect on my growth of the year and where I want to be headed. I didn’t do that this year, because all I know is that I don’t have any idea what is going to happen, and I refuse to be disappointed in myself because I didn’t check things off a list. Especially when I have managed to survive the things life threw at me unexpectedly—that is a goal I would have never written down, but am most proud of. I’m tired of clouding my life with to-do lists. I’m not sacrificing valuable time with people I love to fold my laundry anymore. I’m never going to sit and wonder if someone I loved questioned how much I cared about them. I haven’t been writing and I had finally convinced myself to sit down and write about my trip, and instead I wrote about all of this because all I can think about is Matt, and my parents, and all the people around me. How money can’t buy happiness but I can’t help wondering what life could have been like if instead of using a calculator at the grocery store to make sure we weren’t going over what we had on our EBT card, my parents could have used a calculator to plan a trip to see the ocean. To be reminded how little we are and how beautiful the world can be. My dads dream was to move to Alaska and learn how to deep sea fish. The man never even got to see the ocean before he died, tangled in dreams of what life could be like from watching the dreams of others on a TV screen. Sometimes I walk around this world harboring this guilt for that, for being able to live a life that as a kid I would have never imagined possible. I have to remind myself that that’s what my parents gave theirs for, for mine to be better. I can spend my whole life wondering about the what ifs and how their lives could have been different, how in so many ways their deaths and Matt's death will never be something I can understand, something I have to come to terms with in the sense that my brain will never stop trying to tie up those loose ends, so instead I’m trying to just keep adding to those ends. To talk about Matt and make it so his name is never taboo, to keep living a life and trying to enjoy the little things in between, like looking up at the stars, floating in the water, reading a book that I wish I could have given Matt once I finished it, enjoying the lilacs and thinking of my mom every time I smell them, even if they’re only in bloom for a few weeks. To stop and look at the tadpoles in the rain puddles, to remind myself that being a human is complicated, and it’s painful, but I refuse to let the world harden me. I have spent a lot of years of my life wanting to leave this town, this state, to run away and try to find a reason why my life could possibly be worth living, and instead I finally realized I’ve created all of it here, right where I needed to be all along. It’s so many little pieces that weave together, so many people that I feel like I won the jackpot by just being able to split a cookie with them and laugh in their presence. A place to exist where I finally feel excited to return home after a trip. 

In January Matt and I went up to steamboat with some of our best friends. We were both dealing with the aftermath of painful break ups and our hearts were hurting. One of those nights we ate some mushrooms and all went to Strawberry Hot Springs. Jumping back and forth between the hot and cold pools, laughing at our panic with the way the cold water would steal our breath, and how fucking good it felt to be alive. We kept laughing and joking that the springs had healed us, this was going to be our year, no more bad shit was going to happen. We were on the up and up. I love you Poppens, and I really don’t know what I believe in as far as what happens after someone dies, but wherever you are I hope you’re feeling on top of the world like we did that night, because you really fucking deserved that.