I kept a diary, something I had done since age eleven, up until the day I died. The lock was jimmied by the police so they could look for any evidence on why, as per customary measure. To Derek, it seemed as though my last months were bleak. I talked about how I hated myself, how my sheets grew stale, how the tiny demons oozed from my pores. I had been so repulsed by myself that there were times when I had to drape towels over the mirrors until the worst of it passed. The later content belied the exterior, the hard-back writing book embroidered with glitter and stickers, colored with felt-tip markers, bearing the resemblance of a lovechild between a teenage dream and a religious tome from The Dark Ages. Miniature designs crowded the pages: bubblegum angels swooped from the upper margins or scraped their wings between paragraphs. Maidens with golden, flaxen tresses dripped tears onto the spine.
Derek would spend hours leafing through the rice paper notebook, this was one of many that cataloged my life, my inner world. The beginning of this edition incepted a year before my suicide. Derek felt as though the brightly-lit pages were part of a whole of ancient scriptures of despair, though the illustrations looked cheerful enough. On this day, he sat on the living room couch, while Kiersey and Max were at school. Tadao was reclused in his room, slightly afraid of Derek's darkly judging gaze.
There are certain parts of my diary he had committed to memory. Gradually, however, Derek learned, though I tried to act mature, I was something of a moody, angsty, middle-aged teenager. The diary was a documentary of an unformed ego, of adolescence that overstayed its welcome far into adulthood. Standard lamentations, daydreams, insecurities are everywhere in evidence. I was also curious and observational; one of my favorite things to write about was how Tadao marveled at the creature comforts of the modern world, such as when I had him try raspberry-vanilla bean frozen yogurt on the first day he arrived to my home, or when I took him to Central Square to go shopping with me. The frozen yogurt was love at first bite, and I loved how Tadao wondered as he craned his head to look at the impossibly tall buildings and the clothes, furniture, and exotic sports cars posted on display in the windows of retail. I also wrote about my heartbreak at the physical altercation with him when Derek opposed the idea of Tadao staying with me and my children.
Derek spent a lot of time at home, caring for Max and supporting Kiersey. He found common ground with Tadao. He had taken an extended unpaid leave from work so that he could process this all, about himself, about me, and about his life. Once he got over his own feelings and the greater context regarding Tadao's appearance, Derek found that he was a polite, upstanding man, if a little odd.
There were times where all he could feel was my absence. When he looked at our children and saw me when Kiersey smiled, and recognized my intelligence and curiosity in Max. But it was not me, he wanted to be with me.
A summer later, he had long since returned to work and fell into the role of a full-time father to our kids and willingly matriculated into the position as Tadao's sponsor to honor me and my kindness. But even when he laughed or smiled, it came from an emptiness within him. He wanted to pretend to be okay, posted happy photos of himself, our children, and Tadao on social media feeds, and thought that if he fooled enough people, he could also fool himself into thinking he was okay.
He had been visiting a therapist for a while, and ended up lying to her and giving her what he thought she wanted to hear. He couldn't look anyone in the eye and tell them that he did not wish to live anymore, even if it were true. He dreaded the idea of speaking it aloud, and was prescribed antidepressants which he begrudgingly took.
The feeling is common, the depression of losing someone to suicide, but it feels impossible to share. It is wrought, terrifying, sometimes selfish and indulgent. I was not a child, I was an adult and I made my decision. It swallowed Derek whole.
Much of the time, as in the obituary Derek wrote of me that celebrated my life, he never talked about how I died. He didn't want to tell people about me. My suicide was no secret, but it was a deep wound, and talking about it allowed people perilously close to the deepest and darkest parts of himself. He did not tell people that he decided that he did not belong anymore, that he had contemplated removing his seatbelt and speeding into a concrete pylon that held up a road deck. Or that he had taken whiskey and sleeping pills one night, but still woke up, even if it were almost eighteen hours later. He did not want to tell anyone that he wrote notes to his children, and even Tadao, thanking them for everything as he told them goodbye.
Derek went into the garage, temporarily being used as a storage unit for his belongings. He'd long since broken the lease to his own apartment and assumed the mortgage of my home after my death. After a few minutes of rummaging through clothing, furniture, and keepsakes, he found what he was looking for. It was a metal case, the size of a yuppy's work satchel; made of brushed steel with rubber bump-stops on the corners, it was much more utilitarian than something a pencil pusher would store his files in for work. Using his thumb print to unlock the case via biometrics, he opened it.
Perhaps we are all one step from the edge, Derek thought, as he stared at the blaster stored inside the felt stencil. He picked it up, checking that it had a full charge. He couldn't understand it, until he could.
He felt my terror.
Death seemed the only answer.
One day in the summer following my death, Derek took some time off from work and got on the road to Awapaho, intending to check into the hotel where I ended my life. He wanted to be with me.
He was crying. He told the kids and Tadao that he needed to just leave, to simply get out of the house. He was certain that they would be better off without him. Max handed him a hand-written note, and Derek slipped it into his back pocket on his way out the door to his truck.
He was almost there when he pulled over to a refueling station. He was sobbing, and even though he wanted to die, he could not drive, he just could not be.
Derek then remembered the note that Max gave him. He reached into his back pocket and pulled it out to read it. It was a 3x5 index card, with Max's penmanship in blue marker pen:
I know you love me, and I love you.
Max
He saw me in our son's profile, his eyes, his gait.
Derek immediately turned around and went home.
*
The odd thing about The Living plane was what we saw when we looked down. Aside from the initial perspective one might expect, the "they look like ants from up here" trope, souls were leaving their physical forms from all over creation.
As Amber and I scanned The Living, spotlighting on one scene or another for a moment or two, looking for excitement in the most mundane of instances. A soul would sail by a living person, gently touching them, on the shoulder, on the cheek, as they passed them on the way to Heaven. The dead are never actually seen by The Living, though many people are astutely aware that there was a change in their environment. They may speak of a chill snapping the air. They might wake up from a dream about them, and see them standing at the foot of their bed, in a doorway, or their phantom boarding a bus.
The terrace of my high-rise apartment in the clouds overlooked not only Heaven, but The Living, especially those I loved. I watched Derek as he read his son's note and decided to return home. I was glad; he wasn't ready to come here, The Living needed him.
The morning of the day I died, Max had started a painting. In his progressing illustration, a thick, blue line separated the air and the ground. In the days that followed, I watched my son add more and more to the masterpiece, and I became convinced that the blue line was an actual place - The Inbetween - where the horizons of Heaven and The Living merged. I wanted to go there, into that cornflower-colored acrylic, the royal, the turquoise, the delphinidin blue.
Derek came to learn that he is now at risk, as do many who bereave a loved one's suicide. He came to that acceptance, and now guards against it. It is a place of caution and checklists. A place where he knows not to stay too long in his head, and too often says yes to random family outings for bowling and frozen yogurt.
A year of psychotherapy, medication, luck, and grit has led him to where he is now. There was no aha! moment with his therapist, no time where it suddenly became clear, no moment when his guilt dissipated. In its stead, there was a dull droning of months involving talking through his worries and what ifs, and all of the reasons he should not have them, until they slowly dissolved. He kept our son's note in his wallet, and later on the nightstand by his bed so that he could see it each morning. In his darkest moments, my mother would call to check on him, and Tadao would even often accompany him on errands or just outings to Ted's for a burger so that he would not be alone. And with medication, he now has the wherewithal to listen.
It took Derek a long time to tell our son how I really died. All he was told was that I was really sick and I did not beat the sickness, which is part-way true.
The darkened sky crackled with jagged streaks of light, looking like bright white tree branches under the black-gray leaves. The downpour was torrential when Derek picked up Max from his art lessons. When they got home, they were standing in the foyer, thoroughly wet but safe from the storm once they were behind the dead bolted door. To overcome the language and sensory barrier, Max keyed in a message on his holowatch's notepad for his father to read:
Be honest. How did Mom die?
Derek's brown eyes, pensive, intense, met our son's innocent green. He'd been kept out of the loop for so long.
Do you really want to know, Max? Derek asked, slow so his deaf son could read his lips.
Max nodded, resolute.
Derek breathed, feeling his diaphragm expand and shrink. He made the shape of a handgun with his hand, pointed to his temple, and pretended to pull the trigger.
Max looked at his father, somewhere between sad and angry. Derek's face was frozen, nothing changing in his expression. Max shook his head and ran upstairs.
Derek followed our son to his room, to find him face-down on his bed, unwilling to look at his father when he came to talk to him. Seeing his composition notebook on his nightstand, Derek opened it to the most recent page to write a message. Instead, he found the following block letters:
LIAR
Half an hour later, Max came downstairs to find his father seated on the couch taking in an evening newscast. Derek turned to meet our son when he approached him. Holding out his notebook for his father, Derek looked at Max for a moment before taking it and opening it to read the most recent message:
Promise me you won't do what mom did.
Derek stared at the sentence, the double-story lowercase A's and the I's dotted with circles, as if the words were to pop off the page. He looked at our son to see Max's face wet with tears, and invited him into his embrace.
I won't, Derek said. I promise.
It was then that Derek, my ex husband, decided he needed to live. Not just for me, not just for himself, but for his children. He knew what it was like to be left behind.
From the balcony of my apartment in Heaven, I looked away as they embraced, turning my eyes to look out the sliding glass doors to the undeveloped field behind our house. Beyond the privacy wall, the wind and rain tormented the trees and shrubbery, driving the woodland creatures into their homes. Not so deep into the ground were the warrens of feral rabbits I loved, the bunnies that ate the flowers and vegetables from my neighbor's gardens, unknowingly, brought poison home to their dens. Then, inside their burrows, not far from the man or woman who laced their gardens with toxic bait, entire families of rabbits would curl into themselves and die.