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I have seen the poetics
of your self-directed death.
You,
in your drunken rage
who had only years earlier
found your
father’s failures
scattered in brain parts across the
tattered carpet,
who hung up your phone after a friend
strayed
from absolute loyalty
and too burdened to loosen the
ducts
that would let you cry, took the shotgun outside.
The
bright porch light graced your face
and you thought, if only
the sun were out,
if only that was the sun, then perhaps
I
could stop myself. Your little sister’s
mouth moved in
repetitious hollows,
her eyes pleading, but you could
hear
nothing, see nothing only
the compression of doubts, faults
and memories.
Your heart was the most direct route to your
pain.
Did you see them lay you on that slab of ice?
Without
mortician, we viewed your yellowed body,
encrusted with once
life giving and dripping blood
from your ears, between your
teeth, your mouth
oddly poised. Were you smiling or did
we
only imagine a smile?
Your finger, still bent over your
heart
still searching for the trigger
that would make it
all go away.
I didn’t
know you well but I cried at
your potlatch when we
viewed the photos
of you with your father or you
with those
you left behind to linger
in the questions you left
unanswered.
The two of you are standing together now
like old
friends. Your deaths were only two days
apart.
Did you
choose to join him or did you
get caught up in the momentum?
Perhaps you were being
kind,
sparing the mourners from
extra grieving,
get it all over with at once. I doubt you
thought
about it at all.
You didn’t attend his
funeral or cry
when you heard the news.
I have seen the poetics
of your self-directed death.
You,
who tried to keep it all inside,
whose signs were hard to
read, practiced
how you would do it, locking yourself in
night
after night until you got it right,
tied a belt around your
neck.
Perhaps it was a belt you bought in town
to prepare
for another year of classes
to go with your best outfits or a
belt
for practicality to keep your pants up over
your
nearly hipless body, so young and undefined.
You tied the
other end to the doorknob
of your locked bathroom door and sat
down.
You sat down with surety, like you
had planned that
moment of finality
over and over again in your head. Lost
breath
and consciousness, you slipped away
like one might
into sleep only life
was your dream, your nightmare, and
you
were looking to wake up from it.
Did you consider how the others would be
haunted by
your death, while you roamed the halls
of the building,
visiting them in their dark showers?
They sent your body home
two days later
so none of us could be sure that you were
really
gone. Only the open door to your empty room
and the
photos of you posted on walls
reminded us as they puzzled us.
I knew you well,
but at your memorial, where people spoke
about your preciousness, your virtue, how you
will always
be in our hearts, I cried less for your
choice
or brief
memories and more for those you left still
living.
The others, those who have considered sharing
your
fate
but were not brave enough to follow through,
who
spitefully imagined the regret on their parents’
faces,
the
shame on the shoulders of those who rejected them,
ask me if
it’s worth it. And I consider late nights
when I mourn
your death, wondering if I could have
done something to stop
it or if I said something
to encourage it and I imagine the
relief in slow
bleeding
that leads to ceasing and I calm my
self with the
thought
of relinquishment before falling into
a dreamless
sleep
to awaken to a new day where the sun
is
just a bit higher in the sky.
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