“I wanted to talk to you. I wanted to hear your voice and
tell you that I loved you.”
That was the opening sentence of a phone conversation had
between my husband and me not thirty minutes ago. He decided he would call me
as he left the Toyota dealership where he had been this morning getting an
estimate on what it would cost to repair the damage I had done to his truck as
I accidentally rammed it into a pole about a month ago.
“I, along with about twenty other people in the waiting room
of the dealership, witnessed something this morning that really shook me up. It
was… I don’t know… it was disheartening, and pretty disturbing, but I wanted to
share it with you because… well, I needed to share it with someone. No, I
needed to share it with you, so, I’m going to.”
As I quietly sat on the end of my chair with my laptop in
front of me in the middle of some mindless data entry, I listened intently to
my husband’s quaky voice tell the tale of woman who experienced the unthinkable
this morning. He set the scene at the dealership – where he was sitting in
relation to where she was. What she looked like and what she was wearing. And
then he proceeded, his voice even shakier now, to tell me how in a relatively
quiet room with not much more than the sound of an irrelevant guest answering
questions asked by a talentless daytime talk show host echoing in the
background, this woman – middle-aged, nicely dressed, African American – began
screaming at the top of her lungs.
“She was wailing, Barbara. I mean, it was the type of scream
that I imagine would have been similar to the scream you let out in the mall
when Roman was having his first seizure. You know… helpless. It was as if she was not in her own body. You had to see
her… you had to hear her. She just
kept screaming ‘My God, no! My God, no, no, no, God, no!’ and tears were
pouring from her eyes.”
The woman was helped outside, he continued to tell me, quickly
surrounded by Toyota employees trying to calm her down or find out what it was
that was happening, or what she needed. Everyone, he said, was left in the
waiting room in a deafening silence. But they stared. They stared, along with
my husband, through the dirt-reddened waiting room windows as this woman
continued her telephone conversation, and went on with her screaming and her
wailing and her clear expression of pain, until she finally just dropped to her
knees in silent heartache.
Her husband had shot himself this morning. Taken his own
life. And someone called to tell her that. Right then. On the phone. At the
dealership. While she waited with everyone else for her tires, or her brakes,
or her wipers to be fixed. She was there going about her everyday life while
somewhere in their home probably only a few miles away, he was taking his. What
was he thinking? Was he thinking? Did he think in the process of taking his
that he would also selfishly be ruining hers? No one knows. No one ever will.
But everyone left will bear the weight of the pain.
“There was a guy next to me in a
suit. He and I just looked at each other and shook our heads. I could tell he
was affected. I was affected… I AM affected. And when he got up to leave he
said to me ‘Have a good day’ and I said ‘thanks, yeah, have a better day than
what that woman is having. Oh, and if you ever feel like you might want to end
it all, I suggest you remember that scream’ to which the man responded ‘Good
point. I think if her husband ever heard that scream, he would have never done
what he did. Take care’ and then he left. But it’s true, Barbara. It’s true
that when a person takes their life they are thinking about themselves most,
and how they can’t take it, and they can’t handle it, but everyone… EVERYONE
should hear a scream like I heard this morning. I think there would be a lot
fewer suicides if they did.”
Anne Tillet Palumbo was an
English woman of incredible beauty. A hairdresser with a knack for fashion and
a keen style eye, she married an Italian man from Philadelphia and gave birth
to two children in her twenties, Barbara and Patrick. She was a wonderful wife
and an incredible mother until the day she took her own life, leaving her kids
– then seven and four – behind. Anne Tillet was my grandmother and her death
affected my father in a way that I hope I may never affect someone I love. He
grew up as a once talented, but often troubled artist who became an abusive
husband and used alcohol to wash the pain away, if only temporarily. Without
the love of his mother he struggled to know the proper way to parent and the
end result was a strained and eventually non-existent relationship with his
children, me being one of them. When I think about those who commit suicide, I
think of how the act of my grandmother affected my father. And then I think
about how it would affect my son and how I would never wish my father’s life on
someone so precious and so dear. As the granddaughter she never knew – one of
only two grandchildren she would have had – I also think about what it would
have been like to know her. I look like her, which I’m sure made the pain even
greater for my father. Did he resent me because I reminded him of her? Did that
strain our relationship even more because he hated that she left him behind to
suffer, motherless and guideless? Those are answers I will never know in the
same way that she doesn’t know the pain that she caused on the day that she
left this world, never to exist in mine.
Jovan Belcher. A gay Michigan teenager. The nurse who was
pranked by two radio DJs into giving out information about Kate Middleton. A
bullied ten-year-old girl in North Carolina. These are people who killed
themselves just this week. Left behind are infant daughters, loving parents,
co-workers, friends and lovers, all of whom I could only imagine screamed a
scream similar to that of a middle-aged African-American woman waiting to have
her brakes fixed somewhere in Georgia, only a mere hour or so ago.
To those right now thinking about giving up, know this: You
cannot successfully live for yourself without simultaneously living for others.
You are not just giving up, you are giving up on them. Be selfless. Be strong.
And above all, show the ultimate sign of love for those around you by staying.
It genuinely will get better.
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