Jeremiah’s lived experience of suicide story

This is a story by Jeremiah (they/them). They have shared their lived experience of suicide, grief and bereavement through the loss of two close friends. If you feel like you need to stop reading at any time, there is a Quick Exit button on the top right of this page. 

The following is a letter written to my best friend and soulmate after her death. We spent 18 years laughing, crying, and going on pointless drives to Kmart at 2am together.

Dear friend,

It’s Mardi Gras and my birthday next week.

These used to be two of the most overwhelming dates in my calendar every year. Far be it from me to try and compete with a party that always felt like it was for gayer gays and theyer theys. Now, it also punctuates the midpoint between your birthday and your deathday.

Both Mardi Gras and my birthday are still overwhelming, though. It’s like that picture my therapist keeps referring me back to, which explains how grief doesn’t get smaller, but your life grows bigger around it. I suppose in this case my grief grew around the overwhelm, which grew over the depression, and now my life has to grow around the whole mess.

As those ominous dates get closer, I start to feel the pressure bearing down on me to do something and be celebratory, but then there’s that other thing my therapist told me which is that grief changes your address book. Sometimes, maybe often, the people you expect to rally around you in support simply don’t turn up. They don’t know how to. And people have just kept shedding from me like bits of scab sloughing from a healing wound, leaving me raw and exposed.

Our mutual comfort with wounds is something I took for granted. It feels difficult to find others who find solace in the mutability of flesh.

I wish you’d heard the joke I made at your wake. No one else laughed, but I think you would have cackled in your distinctive boomerang way. But you weren’t there, and you didn’t, and my aloneness in the world opened up in an endless crevasse beneath me.

After the wake, I went to our tree, smoked two cigarettes and wondered if I could find your DNA in the dirt there. As we drove back home, I stuck my head out the window and vomited in front of the peak hour traffic on Pennant Hills Road. I washed my vomit off the car door with a bottle of White Lady Funerals branded water.

And then a few weeks after that, my partner will find me all too much and break up with me, and then a few weeks after that, I’ll be in the ER where the emergency doctors can’t decide whether to admit me as a suicidal mental health patient or as a surgical patient for the giant armpit cyst that’s so puckered I can’t lift my arm.

A few weeks after that I’ll fall off my bike, and then a few weeks after that, my vision will go blurry, and my blood glucose will be so high I should have long been in a coma, and then a few weeks after that I’ll realise that I have the motivation and the means to end it all and I’m so pleased with myself and my nifty little secret.

And then there’s the day where I spend the whole day tensely lying in bed fighting myself to stay there and not get out. Lying in bed with depression is often characterised as this passive, languid, hopeless inertia. But that day I was fighting for my fucking life.

*

I feel closer to you now than before you died, because now I feel like I’m walking between the living and the dead. With you, for months, years, I carried around with me the dread feeling, just preparing myself as well as I could in case you had to leave. But I had no time at all to prepare when my other soulmate died one year after you did – just when I thought the universe was just starting to course-correct to a happily ever after. The last time I saw them, they gave me a key to their home which was blue and covered in psychedelic fauna and they made me promise that if I was going to leave, I would call them to say goodbye.

And then they left, without calling me to say goodbye. And I just keep carrying with me this key to a door I can never open.

So, I’ve started to wonder: is death stalking me? I think you’d find it funny that I watched a documentary about Anthony Bourdain not knowing he’d taken his own life. In the film, Bourdain’s friends all say he would often joke about death and ending it all. Without you to bear witness to my darkest humour, I’ve been getting some mixed reactions to my comedy. But I thought about Bourdain living his whole life making these jokes and going through several reincarnations of himself, being so widely beloved, in the end, tapping out too.

So, is it inevitable? Or is it just the case that some of us spend our lives with death snapping at our heels, and in the chase some of us trip, or get tired, and we want to exit the game? Maybe the special thing that I have is knowing that other people are running the same race.

I thought ‘trauma bonding’ only referred to the addictive bond that forms between abused and abuser, but now that I understand that shared experiences and bonding over shared trauma doesn’t have to be unhealthy. Slowly, slowly, I am finding the other walking wounded, and they have good advice on treatment and dressings and how to keep walking. It’s more of a zombie gang than a zombie horde, but maybe one day we will take over the world and normalise being undead.

*

I saw the most incredible moonrise this evening. It moved from crimson to vermillion and shifted through shades of citrus as it rose. And when it was high and bright, it shone a path over the ocean like a celestial flashlight, and I was eating a pineapple fritter dusted in cinnamon sugar and it seemed worth it to be alive in that moment. You wouldn’t believe how much time I spend in the ocean now; how comfortable I am in the face of an oncoming wave. All the fear I had when you held my hand and taught me whether to duck or crest the incoming surge – it’s gone now. I float like a happy jellybean and when a wave comes, I dive through, feel its current pass over me, and emerge triumphantly shaking the wetness from my eyes. I think of this as my inheritance.

*

I make it sound grand, but I find myself longing to live closer to the sea, because it feels like so often I need the holy water to wash away my sins. I need to be humbled by the expanse before I weep my own ocean. We used to face the void alone but together. Standing at the edge of the void feels so much more precarious now, knowing you aren’t there to pull me back.

So, I’ve been throwing things into the void, trying to fill it up in case I fall in. In a way, I guess that’s what I’ve been doing my whole life. Filling the void with seawater to float in; with clothes that I’ve sewed or knitted or crocheted; with earrings and little vessels I’ve made from clay; with moments of sweat and glee and anonymity in mosh pits; with words and words and words written down, and spoken, and spat out loud; with enough vulnerability to light up the edges of the void because maybe if I can understand it, it won’t feel so scary.

I don’t know if it’s working. Some days it feels like I’ve fallen down the wrong rabbit hole, and on others it feels like I can almost see a version of me that is mostly happy to be alive. The thing is, once my eyes start to adjust to the void, I start to notice there are others peering down from the edge. And they’re throwing things in too.

And suddenly it doesn’t feel so lonely or dark in the void. And when I start to feel the vertigo, someone grabs my hand, and then we dance around the void together, and laugh, and I can hear you laughing, too, in your boomerang way. I’m dancing around the void in past, present and future tense and I will keep dancing as long as this communal playlist keeps going.