Seven years ago, my brother died by suicide. It was January 11th, the day before his 21st birthday. We found his body on the 13th. These three days are a midwinter Easter in my life, with no resurrection.
My last post, surrounding my mother’s suicide anniversary, revealed the great hurt that still exists within the cavity of my ribs, even three years later. A radiating depression ripples out from any death by suicide—not just my brother’s, not just my mom’s. Survivors are plagued with guilt, doubt, grief, and sometimes, if caring for the person has been long and arduous, a mixed sense of relief that tows along heavier guilt with it.
A few of you wrote to me after the last post, worried about my well-being. I don’t mean to worry anyone, but I will never feign being okay when grief surfaces. I respect myself too much to deceive myself, and I respect my readers too much to lie.
I’ve written elsewhere about suicide being a means for a person to shatter themselves. Shards splinter out and pierce everyone who’s loved them. I experience pain. I experience lethargy, apathy, and hopelessness in the wake of losing half my nuclear family to suicide. But please remember: any amount of suffering I describe is just a shard, a sliver, compared to the suffering my brother and mother were living in.
So I hold my pieces of shrapnel in gratitude. They are my tools for greater understanding, more expansive empathy, and deeper forgiveness for my family and the world. For anyone in such deep hurt, I now can resonate and be present with their pain. I am better equipped now to accompany suffering (my own or anyone else’s) without avoidance or judgment.
For Quentin’s anniversary, I’m sharing with you a poem that my mother wrote for him in her grief. It’s lengthy; she often wrote many poems in a single poem. But it encompasses the love of a mother who lost her perfect and imperfect child.
QUENTIN POEM
By Bennett Bridgers
(People carrying your long body because you couldn’t walk anymore.)
(And nothing was blooming.)
(It happened without music.)
1
Inside me there is a chair
nobody is allowed to sit in but you.
You are laughing at something funny.
Laughing at John Lithgow as an insane/sane alien.
Pain kept collecting in you (around you?) until you couldn’t shut off nor contain it.
2
When the car with the sailboat on the trailer nearly rolled over you
and you were five, secretly we said, “We got through that, didn’t we?”
When those two horses appeared suddenly on a Georgia highway at dusk,
galloping hard, their sweat long-broken having already survived 3 lanes of traffic going the opposite way, straight into and nearly over our speeding van and we just walked away
(easy since the roof had been pulled apart from the rest of the Sienna, a lifted-up rectangle partially attached like a sardine lid, by the hooves and gutted belly of the white one, the one who by his leaping saved you) who next had to stand there in the grass, knees locked frozen in shock, bloody and stupefied on the median for the longest time, an eternity it may have felt like, until the proper authorities arrived to shoot him. (The guy from the sheriff’s office was not allowed to draw his weapon, so that man had to just stand there too, looking. The required bullet eventually came by. way of the Highway Patrol. I did not hear that gun go off.)
We said it out loud that time. I mean we said it later; after the larger pieces of broken glass had been plucked out, after the ER doctor advised us to wear flip-flops when we got home and showered because the shards (that looked like dew sparks in our hair and in the crevices of our still-alive skin) would inevitably fall to the shower floor and cut into the soles of our feet.
We arrived home in my mother’s car. My mother, who drove to Georgia and collected us, bringing along her stroke-afflicted sister and my father. My father, who road that night in the passenger seat, his dementia already bad enough that unfamiliar roads at night made him feel confused and anxious, though he didn’t like to admit this. We said it: “We got through that, didn’t we?”
We were standing in the dim light of the kitchen. The babysitter had brought us unpasteurized milk from her mother’s friend’s farm. This was the first raw milk I ever tasted. It was complex and delicious. It was sweet and real. And I was standing there swallowing the milk feeling “in on” everything; like we had passed through an invisible, frightening doorway; like we had just been skipped over into another groove, alive somehow, feeling rescued.
I passed the jug to my husband. He took it to his mouth then passed it to you. Next I delved my finger into a pot of local honey.
“Here, this,” I felt myself say. “Now taste this”
and the world of a thousand flowers entered into us.
3
There are nights of milk and honey.
Nights you think about for a long time afterward.
4
I had had a dream the week before.
I had shared it with your stepdad;
I had worked it with my therapist.
Near the end of the big elaborate epic dream—
a dream which started in an airport and then wound up going everywhere—
near the end of it, when the apocalypse came, you were walking, holding your toddler brother
in your arms.
You two alone, without the rest of us, survived
(along, I surmise, with some sad girls you must have met up with later).
You populated a new world.
There were flowers, fruit trees, handmade bowls.
There was an outdoor theater for ceremonies
with stone benches arranged in a semi-circle.
Nearby there were carved-out boats on shining water
with sails attached.
Many of the people you peopled
got names from plays I’d starred in:
Jane, Nancy, Emily, Kate.
Fagin, Petruchio, George.
The hymns of the future were mostly
Rasta, The Grateful Dead and music
from “Oliver!” mixed together seamlessly.
The people in that world looked like one another
to a great extent. They looked like you
and your half-brother. Magnificent heads
strong limber bodies tall, the color of light sand,
pale eyes.
5
In the dream I had, you were
the unbreakable membrane
for saving the world.
6
Then you died
and the forest you were in
kept right on inhaling and exhaling.
Even in the brittle, bright winter it was.
What I feared finally happened.
When I cried, no one seemed to need me to stop.
Which is just the deep kind of tenderness that
makes it possible to stop. To lift my head.
To take a walk. To maybe try some soup.
To some days, sometimes stop sobbing.
7
At times the world does, to me, seem over. Until it begins
again, laughing at Louis CK on the computer screen,
dancing with my husband in the living room at night,
frying eggs sunny side up, runny the way I like them,
finding myself in yet another new room of time to wander around within,
still with all these enduring winter trees inside me.
You did not feel, like most of us, deprived of a certainty; deprived of a certain future.
Treatment center after treatment center seemed horrifically certain for you. Plus, you had no money. We didn’t feel safe giving you any—not even your own. After being rude to your dad in the Home Depot one day, the final straw occurring in the lumber section, you got kicked out of his house. He was trying to make his marriage work. There seemed insufficient room for who you were. You knew you couldn’t reside with me anytime soon, You had scared people in my small town with your strange dancing, biking on the wrong side of the road, whirling into traffic on purpose, cutting yourself with a knife in the bathroom, watching an elderly woman garden outside for a few minutes too long, standing still and gazing at your little brother int he elementary playground which, to the teachers there, seemed like lurking, showing up in a college class (a college where you were not enrolled) the image of a machine gun printed on your shirt (just a cover design from a talented band you liked) asking bizarre questions.
The police were always kind to you. I will say that.
8
You and I, we haven’t spoken for months now.
Though I have this suspended feeling that you still have something left to say.
I wish we’d gotten you that tattoo of Bernie Sanders you wanted etched upon your shoulder muscle—what your baby brother called “the Ninja Turtle muscle.” He also pointed out, more than once, “Even though you and daddy are older, Quentin is the strongest person in our house.”
9
Right now, there is a place in the ocean no fish swim through; no boat has cut; no diving bird.
Meanwhile, right now, a particular human, a person who is like no other and is also like all others, is having bamboo blades shoved into the bed of his fingernails and then his hands are held in a pail of water. There are blisters all over his body. Sometimes, for long times, he is left alone, though maybe he is never alone with pain like that. With pain like that maybe there is no solitude.
Maybe I worry too much, but many things seem worse to me than death, my love.
For you I prefer an empty mile of silent sea—so long as it doesn’t hurt you.
10
What did we ever argue about, you and I?
Nothing we love will be saved by force.
We knew this, so we rarely argued.
Now your voice is in another world.
There seems to be one endless bridge after another.
The tongue in your own mouth all ash now;
no nerves to feel or not feel.
11
When you were ten you used to visit a dogwood tree that grew beside the drive
while the diesel station wagon idled, your sister and I inside it, your books and crumpled paper in a yellow backpack on the backseat floorboard, all waiting for you. And you would just hug that tree for the longest time.
Maybe there is another story that runs beside this one like the brook beside our house (the house I sold this week). You know the stream I mean? Across the little street in the forest of laurel where your fort was, where you had your first kiss and where later, without you, we buried the cat.
At this moment, maybe there is rain on your dogwood blessing its release from the ivy we continuously severed from its trunk and branches.
Or maybe the sun is shining upon it and through it, listening.
(It’s the same either way.)
(I’m not sure because I don’t live there anymore.)
12
A few weeks before you died, we stood in the kitchen of your father’s house, you nearly a foot taller than me smelling of cigarettes. When I held you, you held me. Like always. You cried a long time. Your sobs were like hard laughter. Large and swollen. I could feel them rise and expel themselves around your hammering heart, into your big hands which were gripping me and trembling, your back shook—minor earthquakes arriving one after the other. When we broke apart standing there, looking into one another I said something like: “Quentin, this will get better. We’ll try something new. And just think: soon you’ll have your own place. Arlington is a great place for you right now. You’ll fall in love. You’ll buy your own groceries. You’ll find good work somewhere. I already asked social services to connect you only with assistants who are immigrants from Africa. Maybe you will wind up with an African girlfriend? Maybe you will get to move back there? We’ll try and fix your medicine tomorrow. These things take time though.”
13
But of course, this is all that really happened,
All that ever happens,
All that counts:
You looked into me and I looked into you
(& we were the same one looking).
I hope you saw me see you then, a friend (that most holy form of love)
and a mystery (what we see when we see without projection or pride).
I loved you so you broke me open into blossom then.
You are still doing this, my friend.
Window light was surrounding you, your wet eyes glistening, sun shined in your hair
surrounding your perfect head.
14
Later that same month the whole world shifted on its already tilted axis,
the way you used to cock your head to the side before saying something funny;
then it stopped and stayed
in that position;
stars resting now
but changed;
a final music chord
I don’t get to hear.
Occasionally it starts to seem to me, still here without you, like everything that happened had to.
15
Remember the time you and Jackson caught those fish and you knew from nature-based therapy schools exactly what to do, how to kill it and clean it (outside on the deck with Nina’s big glistening knife)? You cooked it in a pan with oil and butter. You fed us.
“Come and have breakfast” you might have been saying.
O Vanessa. Salvaging from the wreck. How large she was, how encompassing & there's that huge open capacity in you as well.
This is beautiful and devastating. I am so sorry for this immense loss. Quentin was my best friend as very small children in Nigeria. I think of him and our childhood memories often over the years since his and Bennett’s passing, as I did today when I was once again searching for somewhere tangible to put this grief. What a gift this piece was. Reading about him through your mother’s poetry was difficult but I am so thankful I did. Your writing is a light. Thank you.