On Turning 36, the Age My Mom Was When She Killed Herself
By: Bernadette Roca
Tags: Mental Health, Freedom, Life Lessons, Suicide, Parents

Still, what most occupies my mind is not really my newly attained freedom. Instead, my mind is pulled, again and again, to my mom. I come back to her precisely at this moment because it is so difficult to begin to comprehend the gravity, to unravel the implications of this one inescapable, near-implausible fact: that at the exact same age that I finally succeeded in discovering and embracing my own power of choice, my mom felt so trapped, so suffocated by her own life that the only choice she could see was death.

I think about my mom at 36. I try to picture her in my mind. I try to imagine what she was feeling, the thoughts going through her head. I try to imagine the cumulative effect of falling for a man who, unbeknownst to you, already had a family in another country; of bearing his children, giving birth to these constant reminders of love and treachery and humiliation; of being haunted and stalked by this man even after you’ve moved halfway around the world to Canada. I think about what it must have felt like, to be made to bear the heavy weight of shame and guilt that came with our family and our culture. What it would be like to have two young girls, 11 and 12. To watch them grow each year and wonder, When is it ok for me to leave them?

I think about my 11-year-old self after my mom died. 11-year-old me, suddenly stranded and alone. Helpless and hurting and afraid. Blaming herself, wondering if it was her fault. I think about that little girl, crying in the shower, incapable of comprehending the enormity and depth of what had just happened to her, the imprint it would leave on every moment to come. How that one event would come to define the texture of her entire life. I’d had my first taste of death just weeks before, when my mom’s only brother finally succumbed to leukemia. And here we were at the graveyard so soon, the mound of dirt barely dry as we laid my mom next to him.

I think about my sister, having already outlived our mom by a year, alone in her own pain, lost in her own cloudy panic. Still hurting and afraid, struggling to make it through the days. I watch her from afar and it hurts my heart. My sister, my other half, the only other person who will ever understand what it was like — two little kids trapped in a pressure cooker with no way out.

And I think about me, now. Me on the brink of 36. Having achieved all the freedom I ever desired and yet still carrying this weight, carrying this love. The only thing worth carrying. Carrying in my heart all of us: my mom, my sister, my young self. Not because I have to but because — despite the freedom, despite the liberation — I choose to. I can choose anything now and I choose this, to hold in my heart all of us.

I think about these images and I can’t pull them apart; I don’t know where one starts and the other stops. Like sheets of semi-transparent resin laid one on top of the other, each holding different cross-sections of an organism’s development. I see these layers and I know they’re distinct, but seen from the top, their outlines are almost impossible to distinguish. I am me today, I am me at 11, I am my mom at 36.

Thinking about all this, I can’t help but feel profoundly sad. Sad for my mom. Sad for my sister. Sad for my young self. Sad for me, now, the only survivor who made it out intact. The only one able to write these words.