Life Sucks. And Then You Die.
By: Laurenne Sala
Tags: Dads, Mental Health, Survival, Suicide, Mwc Death

A suicide survivor’s quest to break the cycle.

The author with her father circa 1983.

I could still feel the burning pavement through my flip flops while we stood in line at Baskin Robins for a mint chocolate scoop on a sugar cone. I had been dreaming about biting the gooey end of that sugar cone all day as I practiced underwater somersaults at the public pool. My mom and I found a bench outside between other groups of families and high schoolers. I licked a drip and it was heaven. But when I went in for another, I got too excited and the whole scoop flew directly to the ground, landing with a soft thud and sending a splatter over my sandal. I froze and tried not to cry. I looked at my mom, lip quivering.

She motioned to the long line and offered me some of her butter pecan instead. When I hung my head, she said something that she would continue to say for the rest of my life, something she must have found comforting.

“Life sucks, and then you die.”

Mine was the kind of mom who hated hugs, so this tracked.

As an 8-yr-old standing over my ruined mint chip, I didn’t quite understand but found myself repeating it on the car ride home.

Does life suck? Then you die? I didn’t want it to be true. I wanted to believe that life could be fun. Or magical. Or anything but… sucky?

I thought about my mother, abandoned by her husband for another man and stripped of her housewife status with one late-night confession. Forced to raise me alone with little help and a job she didn’t want. Yeah, I guess her life seemed to lose its luster. And my father, in his own snazzy condo on Lake Shore Drive in Chicago, starting his new life as a gay man in the big city. Ready to party but still having to battle with his family, society, and his own depression. Dammit. His life looked pretty bleak as well.

Could I be spared?

Or was I destined for tragedy by my parents’ sucky lives?

My dad’s life seemed to be doomed from the beginning. Born into a family of artists who put image above all else, his mom expected him to always look and act his best — and she beat him when he didn’t. She smothered his self-esteem with insults and even worse… made him go to Catholic school, which pushed his sexuality even deeper.

Then, she left. I didn’t know the details until I found my father’s yearbook much later. His mom had written something like “I hope to read about you one day in the newspaper. Buh Bye.” This is slightly worse than “Have a kickass summer.” Then she was gone. Off to become a famous actress. From the many internet searches I’ve done to find her, I’m guessing her calling never took off.

Intent on hiding his secret, my dad married twice and had one really adorable baby, me. He lived as his authentic self only within his fantasies, which has to be pretty lonely. He learned along the way that he couldn’t count on his family. And when you can’t count on your family, you can’t tell your truth. You’re in your head a lot. You learn to solve things yourself. You close inward. You pull your baggage along with you because you can’t put it down. Nobody is there to help you carry it anyway.

Pile that on top of a brain that doesn’t run on normal. It’s a manic depressive brain with jubilant highs and devastating lows. During the highs, I’d get gifts wrapped in beautiful packaging. My dad loved to wrap a present. (And nobody knew he was gay?) We would zoom down Lake Shore Drive blasting Madonna in his new fancy car. He loved me during those times. He was on top of the world.

During the lows, he’d disappear. There’d be calls where my mom would plead with him to get it together. He’d accuse her of working for the government. Of spying on him and telling the IRS. Instead of a gold bow on a meticulously wrapped gift, I’d get a printout of Diana, the talking Cabbage Patch he was planning on buying me but never would. He was too preoccupied with his mental illness to love me the way I needed him to during those times.

Maybe my grandma, who I never met, did read about my dad in the newspaper one day. I wrote his obituary when I was sixteen and he had made it three months past his 48th birthday.

A few years later, my mom, the natural nurturer, asked me: You’re still not over him?

And, no. I am not over him. Nope! I am writing this because I am extremely not over him. I find myself imagining his last breath while waiting in the supermarket line. He’s my dad. It’s been 25 years. I still miss him. And love him. Why is it so easy to love people who are dead?

I’ve written a lot about my dad, but this piece is about me, the grown-up with a broken heart still not over my dad’s suicide.

This is not about how he fell into a super low and his friends and family were just a bit too tired to help him out this time. How he was struggling financially and didn’t see a way to pay the rent. Or the bills. Or how to scrounge up more than enough for a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red. When he died, he had $700 left to his name. I can imagine that was daunting. How do you keep on living knowing you might be evicted and you’re constantly disappointing your daughter and her mom with an empty wallet instead of child support.

This is not about how he had watched his best friends die during the AIDS crisis in the 90’s. Worst time to finally come out, if you ask me. My mom was right. At least in his case, life sucked… and then he died. Especially since it was his plan. My dad carefully scheduled it out. He wrote a note, he wrote out instructions. He taped it on his door so people entering knew what they’d find. And then, three days later, when his downstairs neighbor threw out his Korean leftovers and still smelled something unusual, he went upstairs to find my dad.

That’s when I got a call. He was gone.

No matter how much I wished he’d just faked his death and escaped to Canada, he had become a bag of decomposed parts and then a heavy box of bone-colored ash and then a breeze in the Castro because I sprinkled him in all the plants so his community could breathe him in forever and ever. No matter how many times I thought I saw him on a passing train or in the back of a bodega, it wasn’t him. He was gone.

Gone. Gone.

And, no, I’m not over him.

What happens when you’re sixteen and an only child and your dad decides to leave for good? You wonder if he suffered. You imagine that night over and over in your head. You play back the last phone call. What if I called him back like I said I would? What if I hadn’t visited and told him what my mom had said: that his friends wouldn’t help him this time. What if I had noticed how his teeth were browning and his apartment was a mess and he was surely stuck in his lowest of lows? What if I had been older? What if I had been better? What if I had known the perfect thing to say? What if I could have shaken my mom awake to help him this time.

But guess what? She didn’t care as much as I did. Nobody did. They’d all taken turns to coax my dad away from the edge so many times that they decided to step back, one by one. Maybe he really was alone. I was there, but he didn’t see me. He didn’t think of me before he left. He didn’t think I’d need him to walk me down the aisle. He didn’t care that he had a daughter, which is baffling to me now that I have daughters. I would do anything in my power to live until 150 just to see who they become.

But my brain isn’t full of disease. It did learn something from my dad though: that I’m alone. That life does suck and then you die.

As an only child, when your dad dies and his friends are more relieved than sad, you mourn alone. You sit there at the memorial service and look at all the people who’ve come and wonder how they could just sit there smiling over your dad’s favorite cinnamon buns and scratch at their black dresses and leave after tea to go back to their lives. How could they when all I could do was imagine his face as he took his last breath and was he in so much pain and was he drunk and did he regret it at the last second and think… no wait… i DO want to be there to see my daughter grow up … but it was too late.

I am so sad for Kate Spade’s daughter because one day she will see all the reports and read about her mom dying by the hand of a red scarf and she will never be able to see a red scarf again without thinking about how badly her mom wanted to die. Just like I can’t even look at a plastic bag without thinking how powerful it is. And wondering what it’s like to feel the air disappear little by little until it’s all gone. I’ve done the research. I’ve read it only takes a minute but that must be the longest minute and what if he wanted to change his mind but the handcuffs were on and this was it and he did this.

So, no, I’m not over it. Do you know how hard it is to shop for produce? There are plastic bags everywhere.

And Anthony Bourdain’s daughter. If she’s like me — which she is because STARS THEY’RE JUST LIKE US! — she’ll also read the news, Google everything she can about her dad, watch his every show, read his every book, beg his friends for stories, smell his leather jacket every year to make sure it still smells like his cigarette brand, still put her feet in his big slippers and feel how huge he used to be and imagine just for a minute that he might come out of the bathroom and say, “Ha! your feet are still so small compared to mine,” or some totally boring yet alive thing that will make her feel like a normal person with an alive dad.

And all of us will continue to question, no matter how much we’ve healed, the events of the day and how we could have done things differently and maybe if we hadn’t seemed so mature that last time we saw them maybe just maybe they would have wanted to stay behind to be our parents just a little bit longer. Because we needed them. And we still need them. 25 years later.

The thing is, when you’re an only child like me and the daughters of those famous people, nobody else in the whole wide world had YOUR relationship with your parent, so it was me. All alone. Me the one who savored his hugs and wanted to soak him up like he soaked up the yolk of an egg with toast, his favorite meal. And me who stayed in my room at night hoping he’d somehow come back and wishing he’d made a reversible mistake. Just me. And it’s still just me every August 6th when his death date comes around that I celebrate him quietly. Alone. With a glass of Johnnie Walker on the rocks.

So yeah, I’m alone. I mourn alone. And I could fall down the same path if I let myself.

But I’m different than my father because I reached a turning point where I didn’t want to have a life that sucked until I died. Even though my dad left me, just like his mom left him, something in me refuses to continue the cycle. So I asked for help. I’ve done every kind of therapy to chip away at this unwieldy lack of self esteem and guilt. I’ve been hypnotized, I’ve practiced spiritual psychology, yoga, chanting, Vipassana meditation, workshop after workshop, detoxes, sojourns, sweat lodges, 12 steps. I even took an improv class.

My friends laugh at me, but you know what? I’m not suicidal. At all. I’m having a lot of fun. My dad killed himself when I was 16 and my mom didn’t even hug me when she told me the news. I should be totally fucked. I’m supposed to be a murderer or a sociopath or someone who still writes checks at the supermarket.

But I’m somehow a mostly sane person who’s clawing out a place in this life and doing anything to make sure it’s fun. I’m alive. And I have a lot of friends who love me and make me feel less alone by the day. I have a relationship with god. I love my daughters so hard that it aches. So, I’m lucky. Maybe it’s because my dad didn’t beat me. Maybe he did me a favor. And maybe he’s done the world a favor because you are reading this and maybe just maybe if you’re thinking about taking your own life, you might say: Wait! Suicide won’t actually take away my pain. Instead it will distribute it to all my loved ones and they’ll carry my sadness in the form of big boulders of grief. For 25 years and beyond.

Maybe you’ll realize it’s not the answer you’re looking for. Maybe you’ll make the effort to have a life that doesn’t suck until you die. There are things like blueberries and pancakes and friends who play with your hair and babies’ butts and the beach. Those things don’t suck. So go out and live. I’ll see you there.