Understanding Love

  I pulled into my driveway and her car was there. For that split second of twilight, between hope and stark reality, I let out my breath; knowing she was home and it had all been a cruel dream.

  My mother once said she was willing to give up having her most wonderful dreams come true in order for the terrible ones not to come to fruition.

  Would I trade this pain to have never experienced one moment with my daughter? Never. If someone said it could have been me to go and not her, would I trade? In a heartbeat. Anything to spare her brothers’ from this unspeakable pain. My loss to them would be sad but would fit more in the natural course of life. My passing would not be as unbearable as the loss of their sister in such a devastating way.

  Her younger brother said he would have to live with her loss the longest. Her older brother felt the joy in life was now out of his reach. How could I argue any of that at this time? What hope was there to soften this blow? Every thing else in our lives, no matter how difficult, had been what we knew to be surmountable, but not this. I had nothing to give, just words that felt so hollow.

  She considered it for many years, but we all thought it was a cry for help and tried to offer her that. Hospital stays, treatments, counselors and still the memories of that brutal attack on a naive seventeen-year-old girl persisted to haunt her waking and sleeping moments. “I wish I could be one of those made-for-television movie women who turn it around and save the world, but I just can’t”, she’d cry when she knew that was what others thought she would do.

  She seemed happy toward the end and everyone thought she was doing better. She was doing better, for us. But underneath that beautiful gapped-tooth smile and sarcastic, sardonic humor we all loved, lived a broken young women.

  The saddest words I ever heard were when I said “A penny for your thoughts?” and she didn’t add her usual, “Inflation, Mama!” but simply spoke volumes as she whispered, “It used to be so easy to be me.”

  When she decided leaving this earth was the answer she needed, she took time to explain it to each of us in handwritten letters.

  We sat together to read her last words, right out in the hot summer sun in front of the coroner’s office on a busy street downtown, a place no mother or brother should ever have to visit.

  We opened the envelopes addressed to each of us.

  In my letter, she explained why this world had no more to offer her. She was sorry to cause us such pain and that I, of all people, knew how much she was hurting, but that I didn’t know what she saw when she closed her eyes at night and what was waiting there when she awoke every day.  She asked to have her ashes spread near her favorite lake in the mountains when the leaves changed color in the fall. A poem by Longfellow was included in the envelope that she wished to have read aloud. When I read her carefully chosen words, I suddenly knew what courage it had taken to do what she had done. Many would say suicide is an act of selfishness, a cowardly way out of a temporary problem. I may have thought so until it happened to my only daughter. She put it in words that no mother should have to hear, but she did so bravely, and with what I knew at that moment to be love.

  As we finished reading our own letters, no one spoke. There was only the sound of soft crying that seemed to drown out the city traffic noise. Without talking, we all just passed our letter to the one next to us, and silently read on.

  I opened her younger brother’s letter and the first line was “You were always my favorite.” Through the thick fog of grief so fresh, my first priority was now on shielding my boys from more pain, and I immediately thought, how will her older brother feel when he reads this? Her big brother, her protector, not her favorite? How could he not be crushed on top of being broken-hearted?

  It was when I read the next one, the letter to him, that I felt pure love rush through me with such intensity, I knew she had gotten it right while she was here, even for such a short time.

  She had carefully thought all of this through, and knew that her openness would help us deal with her loss. Alone and at her worst moment, she still thought of her family and the unique relationship she had with each of us. She wanted to leave us with this unconditional love. I should have had more faith in her. I almost smiled through my tears as I read her first line to him “You were always my hero.”