Why Death is For Me | Part Three: "Enter Night"

AFTER THE FUNERAL, when it could no longer be avoided, I got on the train to go back home. For weeks I clung to my sisters and mother, knowing that once I left them, I would have to learn how to grieve alone.

I stepped off the train and took an immediate morbid turn. I traveled to the edges of the internet and learned too much. My grief required answers, and no matter how sick the information made me, I refused to look away. I wanted to stare my dad’s suicide in the face and know it so well that it couldn’t tear me apart any longer. If I could understand it, maybe I could tame it.

I carried on with my obsessive research about death and dying for months. I was relentless. There was no question I didn’t ask, and I would not be stopped—not with most of the answers at my fingertips, powered by Google.

What kind of people die by suicide? All kinds, and in most cases, the least suspected.

How long does it take to mourn loss from suicide? Probably forever.

What happens to the body after you die? You might not want to know all that, but you probably should.

What is the embalming process like? You definitely don't want to know about that, but you should because you may not like it.

After traveling through the butthole of the internet, I still hadn’t come back with information of any real value. I read what felt like a million different articles telling me all about my father's physical death. Nearly every article I came across explained the scientific processes that would have occurred to literally take his breath away. I continuously banged myself in the head with the same information, looking for some sort of hidden clue in the pages. But it was all the same clinical shit.

As the carbon monoxide fumes filled the car, they made their way into his body, usurping the oxygen in his red blood cells. He eventually “fell asleep”, and likely died peacefully.

A “peaceful” suicide.

What I wanted to find wasn't 'Googleable'. It wasn’t even conjurable.

It was him I was searching for. I wanted him to tell me all the things my grief demanded to know about his death. It didn’t matter that everything I had read described it as a nearly painless event—that couldn’t be true. He had to have felt something while he sat there blinking with no witnesses.

No search engine could tell me what his face looked like once he sat in that car, or what he looked like after he couldn't take it back anymore. There were no carefully detailed suicide reports to be found in “The Great Book of Death” at the Library of Unknown Information. Even if the morgue had opened up his skull and given me his brain, there was no “cerebral kinetoscope” I could plop it in to view the memory negatives of his last day. And how fucked for me, because I was sure that that knowledge was the only cure to this nagging, blinding sorrow.

Was his last drive slow and controlled, or did he drive fast and frantically on his commute to death? Did his hands shake when he put that hose in the exhaust—or did he do it the same calm, collected way he did when he taught me how to put on my spare? Did he listen to music and roll back his chair while he breathed in and out? Or was it quiet in that car? Did he cry? Did he feel so incredibly alone in this world and unloved? Did anything, aside from the end drawing near, provide him comfort? Did he think of me?

I decided I would make it all up if I couldn’t be told the truth.

I found myself inside that car with him, doused in misery. I could feel my heart being squeezed right out of my chest; my brain loathing its container. I channeled his state of mind and felt his self-hate turn into my own self-hate. I let myself become the walking existence of the sadness I believed his last moments held. I felt the solitude and held it closely, purposefully. I let his death completely take me over. I hosted his ghost in my presence throughout the day, and at night in my dreams.

I had done it—I had managed to achieve the closeness to my father’s suicide I had wished for. This all-encompassing grief was morbid and determined, and I almost liked it.

Holding onto that sadness meant that I got to hold onto him just a little bit longer. I could finally empathize with this man I had shunned from my life years ago—the man I had purposely chosen to cast out while he was still skin and bones. I could justify his sadness by blaming myself for not being a better daughter—for not knowing what caused him to be the way he was. I dialed up the sadness by digging through his past and learning, yet again, too much. I found something I couldn't have for him when he was alive: compassion. Compassion for the child he once was, and the man he always wanted to be.

This was a momentary fix—until it turned on me.

“Exit light, enter night.”

END OF PART THREE.