I remember the way you looked

I remember the way you looked. Not just your different haircuts or your smile; I remember the jackets you wore and the way your hands felt. Your hands, despite playing your keyboards for years, barely had any muscle. They were mostly bone with those translucent veins running atop and in between. You wore those supportive devices for your wrists as you grew older.

I remember the things that I didn’t like, though they were few and far between. When you hugged me and pressed your face against mine, it left a slightly oily sheen on my cheek. When you kissed me, I didn’t like the moisture it left behind. I don’t know what I wouldn’t give now just to be able to experience those sensations again. 

More often than not, I think about the ways in which I failed you. I am not the child of God you wanted me to be. I am horribly flawed, I engage in sinful behavior because I enjoy it. I am not doing well. I have engaged in self-mutilation. I hate being alive often. You generously gave me gift after gift and now I am squandering all of it. 

However, none of that guilt and shame compares to how much I miss you. I don’t know if you even knew how much you meant to me. I took you for granted for so many years and I long for any chance to go back and fix that and tell you how much I loved you. I have no idea if you’re watching over me or simply another body buried in layers of earth. I just want you to know that I miss you. I miss your smile and your love. It nearly killed me to see you in that hospital bed, crying while trying to squirm with the only half of your body that worked. I wanted you to tell me that you knew I was there. But I will never know if you knew. 

That last day I saw you, sitting in that wheelchair and staring into the void, I wanted to be able to be there for you. I wanted to be able to do more. I wanted to fix you; I wanted to take away all that pain and all of your hurt. I know you wanted your life back, but you also understood that it was over. I knew that once you had had that realization that you wanted to die. Recognizing all these emotions in your expressionless face haunted me for years, especially during all of the times when I wished to take my own life. Every time I dreamed of death and wished to end it all, I saw you. I remembered being in the presence of your shrinking body, watching you go through all that suffering, and feeling like an absolutely selfish, cowardly, ungrateful piece of shit for wanting my own life to come to an end.

It is nearly four years later now, and it still hurts. It has taken almost four years and extensive treatment, therapy, and deep processing to even broach the idea of forgiving myself. I recognize now that I am a flawed being but that doesn’t necessarily make me a bad person, despite how much my brain loves to tell me that. I want to be able to forgive myself, but starting that process is so hard. It terrifies me. Because I know it means digging up all of the past memories that I’ve tried to bury and shield myself from for all these years. I am afraid to relive all of that pain, and if it becomes unbearable, I am afraid of what will happen to me. I don’t want to die, but when I am trapped in an episode, the idea just seems too alluring, too inviting. It feels like a solution. But right now, in my temperate brain, my own logic tells me that this is an elaborate lie that my mental illness has been perpetuating for years. 

My mental illness whispers all sorts of untruths to me every day. Now that I’ve been through years of therapy, I can do some tricks to logic my way through a situation. The ultimate skill that I have yet to master, though, is to actually believe it when I tell myself that these are lies. John Mulaney once said something along the lines of “middle schoolers will make fun of you but in an accurate way.” I believe the same is true of my disorder. It knows the inner workings of my mind. It knows every dark corner, every back alley; even when you try to lock things away, it will come for that information like a thief in the night. Then it turns and uses all that information against you. Every ugly secret, every memory you wish not to acknowledge is all laid bare. It tells you the lies that are so utterly convincing, and it repeats it over and over and over until you truly take hold of those poisonous ideas. I have let these lies build up for years and now they are the entire framework of how I view myself. It has utterly annihilated any chance for developing a healthy self-esteem, and it desaturates my memories. Looking back, I can only think of the things I wish to forget, the things I would change, and how absolutely pathetic the experience (and reliving it) makes me feel.

So now, whenever I think of you, my disease reminds me of how little I did, how I didn’t show you enough love, that I didn’t really care about you, that I left you alone in that wheelchair while you were waiting to die. In moments of clarity, I force myself to remember the truth: that I did love you, I did try to help you by holding your hand and quietly singing “You Are My Sunshine” into your ear, just like you did for me when I was a little girl. I tried my best to help Grandpa by moving him out of your house and into the care of people who were equipped to support him. I started knitting and sewing and crocheting again, just like you taught me (with the help of many YouTube tutorials), in an attempt to emulate the creativity you so embodied. And although I doubt I will ever reach your level of expertise, it pushes me outside of my comfort zone as a maker. Most importantly, it reminds me of you, and I like to imagine that anytime I finish a project, you are next to me, holding my hand, looking at my work and joyously proclaiming, “Oh, that’s wonderful!” I still remember the way you said “Oh!” when celebrating something or embracing me after being apart for a long stretch of time. 

I don’t know if we’ll meet again, but if the universe has one last blessing for me, I would hope that it would allow me to never forget those precious little details about you. Even if I must lose all cognition someday, I just want one thing I can hold on to… a giggle, the way you gently clicked your stitch marker, or the way you always seemed to beat us at 13. 

I miss you.

I love you.

Thank you for everything you have ever done for me.

Thank you for creating a daughter who would go on to nurture and love me.

Thank you for accepting and doting on my beloved father, one of the gentlest souls I know, who looked after your husband as much as he could. 

Thank you for being a woman ahead of your time, for earning your PhD from our alma mater, for daring to fly planes, for being a lifelong teacher, and for passing the gift of music on to me. 

Thank you for showing me what it means to be a good person. You were virtuous to a fault, had a strong will and mind, a kindness that knew no bounds, and a love that existed deep in your core and at the very essence of your being.

Rest in peace to the one so dear to my heart. 

I lift all the prayers, wishes, and hopes to the universe that you are happy and at ease. 

I will hold on to your memory always.