One more thing before I shuffle off the planet.-Placebo
I wrapped myself in a blanket of denial,
a costume, a suit of armor,
but armor rusts, corrodes,
breaks down.
Now here it lies,
a pile of sad, lonely metal at my feet,
leaving me unprotected,
no shield, no denial.
So I stand here, naked, before you,
and I am terrified.
I’ve gotten so good at acting, pretending that I am okay. I can actually say “my little sister killed herself” without even frowning. I’ve gotten so good, in fact, that I even fool myself. It is as though I am playing a character in a play that won’t end. There is only a stage, only the act, and I hate it but I am positive that I would just crumble without it. A necessity I loathe.
Writing this book is ruining my act. My face comes through the mask, breaking character, and I am afraid. I have felt this before, this childlike fear that takes over when I know that everything is going to hell and I can do nothing to control it. It has been so long since I cried over Jessie, and I feel guilty for that. I push her to the back of my head, far away from my tears. She is breaking free now, though, and I won’t stop her anymore, I will let her escape now through my tears, through my mouth, open in a scream that won’t come.
It’s so strange to think that this happened to me, a normal ordinary person. This sort of thing doesn’t happen to normal ordinary people. My little sister killed herself. Looking back on that day, it’s as though I am remembering a movie that I saw ages ago. The plot seems clear, but the finer points are blurry and the dialogue has completely escaped me. The only thing that comes through with crystal clarity is the worst part. When it all began, when my parents found her body, seems as though it just happened this morning. Should I be grateful that I remember? For years I wished for nothing but to forget, but now that the memories are slipping away, I feel like a traitor, a coward, and I am trying desperately to regain my hold on that slippery snake, knowing full well that it will swallow me whole in the end. That morning is a huge part of me. It shaped the person that I am today, whether I like that person or not.
I can hardly remember anything of my life before May 26th, 2004, when Jessie died. It is as though that life was replaced with this new twisted reality, the before and after could not coincide. Maybe that is why I always feel so lost. I am a four year old trapped in a 21-year-old’s body. I died along with Jessie that day and a new me was born. In the past four years, I have felt more lost and scared than I ever did when I was a child.
This isn’t right. I know that it’s not. I know that God, or someone, screwed up. I was the one that was supposed to die that day, not her. Her death doesn’t make any sense where mine would have. It was me, the rebellious teen with the black nail polish and the spiky jewelry, the dyed black hair and the angry rock music that people expected to go off the deep end. It was supposed to be me; it would have been me, if I had only had the guts to go through with it one of the hundreds of times that I thought about doing it. But when I failed to play the role correctly an understudy stepped in, and Jessie played the role so well that no one will ever forget it.
Since the morning that it happened, I have known that I was going to write about Jessie’s death. But I procrastinated for over four years. Sure I ranted angrily in my journal and wrote bits and pieces that I remembered from that day, but that was all. But suddenly I feel the need to get this done and out there. Out of my head. Out of my system. It’s taking up too much room.
A couple of months ago, a boy that I went to school with from middle school through high school was found dead on the side of the road with a gun in his hand. Suicide. It hit me so hard that I couldn’t breathe. I cried for days, which didn’t really make sense because he and I had only been acquaintances, not really friends. He knew my name and I knew his, but we never waved or said hello to each other when we passed in the halls at school, and after graduation we no longer existed to one another.
His suicide brought me right back to Jessie, and I knew that I had to write about it. He was a young guy with so much to live for. No one saw it coming. It was wrong. It hurt the most when I thought about his family because I knew how they must have felt and I never wanted anyone to ever have to feel the way that I did. I wanted to give them a hug and tell them that they could make it through this alive. I wanted to help but I didn’t know how. But maybe, if I write Jessie’s story, it’ll somehow help me, help others who are going through the same thing that I went through. People going through the horror of the suicide of a family member must feel as though it will never get better, but it will. I am still alive aren’t I? I survived to tell the tale.
As I write, tears often blur the words. But now my eyes are dry, almost as though the pain escapes through the telling of the story, leaving me at peace. I hope that whoever reads Jessie’s story will hear a sigh of relief. For four years I have kept these parts of my heart and mind locked up. But now they huddle behind the curtain, so used to being back stage that they don’t know what to do out here on center stage. And that is where the curtain rises, the lights go out, and the audience watches in awe at the loss of a young life and the complete unraveling of another.
Chapter 1
Wednesday: The police came and carried my childhood away in a body bag
It was Tuesday afternoon and I didn’t want to give Jessie a ride home from school. I had told her earlier in the day that I was going somewhere after school and she’d have to find her own way home. She asked a few people if they could but was turned down left and right. Then she missed the bus. I was pretty pissed, I hated carting her around, I was 16 years old, I was too cool for this crap, I had other things, important things, to attend to. I huffed out a frustrated breath and told her to get in the damn car.
We drove across town to the movie theater where I worked so that I could pick up my pay check and work schedule, I made her stand alone in the lobby and wait for me. Less than a month before this my mom had paid me to take her to a movie at the very same theater. She’d had to pay me to spend time with my sister. Just writing this, remembering the way I acted, makes me want to vomit, my heart aches and I hate myself. But I was a teenager, I was full of angst and emotion and superficial wants and needs. Jessie didn’t fit into my world, the world that revolved around me, she didn’t really have a spot, she was just there on the sidelines, a chore that I occasionally had to attend to. I will never regret anything more than I regret that. Ironic isn’t it? When before I had to be paid to spend a day with her, today I would give my life for just a minute.
When we arrived home Jessie went straight to her station at the computer on the porch and I decided to take a nap.I peaked my head into the porch, she had her back to me as she typed away, IMing someone or other and listening to music through the computer speaker. I told her to wake me up at 8:00. Didn’t ask. Told. She said fine, she’d do it, so I crawled into bed and didn’t wake until 8:30.
The coroner placed her time of death at 8:00.
I cleaned my room that night, I was up past midnight. That is when I am most pro-active. I picked all of my clothes up off the floor and hung them up, I threw trash where it belonged and even made my bed. By the end of my bout of productivity you could actually see my floor, the majority of it anyway, the room could actually be deemed pretty clean. I was proud. For some reason I had one of Jessie’s hoodies in my room, a blue velvety zip up number that I thought was pretty ugly. I opened my door and contemplated knocking on her door and giving it to her, but instead tossed it the short distance down the hall where it landed balled up in front of her bedroom door. If I had knocked, if I had gone in, could I have saved her? Days after she died I picked the hoodie up from the floor and buried my face in it, regretting. I wore it to her visitation.
The next morning, Wednesday, May 26th, I woke up, showered, and spent an eternity choosing what to wear. Today was senior confirmation, a huge event at school where the seniors pretty much passed the torch onto us juniors. I would be walking in front of the entire school. Choosing an outfit and a hairstyle, was agonizing. By the time I had chosen what to wear all of my work from the previous evening was in tatters, discarded clothes lay in heaps on my floor and bed. Oh well. I settled on a long flowing skirt and a button up white shirt. I spent a half an hour on my hair, trying to make it look like I’d just thrown it up and it happened to look great. No small feat.
Once I was happy with my ensemble and hair I walked past Jessie’s room. Her door was shut and no light seeped from under the door. I thought, she must have overslept again,, but I didn’t feel like doing anything about it, so I continued down the brown shag carpeted stairs. I first headed to the kitchen and popped a bagel into the toaster before heading to the bathroom to put the finishing touches on my hair. While curling a tendril with my mother’s curling iron, I called to her in her room to let her know that I hadn’t seen Jessie yet, and that she’d probably slept in again. So my mother exited her bedroom at the foot of the stairs and called up…
Once…
Twice…
“Jessie!”
“Jessie!”
“Jessie!”
But my sister didn’t call back down, so my mom went up and she knocked…
Once…
Twice…
“Jessie!” BANG. BANG. BANG.
“Jessie!” BANG.
My father appeared in the hallway and ascended the stairs hurriedly to join my mother in front of Jessie’s door at the top of the stairs. I was left standing in the dim hallway. I put my foot on the first step, then the second, my heart was pounding against my rib cage, I couldn’t breathe, and I didn’t know why. Why did I have this terrible feeling? My lungs were full of lead, my heart beat like a humming bird’s, my brain was channel surfing, playing different scenarios rapidly, trying to make sense of this. Why wasn’t she answering? Was something wrong with Jessie? And then I heard the sound of splintering wood as my father broke the door in and charged into my sister’s room.
“Where is she?” I heard my father’s frantic voice ask.
There was the briefest of pauses. Not even a heartbeat, a second, had passed as they scanned the room. And then the screaming began. So much screaming, filled with so much pain that it sounded as though my parents were being torn apart limb by limb. They called my sister’s name and asked God for help. My brain shut off, my mind and body went on autopilot as years of training went into action. I had leaped down the stairs, grabbed the nearest phone and dialed 911 before I even realized that I was moving. When my mother called down the stairs, ordered me to call 911, I was already rambling off my information to the operator. But then the operator asked me what the emergency was, and I couldn’t tell her. I didn’t know. All that I heard was the screaming, all I knew was that it was terrible. That it was Jessie.
A moment later my mother rushed down the stairs. She was breathing heavily and her face was starkly white. She put a hand on the back of the couch to support herself as she breathed the words that I have yet to truly believe. “Jessie hung herself in her closet,” she said. I didn’t even comment and just got back on the phone, repeating this information to the operator as my mother rushed back up the stairs. For a moment I began to think that this was all a joke, that my parents and Jessie were upstairs sitting together and laughing over the scam they’d pulled on me. Any second now they’d come marching down the stairs and I’d glare at them, maybe yell at them a little bit. This wasn’t funny.
I was broken out of my optimistic reverie when the operator began asking more questions that I, alone in my dim living room, shaking and confused, couldn’t possibly answer. My mind was spinning, trying to grasp the truth. But it was slithering around inside my head like a wet snake and everything, the whole thing, seemed impossible. So I concentrated on the woman on the other end of the line; she asked me if they had taken my sister down.
I wanted to vomit.
I shouted up the stairs but no one heard. “Did you take her down?” I was screaming and I could hear my own voice crack. What sort of surreal place was this, in which I would be forced to scream a question like that through my house, as though my sister were some sort of Christmas ornament left up past December. I told the dispatcher that no one was answering when someone knocked my sister’s phone off the hook upstairs and my parent’s voices flooded the line as the operator tried to communicate with another dispatcher.
“Jessie! God no! no!”
“Hello, this is emergency-”
“Why, God?! Why?!”
“1327 Howland, Kalamazoo-”
“My baby! My baby!”
The voices and the screaming mingled into a sort of chaotic symphony of pain and confusion. I couldn’t listen anymore, so I set the phone gently back in its cradle. Then I unlocked the front door, knowing that soon enough we would be having visitors. I led Max, our family dog, into my parents’ room and shut the bedroom door so he wouldn’t bark. I felt stupid in my flowing skirt and curly hair so I grabbed a pair of jeans from the basement and put them on instead. I felt sturdier, more like the soldier I knew I was going to have to play. I raked my fingers through my hair and grabbed my cell phone to call my cousin Sean, who lived down the street from our house. I had promised to give him a ride to school that morning. Looking back, it seems sort of odd that I was still thinking clearly enough to worry about mundane details such as these. I left a distraught message on their answering machine, then set my phone down and slid down the newly painted beige wall to the floor.
My father had just remodeled the house; the wooden floors gleamed; the walls were flawless. But at that moment, the house looked so…cold. This was no longer the house that I had grown up in. It was a movie set, fake. My parents were doing CPR upstairs as I pulled my knees tightly to my chest in the corner of the living room.
“Let her be okay. Save my little sister. Please. No.” I don’t know who I was praying to, to the sky, to God, to anyone who would take the time to listen, to save my little sister, to save me… no one listened. I sat on the floor and prayed until I heard the sirens.
It was beginning.
I escorted the first policeman into the house; he had light brown hair cut in a straight line across his forehead and a kind face. I tried pathetically to muster a smile out of habit as I showed him to the foot of the stairs. I didn’t follow. I didn’t want to see. So I walked back into the living room, then out the front door to the deck and watched as car after car pulled up to the curb. An ambulance and a fire truck were also on hand and I couldn’t help but think that the ambulance probably wouldn’t be needed. It was too late.
I wandered away from the front door, from the agony inside. I sat down in the center of the street a house or two down from the scene. I watched as the cars pulled up, parked, and unloaded. Waves of navy blue and sympathy poured out onto the asphalt and flowed purposefully through the front door with briefcases and clipboards in hand.
“What’s going on?” I hear from behind me.
Sean.
He was standing several yards behind me wearing his bright orange back pack and looking around blankly. He looked so young, like when we were eight and my sisters and his brother and sister used to play kickball in his backyard, or when we would play hide and go seek until midnight, using the entire street as our playing field.
He didn’t look like he was ready to hear what I knew I was about to tell him. I rose to my feet and gathered my courage. He was Jessie’s age; they were in the same grade at Loy Norrix and probably had some classes together. I took a deep breath. “Jessie died this morning.” Those words felt so insignificant. I should have said, “Our world ended this morning,” or “the worst thing that could ever happen, has.” But, keep it simple, I thought. I should probably rehearse it, like memorizing lines for a play. Just one line that I would be saying over and over and over again. Forever.
Sean’s eyes popped wide. “Seriously?” God, I wish I could’ve laughed, slapped him on the back and told him I was just joking. But instead I just nodded. His parents, my Uncle Tim and Aunt Cathy, walked up then. Sean broke the news to them, thank God for small favors. Aunt Cathy had the sense of mind to re-direct me from the middle of the street to the curb, where she sat beside me with her morning coffee.
“I know we haven’t kept in touch as much as we used to recently, but you need to know that we love you, and we will be here for you,” she said. I had never loved or appreciated my aunt and uncle more than I did in that very moment.
They sat like that with me until it was time to take Sean to school. I obviously wasn’t up to the task so my aunt and uncle headed off and I headed back to the middle of the street where I sat and watched the feet pass by without looking up to see who they were attached to, sort of like watching a movie on a broken TV set where the picture is cut off at the knees and you have to imagine what the people look like, like the mother in “Bobby’s World”. But I didn’t want to imagine and I didn’t want to see. The faces all blurred together anyway, all into one big well-meaning façade that did nothing for me or my family. Nothing could help us. They knew that, didn’t they? So why did they even bother?
I wandered back into the house a little later to find my parents huddled in a chair in the corner of our living room, surrounded by neighbors trying in vain, to comfort them. A cop approached with a note pad. He needed to ask some questions, so I headed him off and took over, knowing my parents weren’t up to it. I had gone into “hero” mode, a soldier ready for battle. I rattled off answers about my family, about Jessie.
“How old was your sister?”
Is, I wanted to say. Is! Present tense! But it’s not, she’s not, she’s past… past tense when just days, just hours ago, she was here with me.
“Fourteen” I said. I gave him her birthday, my birthday, my parent’s birthdays, our names and ages and occupations. I was playing soldier. And when the policeman said that was enough, the soldier went back to being a scared sixteen-year-old and retreated outside. I curled up on the front deck and watched the stream of bodies go by with uncertain eyes. No one knew what to do. Is that any surprise? I wished I could help them, I wished I could point them in the right direction, but how? How could I do that when I had ceased to even know which way was up?
I remember that then I looked up to the sky as I so often did, its constant changing movement grounded and calmed me. But not this time. Its beauty failed to reveal itself through my eyes gone blurry. I saw nothing. A steely sheet of nothing. Blank. Not a single cloud. Apparently the sky hadn’t figured out what to do yet, either.
I was sitting at the end of the driveway, staring numbly at passing cars and feet when my sister Amanda and her fiancé Dan pulled up and parked down the street. They had to park several houses down because of the ridiculous amount of police cars, unmarked vehicles, and the ambulance parked in front of our house. I stood slowly and on shaky legs walked towards my big sister. Halfway there, I broke down and ran at her full speed until we collided. Specifically until her chin collided with my head (I’ve always been short for a Renauld). I hugged her as tightly as I could, crying again with her soon joining in.
“What happened?” She asked.
“You don’t know?” I pulled away and looked up. I guess our father had only told her that one of her sisters had died. That’s all. Later she told me that she had thought it was me since I was the one who had just gotten her driver’s license. She had assumed that I had gotten into a car accident. She shook her head, and I cursed my father for laying this burden on me. “Jessie hung herself in her closet last night.” And we walked arm in arm to the house and met up with my parents in the kitchen where there was more crying, more pain.
Amanda hadn’t eaten breakfast yet and found a bagel in the toaster. I had put that in several hours before, meaning to eat it on the way to school. Amanda was sure she could salvage it and smothered it with peanut butter. A few bites into the cold, stale snack she gave up. A family friend made her some fresh toast instead.
My father coped by calling everyone he knew or had ever talked to before in his life to tell them the news. My mother, Amanda, and I kept yelling for someone to take away the damn cell phone but he just had to make sure that everyone knew what had happened to his little girl, and every phone call ended in more tears. I was afraid that those tears must have been what had been holding my father together all these years. He stood tall because of all the built up, unshed tears he held inside. The more tears that escaped, the smaller he got, the less like my father and the more like a sad old man. I couldn’t watch anymore.
I went outside to escape the chaos and was followed by an old family friend who just wanted to keep an eye on me Everyone was worried about me, hugging me and asking me the same question over and over again: “Is there anything I can do for you?” All I wanted to do was scream, “Yes! Jessie! I want Jessie back! Give me my little sister back! You can do that for me, and if you can’t, then fuck off.” Truly, what other answer is there, what else is there? Nothing. Because once you lose a piece of your self, life around you just seems to crumble and you find yourself trapped inescapably in the rubble, digging and clawing frantically for air because you can’t breathe; your lungs are bursting. But then you realize, it’s not your lungs. It’s your heart.
I walked barefoot across the dew damp grass over to the garden and picked a daisy from the bed. Then I sat on the deck and twirled the flower around in my hands, thinking about Jessie, trying to block out reality. But soon enough my father came out the back door and fell on top of me. He sobbed into my lap and cried for me never to leave him, never to go, and I pet his head and told him that I wouldn’t and that everything would be alright. Everything would be fine.
My grandmother walked around to the side of the house, and I jumped at the opportunity to distract him, to sic him on someone else and leave me alone. I told my father that he should help her into the house and get her to my mother. He slowly rose and went back inside. I exhaled.
“That was a good thing you did, comforting your father like that.”
I looked up and realized that the neighbor was still standing there, looking down on me. I tried to smile but realized that he didn’t expect me to. I nodded and knew that he knew just as well as I did that I hadn’t meant a word that I had cooed so gently and comfortingly to my father. Nothing would ever be alright again.
Minutes after my father escorted my grandmother inside my solitude was shattered once again. My father again came out the backdoor, along with the rest of my family.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“They’re bringing her out,” someone said.
“I want to see,” I said as I rushed to the side of the house where they would be bringing Jessie out. Amanda held me back, wouldn’t let me move another step. A policeman, the one who had questioned me, was with my family and he agreed that it would be a bad idea. Now I wonder if I had seen them physically remove Jessie from the house, would it have helped? Would it have given me some sort of closure? Would it have made me feel safer, less haunted, in my own home? I think so.
The cop wasn’t there merely for comfort. He was there to talk to my family and me. But what he said only made things so much worse. I wasn’t paying him much attention, as I stood there, holding Amanda’s arm and trying to remain ignorant. But then he broke through the wall that I had constructed around my head and my heart.
“Black belt,” he said.
That is all I heard, all I needed to hear, and I didn’t want to hear it. Black belt black belt black belt. My sister had hung herself with a black belt. All of a sudden the image was clear in my mind, sharp as a knife, gleaming and stabbing at me. Everything around me blurred – my family, my sister, his voice.
“-it’s no one’s fault-”
Black belt. Hung. Dead. Dead.
“-I know it’s hard-”
Dead. Black. Black belt.
“-it will get easier-”
All gone. Forever. Black. Black belt.
I couldn’t think, couldn’t hear, couldn’t move. I just hid behind Amanda, gripped her arm and sobbed, trying in vain to fall back into ignorance. But that wasn’t an option anymore. It had all begun to crumble. My flimsy wall, my movie set, my self-inflicted ignorance. I really began to realize at that moment that my sister was never going to come back home.
And it hurt. God it hurt so much that I just wanted to crumble into a pile in the middle of the asphalt and never get up. I just wanted to stop crying, I wanted everyone to just stop crying! Can’t you see? The floor is covered in salt water. The world is flooding! We were drowning in a flood tide of tears and it kept getting deeper. We are going to die here just like her, drowning in our own surplus tears.
The police men and women soon realized that their attempted rescues were in vain. The navy and grey suits flowed back into their respective vehicles and left us with assurances that if we needed anything, they would be there. The house felt empty without them, its body now a skeleton. We were bleached, broken bones scattered throughout the house, unable to mend.
Amanda left several hours with a migraine, promising to come by later. It was then that I found an empty red spiral bound notebook, sat at the dining room table in the midst of the storm, and began to write. The words flowed, releasing tears that had to get free. Someone, my aunt, set a plate of food beside my elbow, but just looking at it made me ill. My grandmother was leaning against the wall beside me, talking on her cell phone. Could we post a sign? Like the ones that they have in libraries? Please turn off your cell phone. I was tired of hearing the news repeated over and over, a skipping record that I was dying to break.
My grandmother was talking to someone, probably some distant relative that I didn’t know and didn’t really care to know at the time. She described Jessie as a “15-year-old angel” and I wanted to punch her in the face. First, Jessie was 14 you senile old bitch, second, if Jessie had been an angel I wouldn’t have loved her nearly as much as I did, and third, oh third... You think that I am heartless for calling my own grandmother a bitch but allow me to explain. I have this one very clear memory of a time spent with my grandmother and Jessie. We were at McDonalds, Jessie was probably around five or six, and my grandmother bought her a happy meal that she didn’t like. Jessie, being a five year old with a very picky palette, was upset and began to cry and my grandmother shouted at her, exasperated, “Shut up, you little cry baby.” I hated her from then on. When she was assigned to babysit us she would spend the entire night sitting in front of the television watching “Wheel of Fortune” and snapping at us, smacking our butts if we walked in front of the television. We all hated her, and I knew that Jessie was looking down on her, glaring down at her, at that moment, just as angry as I was.
I wrote several pages front and back until I ran out of words, an engine without fuel. I snuck my untouched plate of food into the garbage and I looked around the dim house, at the red blotchy faces and the trembling lips and realized that I had to get out. I had to get free, somewhere where the air was not stale and permeated with sadness and pain.
And for the first time in my life, I begged my mother to let me go to school.
Wow! What a lot of memories....I also remember that day so vividly. Your Dad called me at work and told me to come quick...you had lost Jessie. I couldn't quite comprehend what he said or what he meant. I tore out of work in a blurr and headed over. My mind was trying to make sense of what was going on. When I turned down your street and saw the emergency vehicles, I knew it was going to be bad. I was shaking and crying before I even knew what was really happening.
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