#I seriously need to talk more about jackie and nat parallels at some point

[winters-rose-daughterofcain]

Something something Natalie's death being ruled an overdose and how even in death she cannot find peace or escape from the judgments or assumptions made about her due to a coping mechanism, however unhealthy, she developed only after society failed her as nothing but a child, something something death being labeled the great equaliser yet proving time and time again not to be, proving that the memory is far to great an stain on it's supposed equality to ever truly balance anything, something something Jackie and Nat parallels and Jackie being remembered as the image she projected of herself that fell apart outside organised society and Nat being reduced to the image others projected onto her that she was only ever given the chance to break free of after the established rules of organised society fall apart, something something how no matter who they are at their core they will forever be reduced to what they were perceived, forever assumed and never understood, something something the reduction of them both to predetermined roles for the dead and the stripping of both their individual personhood being not at all surprising on reflection, just a microcosm of girlhood and womanhood itself, something about how in that way, perhaps death dose equalise after all, if only in the manner in which societies reflection after robs these girls of their human complexity.

[ianmmori]

One Year On

I spent the better part of the last few months leading up to this day, trying to think how properly to eulogize my father; in an effort to make up for my hackneyed and overly symbolic attempt at one at his funeral, my voice, usually booming and confident, having had the emotional restraint depressed upon me by a heavy heart, sounded wispy and distant to all in attendance in the church that day nearly a year ago. I know how I feel about it all, how I feel about him, how I feel about everything that's led up to this point, and I've definitely got enough words to spare. It's just, well, exactly what do you say? What can one say in this situation? How much should you say? I am not writing this only for me, as a therapeutic means to deal with my father's death (which I can openly say, I have yet to really face), or only for him, to enumerate his influence and his finer points in honor of his memory. I am writing this for both of those things but for anyone else wanting to read it, anyone else who has felt alone, depressed, sad, anxious, or suicidal.

On a cool, clear Saturday morning one year ago at around 7AM, just as dawn was breaking, my father stepped out of the front door of the first and only house my family has ever owned; he walked around the corner between our house and the two story house adjacent, walked to the end of the building, and with a 9mm in hand, ended his life.

My mother heard the shot and woke up immediately. Didn't know what it was. Looked around the house, then saw the front door was unlocked. She went outside and found him. She ran back in, called for me. Her voice propelled me from my heavy sleep, her words still clear now as they were a year ago.

"Come outside, quick, your dad shot himself."

Everything moved so fast after that.

Seeing him there. Taking it in. His body smaller than I remember it being. Calling 911. The woman on the other side of the phone, asking me over and over where we were. "Between the two houses," I kept saying. The sirens in the distance. Neighbors coming out. Police tape. Statements. Detectives. Coroners. And by noon, everyone had gone. Our family of three was now two, and in that moment, all mom and I could do was look at each other. No tears, not yet, just the unreal sense of everything suddenly becoming not what we had known it to be all of our lives.

I texted all my friends, they called me, and in hours they were at my house. The gravity was immense, both in seriousness and in weight. My legs felt sluggish and my heart felt heavy. Despite being a family who had lost a major member in the last few hours, my surrogate family, the family I grew up along with through life, came to my aid as well as my mother's. Thank you Audrey, Lisa, Michael, Paula, Justin, and Jeff and Lisa Butler for coming that day. It meant more than you know, and it still means a lot now that I call all of you more than just friends, but also family. I know that I've lost touch in the last year with each and every single one of you, lost touch because of everything that has happened and it's becoming now ridiculously apparent that I do need each of you in my life to give it some sort of balance, I just haven't really known how to do that; who I am now feels like a desperate attempt to keep hold of who I once was without the understanding of who I am at all, as a result of the past year. I have floated on every emotion a human being could be capable of, and I'm sorry that I haven't extended my hand to seek refuge in your friendship since that day. I just don't know how to anymore.

Everything that came after that, how my mom and I dealt with everything, was, to put it mildly, the hardest thing.

Mom had a mental break. Both my parents suffer from Bipolar Disorder, my mother usually tending to be more manic than depressed, and my father battled both the high of mania and the low of depression. Despite her sister visiting and a trip to the Philippines to try and help, my mother wasn't herself for nearly 8 months afterwards, still struggles in the day to day now. Psychiatrists played pop quiz with medications and discussions, trying to find the right balance. Mom, between her uncharacteristic and emotional tirades and behavior, her unmanageable decisions, and her utter disregard for how her actions influenced my emotional and mental state, it wasn't until late February the following year she realized that she wasn't okay, she wasn't in control, and that this had really happened. We had so many arguments, so many fights. She'd talk my ear off for hours about nothing in particular, regaling me with the exploits and the achievements of distant relatives and long since passed ones, without any real point to what she was saying. She'd concoct conspiracies, make up facts, and yell at me for no reason. She'd blame me openly for my father's death. Blame random people. Blame herself. Say he was still alive somewhere. That he wasn't in an urn in the foyer and it was just sand. She was losing her grip on reality.

A year on, I see her in the kitchen sometimes, wistfully staring out the windows as she sits in her chair. She's more herself now than she had been in the past year, more in control and back to some sort of normal, albeit understandably quieter. Sadder. Only recently has she found things that she used to do for fun pleasant and enjoyable once again. She goes out to work out. She goes to her retirees' luncheons. She's reading. She watches television. For a time she didn't, and would sleep for hours, upset at anything she blames as a distraction, a distraction to her seeing the signs when dad was still around.

There were signs. Signs that dad might do something like this. Small things and big things. An overwhelming sadness.

Dad was a poor communicator. He wasn't one to talk about his feelings much, and when he had, they'd be a burst of unintelligible and unorganized thought that my mother and I wouldn't know how to take it or interpret it. We should have though, should have tried, despite not getting it at the time. The guilt of not properly addressing how my father felt will stay with me until my final day. There isn't a day that goes by that I don't think that I should have said more, done more for him.

I took a leave from work at the bars for 7 months. Mostly to help mom. I tried my best to find my own normalcy. The only thing that did feel normal was my relationship, and even that is completely unconventional.

Some of you know that my girlfriend, Lucy, is from and lives in the UK. From the day that we first started talking until this very moment, writing this (we're actually on a Skype call, she's asleep, it's just now breaking dawn there and it's nearly 3AM here), she has been my rock, my anchor, and my savior through everything. After my dad, I didn't have the strength to keep myself up, and without asking, without needing any prompt or reason aside from her love for me, my partner, my Lucy, was there for me. She is my best friend, my person, my confidant, and she has kept me going all this time. From 4208.4 miles away, she's capable of this. From all the way in Wales, she is by far the best thing to ever happen to me, my light in my dark. We have seen such ridiculous highs when we are together, the world falling away and happiness being more than possible, but real and incredible. We have seen such lows: fighting, finding balance, dealing, struggling, not just with the distance, but the depression I felt but wasn't aware of. She encouraged me to seek therapy. She listened to me late into the night. She sacrificed her days and her livelihood for my betterment, and for that, I am forever grateful and ever penitent, in hopes I can make up for any pain I caused her in my battle with my  depression.

I have suffered with depression all my life, and to unwittingly suffer parallel to my father, neither of us understanding the other, it comes still as a shock that my father was even capable of feeling depression at all.

Being of Asian ancestry, mental health and wellness isn't something discussed, properly understood, or even regarded as an issue. Things like sadness, depression, anxiety, and stress are all seen as weaknesses. There is food on the table, a roof over your head, and a bunch of things for you to do for fun, why are you sad? I could hear my dad, a stronger dad, asking a younger me. Will, determination, discipline, duty, these are things that overcame adversity, strengths that kept a strong, first generation Filipino-American on the right track for success. There was no room for sadness. No room for discussion. The sacrifices my parents had to endure to give me the opportunities in a country full of them that they never had instilled a sense of guilt-filled responsibility to make the most of their choices in life within my own life. Depression was an affront, a tarnish to their legacy, so what I felt, my sadness and my fear, I kept in me for two decades, and kept on. Moved forward somehow. Cried at night, wandered the streets when I learned to drive. Tried to find happiness where I could to keep me going.

All my life, dad was strong. He was the strongest man I knew. He was stubborn, particular, ambitious, rude, and forthright. He walked with his chest out. He asked friends and family to feel his muscles. He told crude jokes and laughed when he farted. He had a damn good laugh, a laugh I inherited. He loved Jackie Chan films and Nat King Cole. His favorite song was "What a Wonderful World," by Louis Armstrong. He was so bad at karaoke. He always wanted to be his own boss. He loved fishing. He loved shoes and watches, again, something else I inherited from him. He was quick to anger when I was younger. He tend to yell to get his way. After his heart attack in 2004, he calmed down, took to easier jobs that didn't put so much strain on his body. His body ached. He had back problems and stomach problems and heart problems. He lifted and built and cleaned and repaired. He was always working with his hands. He could make anything. He was a proficient and accomplished artist and could draw anything, but no one knew that about him. He was a damn good cook. He loved Chinese food. He was always on the lookout for the best hot and sour soup. He cared. I found out from many who came for his funeral or talked to me after his passing that he helped a lot of people when he was younger, a man who taught me to take care of myself more than taking care of others for fear that I'd be taken advantage of because of my selflessness and good will. I can only assume someone had done that to him, but I'll never know. He was a good neighbor. He was kind to friends, helpful to family, but wary of strangers. He had a strong grip, but the finesse to counter it; he pushed his pen down hard, but his signature was the most beautiful I had ever seen. He loved cars. He hated sharp smells and dirty floors. He was always picking his teeth. He wore a ridiculous amount of jewelry. He told stories lavishly. He talked a lot, but always waited his turn. He was a hard worker. He was a good father.

I can't say exactly why he did it. It's been a year and I still haven't found anything. I've been through his things, through the files, on his phone, his computer, every nook and cranny he could have been in, but he never left a note. Never expressed exactly why, and all mom and I can do is speculate. Was it entirely a silent sadness, a depression he never could properly express to us? Was it his difficulty articulating his feelings as he's always had? Had his strength, his will, his determination, had it slowly evolved into silence to spare us? Was his physical pain so unbearable, all his heart and back and muscle problems, was all of it so out of control and so well hidden? Many mornings have I sat across from mom, coffee in hand, a heaviness in the room, asking the same questions over and over, to no avail. We will never know. Never know for sure.

How I feel now about all of it, a year on, can't really be summed up briefly, but I'll do my best to. I accept it, accept what he did, and I forgive it. I hope he can forgive me, forgive me for everything I could have done and should have done to prevent this. I struggle with guilt, even before dad. I feel as though everything is my fault, or I take the blame in times of conflict because I subconsciously think it'll diffuse the situation faster and resolve the problem easier, and most of the time it does, but in reality, I am not guilty, but I convince myself I am. It's self destructive, and after dad, I did it nearly every day, and I'm sorry to Lucy, but she bore the brunt of my guilt and my self deprecation. She worked so hard to build me back up, safe to say that with her help, I've managed. It doesn't mean I don't still feel guilty. I do, I just manage it. I'm sad as well, and I manage that. I feel lonely a lot, especially late at night; I'm a bartender and I keep late hours. Most of my friends are asleep before 2AM, and by then if I work, I'm just getting off, and if I'm off, I'm wide awake. Lucy is 5 hours ahead, so she's definitely asleep until it's about nearly dawn for me here. Mom goes to bed at 11PM like clockwork. I'm left to ponder in my solitude from just around midnight, nearly every night, until just before dawn, and after 32 years of being on the planet I've realized that I don't do so great on my own. After dad, even more so.

In all admittance, I still have depression, but the only reason I can capably deal with it is because I manage it.

My therapist likes that word: manage. She told me that getting over things, dealing with things, that's almost pushing it all aside to try and focus your energy and your efforts on something else. Imagine a coffee table with stuff on it: bills, paid for or past due, some trinkets and baubles from your time abroad, a book you're reading, one you're not, a photo, a notepad with stuff scribbled on it, an empty bowl and a half-empty mug, a box of tissues, guff on top of guff on top of guff. You've got LIFE to do, so you push all of that nonsense out of the way, clear the table, and put LIFE on it. You know, all that stuff, it's on the floor now. It's not gone, it's there. It's still going to be there when you decide that you're going to take a break from doing LIFE and decide you need that bowl, that photo, that notepad. Hell, you might even accidentally step on all of that trying to get around LIFE. The things that are there, the feelings you feel, they shouldn't be ignored or put aside, they should be acknowledged. They shouldn't be dealt with, but understood, and understood to the best of your ability because, sometimes, we don't even understand how we feel. It's about managing all the heavy bits, and perhaps, rather than casting it aside or attempting to put it behind us, find strength as a result of how we feel through the management of things like anxiety, depression, fear, or sadness.

I'll never know why my father decided to end his life. I can guess, but I'll never know for sure. What I do know is what it has taught me, what he has taught me: life is precious. We get one go of it, and that's it. We aren't invincible. We fragile things full of fire. We must care and be kind and be honest and good to one another. We must hope. His last act, his last lesson, was one I interpret for myself. Life must go on, it does get better, and no one is truly alone.

I miss you, dad. You voice is still in my head, guiding me, telling me right from wrong. I wish I could have done right by you and I'm sorry I didn't. All I can do now is make sure no one else has to.

If you're out there and you feel alone, you aren't. Anyone, anyone out there that's reading this, I assure you, we care. We all care. You are important, you mean something, and whatever it is that pushes you down or holds you back, it will be okay. It may not seem it now, but it will be. The darkness doesn't have to be real anymore, you don't have to wade through it. If you are suffering, please, please please please tell someone. We do care. We want to help. We are here for you.

You are not alone.

I'm listening.