Warm, sunshine Saturdays
UCSF Campus Calendar
7th Annual National Survivors of Suicide Day
Where: Parnassus
When: November 19, 2005, 8:30 AM
Join us for a live webcast. Every year, the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention(AFSP) links simultaneous survivors conferences throughout the country through a live national broadcast by satellite or web. This nationwide event is an opportunity for those who have survived the tragedy of suicide loss to come together for support, healing, information and empowerment. UCSF Dept. of Psychiatry faculty & staff will moderate a discussion group after the webcast for attendees to share with each other & ask questions. Admission is FREE and open to anyone who has lost a loved one to suicide.
Info URL: http://www.afsp.org/survivor/conference.htm
I wanted to go to that this morning. And I thought that I should: it was going to be a beautiful, sunny Saturday—the perfect kind of day to take the little one to SF, spend as much time at this conference as he might let me, and then make a day of it, maybe go to a park or just explore the area around UCSF. But I dunno, I just didn’t. I guess this entry is to prove (to me) that I’m not running away.
August 4, 2001 was also a beautiful, sunny Saturday. I skipped out on an Infant CPR class that morning because I didn’t feel like walking the 6 blocks from home to the hospital. Little did I know that only 20 days later, I would walk those 6 blocks in labor, pausing at each intersection to have a contraction. I had dreamt of my little brother, J.C., for the past two nights: first a dream where he was sitting beside me in a theater waiting for a Broadway musical-type show to begin. He seemed pretty happy and quite young—he was smaller than me, it was when I was still his “big” sister—and right before waking up I put my right arm over his shoulders and I hugged him around the back of his neck, and it made me feel so happy that I really, really felt sad to wake up, and find that I wasn’t actually hugging J.C. The next night, Friday, I dreamt that I was leaving an unfinished home, but it was done enough that there was a working fridge there, and I was really concerned about whether or not there was food in there for J.C. Because for some reason I was leaving but he was going to be there alone after I left. I saw him again—not like we were in the same room together, but the way that you can see people in the third-person in dreams, as if you’re just watching… but actually I guess it’s like he did look at me and see me, but we didn’t really connect. He just looked somber. Not happy, not sad. He was J.C., but he looked more serious than I’d ever seen him, and I felt so intensely that I wanted there to be tasty food in the fridge and stuff in the house that he would like, that might help him to feel happy while he was there alone.
When I woke up Saturday morning from this dream I felt sad, but it quickly dissipated with the beautiful sunlight and with that relieved feeling you have when you wake up from a sad dream and find that it was just a dream. I was thinking of him so much and missing him so much after dreaming intense dreams of him for two days, that that morning I pulled out the poems he’d written that had been selected for publication a month or so before in his high school’s literary magazine—and that of course my mom had sent me photocopies of—just so that I could read them and marvel at how deep and thoughtful a 17-year old he’d grown into. I thought how funny it would be if I called the house, and instead of the usual “Hey, how’s it going? How’s school & stuff? Cool, I’m just returning Mom’s call…” non-conversation we would usually have while waiting for Mom to pick up the phone, I instead talked to my little brother, had a conversation with him on the phone like the young adult I knew he really was, and told him how proud I was of him, how just the last time I’d talked with Kuya Cris on the phone we’d talked about him, and how proud of him we were and how much we looked forward to seeing how he’d continue to grow. That we loved him and were excited about how funny and smart and just generally good he’d turned out to be. I thought of how uncomfortable it would make him for me to gush at him about how I wanted to hug him, and it made me smile. I even got so far as thinking that I could always call and just say that I’d dreamt of him for 2 nights in a row, and not embarrass him by saying that the dreams made me really miss him, made me really want to see him in person again, and hug him for real, not in a dream.
But that’s as far as I got before Mom called. Sounding low-voiced, and not quite like Mom: “Papa’s got something to tell you.”
I can’t remember what else she said because whatever it was just made me feel anxious, it was only a few words, perhaps, “it’s something bad. It’s really really bad” but I automatically tried to sound calm and reassuring for her, and when she passed the phone to Papa I was ready to hear that he was leaving Mom.
Papa, sounding higher-voiced and not quite like Papa: “Are you sitting down, baby?” “Yeah.” [Silence. I consciously put a smile in my voice.] “Yeah—in fact I’m actually lying down!"
Pause, then “Oh, you’re lying down?” Papa sounded so weird, and I got more anxious, and tried to sound more reassuring. I can’t even remember what I babbled, or how I dragged it out of Papa, it was just such a weird and horrible non-conversation, where I didn’t know what was going on or what I could do to make it better but there was something so completely wrong, it’s like he wasn’t even Papa anymore. Words I do remember are “It’s J.C.” and “J.C. killed himself.”
And I know I made Papa and then poor Mom describe everything to me in more graphic detail than I think they could handle, but it was what I felt like I needed to hear. Because if I didn’t hear them tell me every piece of the story they could figure out, and describe every terrible, horrible scene, then how could I know they weren’t mistaken? What if they only thought J.C. had killed himself, but actually he could be made O.K. again? I heard all the things they told me though and knew there could be no mistake; I talked to Papa and to Mom and to Kuya Cris and had them tell me every detail again and again, and when all was done I knew that those must be the only three people in my family now. I had never cared for the symmetry of four. I always felt there was something special about the number five: five fingers, five toes. Five people in my family.
