Chapter 0. (Patreon)

0.

People are going to tell you I was selfish. Weak. Tired. Depressed. A bad mother. You are going to overhear their voices in the next room. Down the stairs. Through the window. Not one of them will know what it was like to fall asleep next to your father. To talk in the dark until one of us fell asleep. For years. To wake up with him again and again and again. And then to wake up without him.

I don't mean waking up alone. Waking up alone is not the same as waking up without your father. Waking up alone can be solved. It's not a very complicated puzzle. It isn't rocket science. Find someone new to wake up with. Solved.

Waking up without your father? That, it turns out, is a sick pain that will never go away. That, it turns out, is impossible. So, yes, people are going to tell you I was selfish. Weak. Tired. Depressed. A bad mother. On and on and on.

"Suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem." 

Idiotic.

All problems are temporary. Your father was a part of me, in a way nobody has ever been. The cancer killed him, but it left his dead body. For the rest of my life I will feel this dead thing inside of me. I will fall asleep trying to talk to it, but it will not talk back. 

I am trying to find a better word than pain to describe this past year. But this feeling won't last forever. I mean everybody dies. That's temporary, I guess. The trite little truism is technically correct. Suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem. But a temporary problem is all I've got.

And suicide is a solution.

From my point of view, suicide is a permanent solution to a permanent problem. And if I'm wrong? If the problem is only temporary? If this is merely the natural course of grief? If the problem really was just waking up alone? Well, then that's covered too, I think. What is the saying? Lie down off the side of a pier, wake up with fish?

Pain is when you stub your toe. Or slice your face with a knife. Pain is having your fingernails carefully pulled out, one at a time. It isn't the right word. I'm suffering, I guess. I'm hurting. But that isn't why I am going to kill myself. I'm going to kill myself because I can't carry your father's corpse around anymore, hoping that he will wake up. That's what hurts. Nonsensical hope. The hope that he'll be there beside me once the lights are out. The hope that he'll be there when I open my eyes. 

Hope.

They're going to say I was selfish. Weak. Tired. Depressed. A bad mother. But they won't tell you the truth. That I'm free. That my hope is finally gone.