Checking Out Early – Epilogue
April 27, 2009For Courtney & Ida
For Courtney & Ida
I can’t help feeling we’ve missed the big picture on this one.
The anti-life force had made a, silent drive by killing.
While it surely flagged at times, her passion for life seemed insurmountable.
I always knew there was something hard etched beneath her feline smile, I was too naive to be able to read what it was.
If Judes own passion had brought him to deaths doorstep, he certainly did not welcome the final steps across its threshold.
This was my first image of someone who was publicly labeled as depressed, albeit posthumously.
I felt the death as if it was happening all around me every moment: Chris’s hand slipping out of mine as he plummeted into a great chasm…
I stared at my shoes hanging over the edge of the back seat while my Mother dressed her father down in a way I never knew she could. She tried to yell him off the path he was on.
We don’t use those soaps. They were a gift from my sister for my Mom. She died and now we leave them there.
This essay has been thirty years in the making, finally coming together one morning while reading a NY Times article titled “Midlife Suicide Rises, Puzzling Researchers”.