Letters Written in White (15 page)

I DISTINCTIVELY REMEMBER my mother from early on in my childhood. In my earliest memories I recall a beautiful and vibrant woman with long, flowing onyx hair that hung all the way down to the middle of her back. I always thought she had the shiniest and most beautiful hair I’d ever seen. On my first day of school, at only five years old, I remember wishing my hair wasn’t curly because I wanted straight hair like hers. Yet, by the time she was done fixing my hair, giving it every bit of attention to detail that she could, my curls were pulled up into a ponytail of perfection that hung down in perfect spirals.

She then handed me a box and, with a big smile on her face, said, “I got you a good luck present for your first day at big kid school.”

I ripped that box open and inside was the most spectacular purple bow, and right in the center of the knot was a sparkly stone that, to me, looked like a diamond. My eyes lit up and I couldn’t wait to wear it to school. All at once I forgot about how much I hated my curls. When she clipped the bow in and held me up to look in the mirror, all I saw was the prettiest hair and hair bow a little girl could ever ask for.

Mom grinned from ear to ear and gave me a big kiss on the cheek. “You’re going to do great today. You can’t go wrong with a good luck bow like this,” she told me.

I can see our reflection in the bathroom mirror just as clearly today in my mind as I did on that very day so many, many years ago. Though, at the same time I can remember down the road to the school mornings when she never even got out of bed to at the very least kiss me bye before I left for the bus.

At first Dad would tell us, “Mommy isn’t feeling well this morning. We’re just going to let her sleep.”

I’d really thought she might just have a cold or something. But then one morning turned into many mornings, and then there were the mornings where she would get us ready for school but was so angry the entire time. We didn’t know why or what we had done to make her mad or sad. She just was. Her pretty hair hung in stringy strands and she wore the same clothes for days on end sometimes. I wondered where my happy mommy had gone and why. I never understood why she cried so often or why she slept even more than she cried. But then out of nowhere my happy and energetic mom would return and the house would be clean and she would whisk us off to the park, doing all of the mommy things she usually acted like she hated.

Looking back, it would seem that this would be confusing to a child, but I was just happy to have my mom smiling and playing again. One afternoon during a rain shower she came in out of nowhere and told us to race her outside.

“Let’s play in the rain!” she shouted.

Devin’s eyes beamed, and I bolted off the sofa toward the door. We were barefoot and soaked as we splashed in the puddles. Our clothes got muddy and we were a total mess. The vision of my mother hopping from puddle to puddle, laughing as rain dripped down her face, is one of my fondest and most treasured memories of her. She was the mother I had grown to love in that moment in time. That’s who she really was when her disease wasn’t in control. And that’s how I choose to remember her.

She wasn’t her depression. I know that now as an adult.

When I look back on the day my father told us she went to heaven, I still hurt. It’s a pain one can’t properly describe. Because even though every day with my mother wasn’t the happiest, the unhappiest days were better than no days at all. I cried myself to sleep so many nights, begging Jesus to bring her back to us. I asked Santa for her to come back every Christmas until I got older. I never stopped wanting her back. I’ve missed her all my life, especially on those days when all a girl wants is her mom.

First time wearing makeup.

First school dance.

First love.

First heartbreak.

Picking out a wedding dress.

My wedding day.

Giving birth to my first child.

There are so many days when all I wished for was to have her by my side. Mental illness took that away from me. Mental illness killed my mother. So, from very early on in my teen years, I knew what I wanted to do with my life. I wanted to do something to help people who suffer from this illness. I needed to help them. Helping them has healed me. I’m writing this book for me and for others who suffer or have a loved one who struggles with mental illness, especially women.

I’ve spent hours and hours with women who suffer from an array of mental illnesses, and there’s a common thread that runs through all of them. They’re strong and incredibly resilient people. They battle an invisible and silent disease every single day of their lives, and they fight hard. The more interviews I do, the more I learn, and never once have I felt as if the woman before me was weak.

Where they see weakness I see bravery, I see a fighter. Most of all, I see my mother. I have chosen to share some of these women’s deepest and darkest parts of themselves in this book for a reason. My hope is that you, the reader, will see yourself or your loved one in them. Maybe you’ll find that you aren’t alone in your own pain, or you’ll see your mother, sister, wife, or friend in these women’s stories and hopefully gain some true perspective.

A question I’m often asked by other survivors like myself is how I ever forgave my mother for what she did. The answer for me is easy. How could I not forgive her? This question makes me think about the man who raised me, my father. It makes me think about my brother, who took her death much harder than I did. Throughout my life I always wondered how they did it. I wondered how my father made a life for us without our mother. When I started writing this book, they were the first two people I interviewed. I can’t begin to express the clarity I gained from them. The same question many ask me was the first question I asked my father and brother.

“Do you forgive Mom for what she did?” I asked my dad.

He pondered my question with careful thought and answered.

“For a long time I didn’t. Forgiveness doesn’t always come easily. At first there was so much pain and anger.”

He took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes. Even all these years later he still missed her.

“I had this huge hole where your mother belonged, and I kept filling it with all the wrong things. Anger was certainly one of them.”

He placed his glasses back on his face and sighed.

“I was angry for so many reasons. I had been angry even before she was gone. When I met your mother, a door was opened to a new world for me. Not only was she full of color on the outside, but she was the brightest of colors on the inside. She inked me with all of those colors permanently. And then one day, all of her color was gone. Where she was once bright, you could only find darkness. Early on, I tried to encourage her and help her. Before I knew it, it was as if I was her biggest enemy and I could never stop the fight.”

He paused and I said, “It’s not your fault, Dad. I know you tried to help her. You can’t blame yourself.”

He looked up at me with sad eyes. “I know, but I could’ve loved her better. I could’ve done better. I owed her that. Instead, I grew bitter. I started building walls, and I should’ve been building bridges.”

“Dad, you loved her. I’m sure she knew that.”

He shook his head. “Sometimes I’m not so sure that’s true. If she had believed I loved her, maybe she wouldn’t have done it.”

I reached out and took his hand. “Dad, mental illness doesn’t listen to reason. It doesn’t even have a language of love. It only knows despair. You cannot blame yourself. You can’t allow temporary problems from your past to become lifelong regrets.”

He looked at me and with great clarity and said, “There’s nothing temporary about suicide.”

His words vibrated throughout my body, and we both sat there for a moment in silence. He was right. There’s nothing temporary about it. You can’t get more permanent than death.

“Although there’s a certain finality to what happened and it took me a long time to come to terms with losing her, I did finally learn to forgive her. The thing is, I wasn’t so much forgiving her as I was forgiving myself. I think I finally accepted that your mom didn’t choose death. It was chosen for her by her illness. I found that I was angrier with myself than I was with her. I couldn’t stop blaming myself for everything.”

He then reached over and took a picture frame that has sat on the mantle in his house for years. It’s a photo of my mother. He held it in his hands and stared at her, smiling.

“This woman, the woman in the photo, was so much more than met the eye. I wish you could’ve known her the way I once did. You only got glimpses, but oh my gosh, how wonderful it was to see the entire landscape of who she was.”

He wiped a single tear from his cheek and continued while gripping the frame tightly.

“Beneath the surface there was always a spirit in her, begging to break free. She loved to dance to Tom Petty and skip rocks across the river. Her body image was an afterthought, and her worries were few. She coveted her friends and had a laugh that was infectious. That beautiful and carefree woman was an ocean living inside my heart, and the river of her continuously ran through the dam of my soul. When I fell for her, I soared.”

I began to cry at his honest and beautiful words. My father bared it all to me that day, and I’m so grateful for it. I was able to see more of who my mother was before the darkness took her over. And when my father went on to explain the way he found forgiveness, it gave me every ounce of comfort I didn’t even know I still needed.

“I finally realized there was no way out of the pain unless I found forgiveness, in her, and in myself. I also came to the conclusion that my final act of love for your mother had to be forgiveness. If she deserved anything, she deserved that. I loved her then, I love her still, and I will continue to love her until the day I die. I will never stop missing her. But at least now, when I think of her, there’s no anger, just love.”

After interviewing my dad, I had a whole new respect for him and for my mother. He gave me a gift that day, a vision of her I’d never had. He also showed me what true forgiveness looks like, and it’s something I hope you, the reader, will find as well if you’re one of the forgotten ones, like me.

When I sat down with my brother, I wasn’t sure what I was in for. Devin had grown up very bitter, full of hatred most days. Our childhood from the day Mom died forward was tumultuous and a sort of roller coaster where Devin was concerned. At first, he was in a strong place of denial. Every day he would claim Mom was just on vacation and was coming back. He told his teachers at school that Mom wasn’t really dead. He began to get into fights with other kids, and Dad was at a loss for how to handle him. It was hard.

Many nights I recall lying in my bed with my face buried in my pillow, holding my hands over my ears, while Devin had one of his huge meltdowns, as Dad called them. He’d hurl things across the house, slam doors, yell and scream profanities at Dad, and sometimes it would go on and on late into the night. The older we got, the less and less we saw of Devin. He was either gone with friends or in his room with the door closed. I loved my brother, but he’d become a stranger to me.

Years passed by, and thankfully as we became adults, our relationship grew stronger. I never talked to him about Mom until I started writing this book. I was genuinely scared to ask him to participate, so when he said he would, I was surprised as much as I was relieved.

“I know we’ve never talked about it, but I want you to try to tell me how it was for you when she died. Have you ever been able to forgive her?”

We sat across from each other at my kitchen table. He looked down at his folded hands, forming his response.

“No,” he replied simply.

I tried to give him a moment and said, “You’ve still not forgiven her?”

He looked up at me and shook his head. “I haven’t. I’m not sure I ever will.”

“Why do you think that is?” I treaded carefully, trying not to push too much.

“I have no idea. I’ve spent a lot of money on shrinks trying to figure that out. You know, I’ve never even been to her gravesite? Not once. I’ve tried three times and I can’t even get out of the car when I get there.”