In one week, I lost newfound innocence. I learned new, hard ways that this world is cruel. Three things happened.
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My aunt passed away. At noon, I opened my browser and clicked open a small YouTube streaming panel to see her body rolled forward inside a beautiful coffin towards the altar of a familiar church I’ve never been to. I sat in my home office, looking away from my work, looking away from my phone on the office chair I bought so that I could comfortably sit for hours not looking away from these things. On my desktop, on the same screen I check my bank accounts and forward interesting news articles and funny cat videos, I watched her husband, my uncle, lean over her and when his children led him to his seat, I could see that he would never stand all the way up again. I watched this heartbreak while other family members, who were also streaming my aunt’s funeral, wrote comments about the stream’s failed sound on the side panel.
“No sound,” they wrote.
When the sound came on, I heard my cousins say true things about my aunt. As they spoke, they gestured to a photo of her, even though she was still in the room. The stream sometimes filled the screen with that photo over pauses in the ceremony. In her photo, she smiles warmly, though not as big as she normally smiled. Her normal smile, the one I knew well, was so wide it showed a little hole where she was missing a deep molar. In her photo, she wears pearls and round gold earrings under her blown-out pixie hair. In her photo, her forehead is smooth and her cheeks are full of a gladness that fillers I’ve researched to put into my own face could never replicate. This photo looks like her, but it is not her. In her photo, I cannot see her calm kindness and I cannot hear her voice. I will never again see the way she shook her head a little when she said my name, the very same way I shake my head when I say, “Exactly,” or, “Perfect.”
I never expected to have so little of her left so suddenly. In my naïve mind, the cruelest world would have forced me to make a long, harried trip to her bedside and sit in front of her closed, sunken eyes and straighten a blanket around her warm, narrowed shoulders.
But now I know that is not the cruelest world. The cruelest world is this one, which did not even allow me that trip. In this world, I did not get to kiss her hand and lay it back softly on her hospital bed, I did not get to hug her and tell her that I love her, expecting no response in return. I did not get to make the long, sadder trip home with my father, and find comfort in his retelling of stories about her from their childhood.
In this world, I did not get to pass her daughter, my cousin, tissues at the funeral.
The sound on the stream cut out again during the priest’s sermon.
“No sound,” they said again.
On a Saturday morning trip to my local pie shop, I saw a large easel-size white sign with red lettering taped to the neighboring house’s front door. The sign read, “Tell my daughter I killed myself because of the scumbags.”
A police officer in an all black uniform came and went from his all black police car. He went in and out of the house, opening and closing the door framing the sign. He wore gloves. He did not look at me as I sat in my car facing him.
The woman in the pie shop told me that the woman inside the house was her landlord’s mother. She told me she didn’t know the woman well, and that she hadn’t seen an ambulance arrive yet, so she held hope that the sign was all there was to the commotion on the block.
On my way out, the ambulance arrived. A few more police cars arrived too. They blocked the road I needed to get away from this scene, and so while I waited for an opening, I watched the EMTs and the police officers greet each other, “Good morning.” They all put on gloves and slowly removed a stretcher from the back of the ambulance. They wheeled it towards the door as one of the officers tugged the oversized suicide letter off of the door. They also wheeled another contraption, perhaps an intricately folded wheelchair inside too. I got chills because none of them acted in a hurry. The reluctance in their steps announced to me, the only onlooker, that no hurry was necessary because the letter-writer had no time left.
Since then, I’ve checked the local police blotter. I’ve googled and googled and searched the local news for more information. Maybe I was wrong, maybe no one died. Maybe I was right, maybe there’s an obituary. I want to know so that I can make a donation in the woman’s name to a suicide prevention foundation. I want to know if I walked past the makeshift curtains of a woman who had enough pain to will the end of her own heartbeat.
I thought that, in the cruelest world, the woman inside would have left all those around her wondering how they missed the signs, wondering what they could have done or said to help her, to save her.
But now I know that is not the cruelest world. The cruelest world is this one, which scoops complete strangers into that same tornado of regret and loss. She wanted everyone who walked by to know what she’d done and why. She wanted everyone who walked by to carry the burden of relaying what she’d done and why to her daughter.
I am one of the people who walked by.
I pursued and landed a dream job. A prestigious job. A job that pays considerably more than the one I have now. But I had to walk away from it.
It’s complicated, but in the course of moving forward, I underwent the early phases of a background investigation that required me to gather, summarize, scan, and disclose just about every detail of my life. I pieced together parts of myself that I had long forgotten, and parts that I wish I never again had to remember. I learned things about my family, things I would have been content to never know. Every evening for a few weeks, after a full day’s work, I would do another full day’s work of figuring out who I am, what I have, and where I’ve been.
This dream job required a big move to another city, and other sacrifices. I was onboard, all in, committed. Until I couldn’t be.
In my younger mind, the cruelest world was the one that kept my dream job out of reach. No interview, or worse yet, interview after interview, and no offer. I thought the cruelest world would make me believe that I’ll never be a good enough lawyer, a true master of my craft.
But now I know that is not the cruelest world. The cruelest world is this one, which dangles in front of my hungry face red, red meat, but forces me to bite off my own arm to reach it. In this world, I learn that I am a good enough lawyer. I have no doubt that I’m becoming a master of my craft, worthy of practicing alongside the best in the business as a colleague and not a burden. But in this world, I’m forced to face that I cannot claim my seat, at least in part, because I’m not a good enough person.
I am grateful for the memories I have of my aunt. I ate the pies I bought that Saturday with deeply loved friends and family, spread out over social distance but close in heart. I very much enjoy the challenging, rewarding job I currently have. There’s nothing I would change, except everything in this world.