The Vacuum

I'm trying to get my head around the fact that on April 11, 2018, my gorgeous, capable, creative, and pregnant step-niece, mother of three young children, hanged herself.

My head is cracking open at the mental exercise of trying to grasp this information. My rudimentary understanding of mental health-as-illness, as opposed to a matter of will power or choice, is barely a consolation. My brain hurts, my heart hurts, my throat hurts, my womb hurts.

Her suicide feels like an asteroid has ripped a hole in the atmosphere, leaving everybody who knew her gaping open in agony. It's like what happens in airplanes when their windows rip out and everything inside gets torn to shreds in the nothingness that roars through. With great sorrow, I imagine her children and husband like passengers in the airplane, ripped out the windows of the sweet, beautiful life she painstakingly created for them. All of a sudden, even oxygen feels like a luxury. The hole left behind is heavy, irrefutable, dark, and empty.

Despite a challenging childhood, thin on many forms of crucial support, she built a dream life for herself, of which I was frequently envious. She mindfully manifested the world we could only dream of for her. She was extraordinarily crafty, making aesthetic DIY projects out of free items on Craigslist, creating a labyrinth of raised garden beds producing vegetables, flowers, and blueberries, and making fairy houses through the woods with her kids.  She adopted animals and friends into her life, generously giving of her energy to lots of living things that needed nurturance.

I know all mothers love their children, but she made mothering a mission. She planted so many seeds in the world, despite having been deprived of essential nutrients in her own childhood. Did she keep filling up the world with love and beauty in order to fill a hole inside herself? How could all that love and creativity be only directed outward, and not toward filling her own emptiness?

She and I weren't very close. But she was one of the most important people to somebody with whom I am very close-- my stepmother. Their relationship had its ups and downs, to be sure, but nobody held a firmer place in my stepmother's heart than this young woman. My stepmother did her best to be a loving, stable force for her, and to perhaps fill her own holes through that relationship. They had many reasons to hold tightly to each other.

I'm thinking a lot recently of Andrew Wyeth's hauntingly beautiful Maine images. As I look at "Her Room", I imagine my step-niece there. I gather she saw Maine as her escape from suffering. I imagine her in a room like this right now, at peace.

At the memorial service last week, at least 150 friends and family descended on my step-niece's idyllic northern California home. Her little children and her husband, having slept elsewhere for the previous week, came back to the garden she had spent the past several years building, came back to the critters and tiny-house dwellers on their property--friends from high school and from the ever-spiraling-out rhizome of a community my step-niece cultivated--and to the blueberries just ripening on the spring bushes.

In a poignant gesture of normalcy, the little girls squealed with delight at the sight of the first green, tiny blueberry of the season, which had come into being during their week of absence, during the week since their mother had been found. I can't decide if the marching on of nature is an insult or a comfort. How can they keep growing without her?

Anybody who knows my step-niece knows that her love of blueberries started in Maine. These are blueberry fields in autumn, a view from Caterpillar Hill looking at the bridge to Little Deer Isle, where she spent a month each summer with my dad and stepmom. Despite her seemingly idyllic California life, she had bought a house in Stonington and was planning to move there soon.

Then I try to think of all the things she put into the world-- babies, blueberries, beauty-- and take some small comfort in knowing that although the vacuum is still tearing through the lives of those she left behind, so much of the love she created will come into being for years to come.