Standing on My Brother's Shoulders

by Tara J Lal

  I know that you are in a dark place right now and there must appear to be no end in sight, but one of the endlessly beautiful things about life is that it is constantly changing. What you feel now will be different today, tomorrow, next week and next year. I promise you that. There will be dark places in the future but there will also be light. Take those moments of lightness, however fleeting, and cherish them. Take hold of them and store them somewhere close to your heart so you can touch them when you need them.

  I know it may be impossible for you to realize the good things you have at the moment … but try, please try. You have a mother and a father who love you and will continue to love you despite any pain you may have caused them. When your mother hugs you, remember how that feels. Remember how, for that split second, you can forget your pain and feel safe and protected once again. Remember the warmth it brings to feel the sun on your face. Remember these simple things that bring joy. There will be one thing in every day that brings light … just look for it, write it down and hold it close.

  You are getting help and admitting you have a problem. That is a forward step. It is honest and that too is something that brings just a glimpse of light, far better and stronger than to hide behind an addiction. It is the hardest and most painful of times that also give one the opportunity to learn the most. The choice to learn is a blessing that you will count one day in the future if you can just persevere for now and try to take some solace from the simplest of things … the smell of some flowers, the sparkle of the stars or the taste of your favourite food.

  I know this may mean nothing to you at the moment, but please keep this and read it again whenever you feel able to. I am thinking of you.

  Tara x

  It came from a place deep within my heart, flowing directly through my fingers and onto the page in front of me: one person reaching out to another, the Art of Life. I hadn’t been able to help my brother but I could use what I had learned to help someone else. In doing so, I took one more step toward healing myself.

  * Much later, buried very deeply, I discovered I did in fact feel guilty. I just hadn’t recognized it as such. It was perhaps hidden under the shame. Guilt and shame are extremely common in people who have been bereaved by suicide.

  CHAPTER 22

  By now it was two years since I had first broken up with Luke, yet I was still embroiled in an on–off relationship with him, unable to cut the cord completely. I clung on to the remnants of what I had with him as if I were holding onto a tree branch that kept me clear of predators on the forest floor beneath.

  In fact, I hadn’t been able to let go entirely of any of my ex-boyfriends. So it had seemed perfectly natural to invite Luke, Anthony and Jack to my birthday barbecue. They are all my friends, I reasoned. Although why they remained so I hadn’t the faintest idea.

  On the day, I sweated through one awkward conversation after another. Hmmm … this is a little uncomfortable, I thought.

  Note: Do not invite three ex-boyfriends to one’s birthday ever again.

  My sister, who was over from England, shook her head in disbelief. ‘You’ve gotta sort it out, Ta.’

  When I heard her words, I abruptly lost my grip on the branch I clung to. It was the moment I finally recognized that something was wrong. Jo had held a mirror to my face and said: ‘Look.’

  Then, as if to prove a point, something happened that forced me to do just that. As it does for any addict, the energy and motivation for change only came out of the deepest cavern, when the destruction of my addiction became so great that it overcame the pain involved in moving forward.

  In the middle of the night, I woke to find that my body felt different. My breasts were tender and sore. A feeling of dread came over me. I knew instantly that I was pregnant. It was long before any test was going confirm this, but I knew.

  Oh God, no, please no.

  At thirty-two years old, I felt deeply ashamed and disgusted with myself. How could I possibly have let it come to this?

  I waited.

  Finally, when my period was late I went to the doctor. The test, as I knew it would be, was positive.

  I told Luke. We talked. He’d always wanted kids. I knew some part of him was devastated that I wasn’t jumping for joy. He loved me, yet we both knew our relationship was a mess.

  What I had always thought would be an impossible decision to make turned out not to be. Instinctively I knew I should have a termination. If I knew that I didn’t want to have a child with this man, then I had to admit to myself that I didn’t love him. If I didn’t love him, what was I doing with him? Luke and I never slept together again. I finally did what my sister had told me to do. I began to look.

  Ahead, I could see only a towering, unconquerable mountain. When I turned to look behind me I could see the earth I had scrabbled through following my mother’s death; the quicksand in which I’d flailed after Adam’s suicide; the river rocks upon which I’d hauled myself to save myself from drowning; the trees I’d climbed to escape stalking predators. Here I was at last, tiny and insignificant, at the bottom of the mountain, contemplating the climb ahead. I thought of Adam and his journey through the Himalayas.

  The gargantuan mountains tower in jagged defiance. Huge razor rocks form the snow-flecked summit that gradually recedes into the rounded green pastures of the lower slopes. The thinness of the air was noticeable as soon as we had climbed the first mounds. The summit stood before us as the going became even more difficult. We began to use all fours to ascend the tortuous slope with rasping breaths and acid limbs. Scattered snowfields drained energy out of the soles of one’s feet with sapping incessancy and soon the thinness of the air rasped at our chests. The great rock faces, knobbled and cracked, hemmed us in, diminishing us to appear as ants crawling through a castle.

  Adam’s words formed the perfect reflection of my internal landscape.

  The realization dawned on me that I needed help to navigate the mountain for me and for my brother.

  A good friend gave me the number for a psychologist. With a great deal of resistance and trepidation I made an appointment. My body quivered as I walked into Hannah’s office. I felt as wobbly and vulnerable as a newborn calf. She directed me to a comfy chair and I sat down. There was something approachable about her; maybe it was the bobbed hair and freckles. She was a quirky woman, in her late forties, with an equally quirky dress sense.

  ‘So …’ she said.

  Almost before she’d got the word out I dissolved into tears. Then, for the first time, I spoke of what had happened and I touched the pain.

  Whenever I had spoken of my family history in the past, I would always hear myself say that my mother had died and that I did have a brother but that he had also died. I never mentioned my father’s illness. I said the words but I was detached from them. I never felt any part of the story they told.

  This time, as I spoke I connected with the words and the pain. It was as if I was having my first dose of chemotherapy; I felt nauseous but I was, at last, fighting the cancer within me. I had found the malignant tumour that was strangling my soul.

  ‘What do you feel, Tara? Not what you think, but what you feel?’ Hannah asked.

  ‘I … I … don’t know,’ I stumbled, confused, just as Adam had struggled with the same question.

  Why is it so hard to understand what you feel? Feeling is, in essence what your thoughts are, aren’t they?

  Week after week I went to see Hannah as she helped me understand this very question, to find the essence of my feelings. Ever so slowly, I began to realize that thoughts contaminate feelings, hijacking their purity. Adam had felt this too.

  This mind and heart of mine will not let pure feeling through.

  I couldn’t be honest because I didn’t know what I felt, only what I thought. It was just as Adam had said:

  All good and honest feelings that I have are imparted with double thoughts – those just recognizable suspicions that stem from nowhere and are beckoned by no part of the conscio
usness but humiliate your mind with their falseness.

  My brother and I grappled with the same confusion. I began to realize that to touch the feeling, not to think it, is to find the truth behind the tears. When I stripped away my thoughts, which I had so carefully but unknowingly sculpted to protect me, what I found was an overriding feeling of fear: fear of being alone, fear of darkness, fear of heights, fear of failure, fear of the past and of the future. Fear pervaded almost everything I did and felt. To reach the essence of my fear, I knew I had to retrace my life, back to childhood, and identify where it came from. I had shed a million tears before I met Hannah but I had never connected with what lay behind the emotion. I had never truly felt it.

  One by one I had to walk out into my fears, stripping back the layers. Therapy opened the door for me, but I had to do the work. I had to ‘live’ the changes, learn how to look at things in a different way.

  I began to realize that I used my relationships to shield me from my fear of being alone, just as Adam had.

  Sarah was as sweet as ever and it made me feel free from all my … I don’t know what you call it, maybe loneliness – yeah, that’s right.

  As it has a habit of doing, the universe conspired to put me in a position where I could choose to face my fears. I had been looking to buy a two-bedroom unit, but I kept missing out. I was about to give up, convinced I couldn’t afford anything, when I fell in love with a one-bedroom unit that sat on a roundabout and had water dripping through the kitchen ceiling. I made an offer on the spot and, just like that, I was forced to spend time alone. I kept busy, almost as if I was frightened to stop, for if I stopped, I might have to think, and I didn’t want to think. I didn’t want to look inside. Adam had, and it had killed him.

  Ever so slowly, almost imperceptibly, I learned how to be alone, how to sit with myself in the light, and then in the darkness. I slowed my pace from a sprint to a jog. I began to realize that if I started thinking about things, I could stop if I wanted. I could take a peek at my past without unleashing the unstoppable torrent of pain that I had experienced before. It didn’t mean I would become engulfed by it as Adam had.

  I looked on it as a training programme. If you want to run a marathon, you must build up slowly or you will become injured. You alternate between walking and jogging, increasing the amount of time you run, before you can go the distance. I trained myself to be alone in a similar way, spending the odd evening at home on my own.

  I was vulnerable during the nights. I hated the darkness, the way it enveloped and trapped me. Danger is at its greatest at night: you cannot run in the dark. In the dead of night I’d said goodbye to Mum and Adam had ended his life. I had to learn that sitting alone quietly in the dark is safe, and that I could face the fear. Then, perhaps, the beauty of silence could emerge.

  Gradually, facilitated by Hannah, I stripped away the layers, as if I was a Russian doll. I searched for the smallest one, the inner child cocooned within all those outer shells of protection, still inaccessible.

  Then, one day, about a year into therapy, I sat in her office and she gently probed me, steering me toward Mum. I had spoken endlessly about Adam and Dad, but up until now we had not talked a lot about Mum for I struggled with my memory. It felt blocked. There was so much I could not recall about that time. Then without warning I started to cry.

  ‘I never cry about Mum,’ I sobbed. It was strange, I seemed to cry so much, yet never about Mum.

  ‘Well, it’s about time you did,’ Hannah said gently.

  For twenty-odd years I had never grieved my mother’s death. I hadn’t felt the pain of losing her as I had felt on losing Adam. I clung on to her that day and every day since.

  Slowly I started to piece together some of the lost time when Mum died. I went through every detail that I could remember. I retraced, step by step, the events of the weekend she died. I went through exactly what I had felt when I woke in the middle of the night desperate to see Mum.

  Images came to me in fragments. There was something about floors in the hospital. Had Mum been moved? Perhaps they had moved her and maybe I had been to the hospital and been panicked when I couldn’t find her. Had I thought that she had died distraught that I had not got there in time and that no one had told me? And I remembered the three of us sitting at Mum’s bedside in a private room trying to say goodbye.

  Then, as I remembered, so the nausea rolled in. It welled up inside me in surges, like the swell of the ocean, overpowering and tumultuous, squeezing the hurt, squeezing the pain, squeezing the grief; my chest, my stomach, my throat, all contracting, trying to purge themselves of something, as if drowning in salt water.

  As I sobbed and wailed I felt within my body the warmth and safety of my mother’s arms around me, and I felt the loss of her through my being.

  Following that session, I watched the sadness emerge within me, just as Adam had.

  If I could explain my own sadness, which perhaps I can if any consciousness would let me, then maybe I might be more vital, more worthy of life than I am. If I see with my eyes, then I am a self-pitying wretch, as no doubt anybody who may read this one day will undoubtedly conclude. I thought I had finished with it all, but obviously I cannot rid myself of this ‘nausea’.

  It was exactly as Adam had said. I could not rid myself of it. Perhaps my brother was right.

  I feel as if sometimes I was born to be a sad person. For are there not characters in this world that are by nature sad as there are those that by nature are happy?

  I wondered, was that me too? It felt that way. People close to me have often said that sometimes my eyes glaze over and I retreat to some distant, unreachable place, but the sadness sits so comfortably on my shoulders that I am often unaware of its presence: Struck by a weeping sadness, a tear of confused emotion.

  A few weeks later, as I allowed myself to feel the sadness, I walked down to my home beach of Bronte. I sat down looking out at the water and let the memories and the pain surface. I remembered the crematorium, how I stood and watched my mother’s coffin move along the conveyor belt into the fire. I noticed my grief as I sat quietly on the beach. I watched it in my body. At first it had been in my chest all those years ago. It had moved to my throat like a vice, then up to the root of my tongue. It was no longer raging, but was still pervasive and stifling, as if I was breathing through a straw from a bottle with no air. I began writing to my mother.

  Dear Mum,

  I don’t know where to start. There is so much I want to say. I don’t know why I haven’t written sooner. What happened? What happened to you and to us? Where did you go? Why did you go? I need your love; I need to talk to you. It feels like I’m losing you all over again, or maybe for the first time. Maybe I wasn’t strong enough to grieve for you all those years ago.

  I miss you, Mum. I miss you so much. I want to reach out for you. I still wish you were here to take all the pain away, to take the fear away, to make me feel safe.

  I remember when I found out you were sick, so sick that you might die, and you came upstairs when I lay in bed crying and you comforted me and stroked my head and cuddled me. Then one day you weren’t there any more and I remember lying in bed at night crying and there was no one. I remember realizing what it was like to be fully alone. I feel that now, the same feelings are here all these years later.

  I’m scared, Mum, so scared, just like when I was thirteen or fourteen and I remember coming home to an empty house. It was quiet and dark and there was nothing. It frightens me, Mum. I’m scared of losing my mind, of being out of control like Dad or even Adam. I’m scared of the darkness and the quiet. I’m scared of being alone, of feeling detached. I’m frightened of letting go, of having nothing left, of having no identity, of losing you and in losing you, losing myself also. I’m frightened of finding nothing. I want to be in your arms. I want to be safe. I want to feel your strength, to carry it with me. I want you to be with me still in my heart.

  I hope that you and Adam are together now, comforting e
ach other, looking down on me and Jo. I hope you forgive me, Mum, for all the times I let you down, for not being able to save Adam. I’m sorry.

  I love you, Mum.

  I stared out at the ocean, quietening my mind until it came to settle on the image of myself in the crematorium, my stifled scream. Where had it gone? Was that the reason for the tension I felt across my throat?

  This time as I relived the memory, I rescripted it as I went. I wrote the script how I wanted it to be. I saw that same scene in the crematorium, except this time I was on my own. I knelt before the coffin and laid one hand on it and one on my heart, and I said goodbye to my mother, in my own time and with total presence, in the way that I had wanted it to be. Then I turned to myself, the thirteen-year-old girl, and I supported her, held her tight in my arms and whispered to her, Everything will be okay, you will be all right, I will be here for you.

  As I wandered home along Bronte beach, lost in my sadness, a little girl came running up to me, interrupting my reverie. She reached out and pressed a single flower into my hand.