Anatomy of a Suicide Note

Chapter 1

In my line of work, I always felt as though death was an art form. While loved ones grieved over another tragic (or expected) death, I appreciated the story every bruise, disfigurement, and exposed piece of flesh told as I examined their bodies to figure out how long it might take me to build an effigy of grace. Most never realized this lasted as long as the flowers they placed on their graves. Still, I was reminded on a regular basis how loud that grace sang at funerals and memorials. I never intended to compose a symphony; my only intention was to create a small amount of peace for the lonely.

The art their death created was not temporary for me, however. For as long as I knew the deceased, they were dead the entire time. No breath to sigh. No voice to scream. No heart to beat. No warmth to radiate. These are the burdens of the living, and I had no idea what to do with them. It was not until after I retired from the funeral home that I would have to face that particular terror.

I'd dealt with death and grief in my career for over thirty years, but it wasn't until my first day of retirement that I witnessed a human being breathing their last breath. I wasn't even there when my mother spoke her last words. She died alone in a hospital bed before I even knew she'd been rushed to the emergency room.

The difference between the two is a much bigger contrast than night and day—those words can't even touch how I felt. What I felt that day was more akin to experiencing birth as an aging spinster. That's exactly who I was, and it was painfully uncomfortable.

I was wrong, very wrong. I was nobody then. Today, while I may wander around feeling lost, I am much less than nobody. I am somebody who knows something most others do not. Come and talk to me after it happens to you. Understanding will come.

Unsure of what life had in store for me in my new phase of life, I created this romantic notion in my mind that I was going to finally start writing the novel I felt I had in me all these years. The year leading up to my retirement date I spent many hours at home planning out the first novel I would attempt to complete. Because I knew so much about being a mortician, I decided I would start a series of novels about a new age mortician who was able to communicate with the deceased he prepared for burial. Not only would this keep my mind active, but it would also keep me connected to the career that was my identity for most of my adult life.

While I knew more than most would want to know about grief and preparing the recently departed for their loved ones' last look, I knew very little about being a medium. That's what took me to my local library, where my life would change forever.

I live a few blocks from there, so I walked with my briefcase in hand and the entire world in my mind.

There are no sidewalks in my neighborhood, so I had to walk on the street as a few cars drove by and honked at me. Before stepping off the street I live on, I tripped over a pothole, which sent my briefcase to the ground with most of the contents spilling out. There was a breeze that day, but it was not quite windy enough to send my papers flying down the street.

After I crammed the contents back into my briefcase, I walked the rest of the way to the library with a careful eye on any additional menacing holes that might want to send me to the ground again. Fall had recently begun, so I took some time to admire the yellow, orange, and brown hues painted across the trees in my neighborhood. When you have spent most of your adult life working at least twelve hours a day, you don't usually have time to notice such things. And, now, here I was standing outside, underneath the blaring sun and experiencing the fall colors for the first time in a long time. Greta, my late mother, would have loved to see me like this. She was always lecturing me about the quality of my life outside work.

Once a year, she worked tirelessly to set me up with some old lady's son, but I always canceled last minute. Leaving the house always caused some sort of panic or personal crisis. I could never enjoy what it might have felt like to gaze at the night sky with an interested gentleman. These days, I've found occasion to gaze directly into the light of the stars, but the men don't come calling any more.

The parking lot the library and the local community center shared was nearly full on that Saturday afternoon with station wagons, luxury vehicles, pick-up trucks, SUVs, and even a convertible or two. All walks of life gathered there on such a beautiful afternoon. I only mention that now because I wrote it in my journal as soon as I sat down at an empty desk once I was inside the library.

It was as quiet as you might imagine a library to be with some background noise to drown out the deafening silence you might expect to hear. The desk I sat at was pushed into a corner by itself, so I couldn't see much of what was going on throughout the library. The only traffic nearby I noticed were the few people searching for books in the section closest to where I was sitting. It turns out that less than a handful of people are interested in Oklahoma history today. This mild isolation is what I needed because I wanted as few distractions as possible while I began to work on my first novel.

I could have done this work at home, but I felt as though I needed some separation from feeling like I wasn't sure what this next phase of life would hold for me. I put my earbuds in and listened to "Mahler's Symphony No. 2" while I stared at a blank page, then at my story notes, and back to the blank page again. This back-and-forth took place for what seemed like days, but when I looked down at my watch, a mere five minutes had passed.

To get my mind unstuck, I walked over to the new age section and looked for titles that might provide me with important information about psychics, mediums, ghosts, or communicating with the deceased. As a goof, I started scanning through The Complete Idiot's Guide to Communicating with Spirits. And this is exactly what I was when it came to this topic, an idiot. I took it back to the desk I was working at and read through random sections of the book for an hour or so.

While the symphony continued playing through my earbuds, I grabbed my notebook and wrote down ideas my research inspired. They weren't ground-breaking ideas, but they were a decent start to my research on day one of my new career as an amateur novelist. When I was done writing my notes, I returned to the blank page on my laptop and started typing the first page of my novel.

After an hour of solid writing, I looked up and witnessed several people running through my area of the library. They seemed frantic, stressed, and scared. I ripped out my earbuds and couldn't believe what I heard—screaming and gunshots. While my first instinct was to investigate to see what was happening, I thought better of that idea and followed the people who were running from the sound of the gunshots. Without looking to see what or who I was running from, I ran in the direction of the others in the library. An elderly librarian with a book still in hand silently motioned all of us to pile inside a conference room and whispered one command to us, "Get under the table, quickly!"