October 15
On Friday, October 15, 2004, my dad took his own life. I may be a “writer,” but I doubt I’ll ever have the right words to write eloquently about this. It has now been seventeen years without him. Grief supposedly heals with time, but each year is another year of memories he’s not in. I have an inextricable connection with my father, this man I barely knew. We are alike in many ways, ways I do not know and cannot understand. I’m built more like him than my mom, and apparently, I act like him at times. Maybe this connection is why I feel like I’m responsible for holding space for him each year. The year my father died, I watched cops rummage through our house, looking for a note he never left. Each year since, October 15 has been a day I set aside to intentionally remember him and consider how to create a different world – a world no family has to have cops turning over their possessions, hoping to find some note to explain the unexplainable. A world without suicide. A world without
