A Conversation: Stuck in Your Throat

When I was twenty-six, just a couple years ago, I returned to my hometown for my dad’s funeral. He had killed himself. Mom kept asking me how I felt to the point where her words became something of a weary breath — an exhale I expected every time she opened her mouth.

“Fine.” The one word was enough for me, but not for her. In her mind, I was holding back more than she could even imagine. Each time she asked me, I knew that she expected me to erupt into some vicious, violent outburst of emotions that I had swallowed for the past two decades of my life. She expected me to scream, to howl, to cry. The one word was all she ever got. The one word was all he even deserved.

Mom, however, was more distraught than I would have imagined. She tried to suppress her own guilt by tending to me. I knew that she felt as if, somehow, she played some sort of part in my dad’s death. I’m not sure where this guilt stemmed from considering their circumstances, but it was enough to chew her to the core. She had asked me to run to the store to pick up some things for the house that she hadn’t gotten around to. No questions asked. I went to the store with a list that had looked weeks old. The corners were eaten and soft, every crease in the paper looked like it had been bent in all possible directions out of a nervous contemplation. She worried me sometimes. She never was the best with being alone with her thoughts. And it was clear that this list predated the death of my father.