Penni Jones - Suicide Souls

Honestly, I wasn’t mother material. I was a mess. Obviously, right? No one who has their shit together ends up as a suicide soul.

Even my sister thought I wasn’t cut out to be a mother. She stood in her kitchen with her hands on her hips right next to the refrigerator covered in shitty kid art and told me the kids were going to someone from their church if she and her husband both died in a car accident or plane crash or mass shooting.

“Seriously, Naomi. Don’t act hurt. It’s that we just can’t trust you to raise the kids in our faith. And you party too much.” She smiled sweetly and added, “You really wouldn’t want all this anyway, would you?”

“Do you mean the paunch and the floppy tits?”

She didn’t think that was funny. I could tell by the way she threw a sippy cup at my head and told me to get out of her house.

But no, my lack of maternal qualities is not why I did it. I was sad and lonely to the point of being a rom-com level cliché. I’m sure that clinical depression played a role as well, but I self-medicated so much I honestly didn’t know how I felt anymore.

And there was Greg, the last boy I loved. But I can’t really blame it on him. I honestly thought if I killed myself fast enough, I could catch up to him. Silly me. I shouldn’t have been doing any thinking after all that vodka. But it was so hard not to blame myself for what happened to him.

Not that I worked out all those issues when I was alive. I’ve had a lot of time to sit around and reflect lately. And I still haven’t caught up to Greg.

So here I am in Jamie’s bedroom, waiting for him to grieve.

It’s boring as fuck.

Jamie is a stay-at-home dad because Laney is an attorney. Jamie is a sculptor, so it made sense that he would be the one to stay home with their shiny baby son, who is currently napping, as is Jamie.

Jamie is gorgeous, as much as I hate to admit it. He’s the type of guy who awakens a woman’s ovaries and makes them scream, “Over here! We need your broad-shouldered sperm all up in our shit!” His long eyelashes flutter as he dreams, and I’ve had all the watching him I can take.

The urge to slap him overtakes me, and I have even less control over my impulses now that I’m dead, so I do it. Hard. Right across his stinking beautiful face.

What I didn’t know is that he would feel it.

That’s a new one on me. I’ve tried touching loved ones to console them, to hug them, to wipe tears, but he was the first slap. And there was skin-to-skin contact. There was even a “thwap” noise. It feels fantastic to touch skin, to slap skin. I try to gasp and really wish I could.

Jamie jerks awake, and I slap him again to see if it works. But it doesn’t. My hand goes directly through his head just like my other attempts at touching.

Emitting scent is a gift bestowed on us to help us move this grieving shit along. I emit the scent people remember me by: Snuggle fabric softener (I dug the bear, shut up) and menthol cigarettes.

Tears spring from Jamie’s brown eyes, turning those long eyelashes into tiny, clumpy strands.

“Naomi,” he whispers.

I know if normal human emotions were still my thing, I would be into some heavy regret right now. I would feel that tug from knowing it’s my fault that he is crying and wishing I could make that not be so. I recognize those feelings, but they don’t ring true. I don’t want to change the past, because useless yearning is reserved for the living. Can’t say that I miss it.

Don’t get me wrong. It sucks to watch friends and family cry because of something I did. But it’s a different sort of shitty feeling. Especially since I need them to grieve so the process can continue as it’s supposed to. Maybe Jamie is the last one and I will be able to move on to look for a body.

We have to learn how to stick it out (i.e. live until we die from forces out of our control) in our new bodies or we face darkness. My understanding is that it’s not Hell, it’s just nothing. Non-existence, lights out, dunzo.

Jamie picks up his phone and pushes some buttons. That James Blunt song oozes from the shitty phone speaker and he starts bawling. It’s a pretty douchey move considering I hate that song. I wish I could slap him again.

Jamie’s baby wakes up crying. Jamie gets out of bed and wipes his eyes on his sleeve. He sniffs a couple of times and leaves the room.

I brace myself for the teleportation and feel the now familiar pull. It’s sort of like a vacuum pulling at my entire body. It’s not unpleasant, and I kind of enjoy trying to make out the colors. Maybe this grief watch shit is finally over.

I’m sitting at a small round table now, in a room that looks like a coffee shop. There are people, or souls, I guess, sitting at tables but no one has anything to eat or drink in front of them. We have empty coffee cups in front of us. Some tables have red trays with paper plates and napkins. If an existential crisis was a food court, it would be this place.

Edgar appears at the chair across from me. His kind face is always a haven, like going home to visit your parents when you’re in college.

“Naomi,” Edgar smiles and puts his hands over mine. It’s not like skin-to-skin contact, just a slight temperature change.

“Hi, Edgar. Am I finished with the grieving family bullshit?”

“Well,” he pulls his hands away, “mostly.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“You have completed your grief watch faster than anyone I’ve ever mentored.” He straightens his tie and sits up in his chair.

“I’m an over-achiever.” My mentor knows this about me. He can’t be surprised by my tenacity.

“Sure, you are.” Edgar pats my hand. It feels warm, cold, warm, cold. “The issue is that you still aren’t showing any remorse.”

If I could breathe, my breath would be knocked right out of me. “I thought we couldn’t feel remorse here. Just kind of sad or something.”

“The amount of remorse you feel is directly related to the person you were. If you were an average person who felt the average amount of guilt, you would have felt remorse at the beginning, and you would have come to terms with it before the process was over. If you were a sociopath when you were alive, the hope is that you will eventually feel some remorse before the process ends.” He crosses his arms over his chest.

“You’re saying I was a sociopath?” My urge to slap is back, but I know it’s not worth the effort since there won’t be any skin-to-skin contact.

“You really don’t know that?”

“What are you talking about?”

“You were best friends with your cousin Ruthie Mae from birth until you graduated high school. You dumped her during your first year of college because she wouldn’t stop wearing camouflage. As soon as you got out of your tiny town and met new people, she become nothing to you.”

Is everyone in the afterlife this judgmental? “We grew apart. So?”

“The ‘so’ is that you never felt the least bit guilty about abandoning her even when she got so depressed, she drove her car into a levee ditch.”

“She didn’t die or anything.”

“She was in physical therapy for six months, Naomi.” Edgar leans forward and clasps his hands together. I guess old habits die hard.

“Well, I gave her the last laugh when I killed myself, right?” The fact that I was a shitty person shouldn’t be news to me, but it is. It doesn’t seem right. “I wrote her a letter before I died. I apologized for everything.”

“But you still didn’t go to see her. When you died, you hadn’t seen her for eight years and you only lived a one-hour drive apart.”

I didn’t just dump her because she wore camouflage. It was because the one time she came to visit me at college, it was painfully obvious that she was a part of the identity I was desperately trying to shed. She was the country girl who wore chronically muddy boots and only drank beer from a can and sweetened her coffee with packets of powered hot cocoa. Yes, she was often depressed. But so was I.