Penni Jones - Suicide Souls

Losing a loved one is always difficult. But in my experience, grief related to suicide stands alone in its specificity. Even if there were signs, the death is a shock. Every person close to the deceased feels implicated in their death, some only slightly, and some carry the guilt for the rest of their lives. Grief is never linear, but grief following suicide is a random gut-punch every few days, weeks, or months for years. Suicide is a leading cause of death in the United States. There are a multitude of contributing factors. But if we destigmatize mental health struggles, lives will be saved.

Please, if you are in crisis, call someone. You are not alone. The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. All calls are confidential. 1-800-273-TALK (8255).

There’s no reason to second guess my decision to kill myself. It’s too late for that. I could have tried to stick it out, taken some meds, talked to a therapist, started meditating, and all that shit. My increased self-awareness is the best thing to come out of all of this. All of this being my suicide attempt, which was completely successful because that’s the kind of person I am. I was. Whatever.

I’m dead now, and I’m visiting my loved ones as they grieve. It’s a part of the process. For them, for me, for everyone.

You know when someone you love commits suicide, and you feel sad about it completely out of the blue, and it feels like someone just punched you in the stomach even though you were dealing with it okay just a few days before? That’s part of the process. Suicide souls have to watch their friends and family grieve in order to move on. It’s punishment for us, but also for our loved ones, which is shitty. And if they aren’t grieving for us when we visit, we have to wait until we observe their grief before we can move on to the next loved one, until we run out of people we left behind and start the search for a vapid body to inhabit and start our new lives.

It’s some serious shit. I know.

I’m sure finding a vapid body will be its own set of problems, or maybe it won’t because most of humanity is an empty pile of garbage, but I won’t know for sure until I get through the long list of loved ones. There are so many more loved ones than I had considered. It’s a funny thing, how many people love you, yet I felt so utterly alone that I thought my death would be no big deal for anyone.

There are no markers of time in the afterlife. Or spirit world. Or purgatory or Heaven, or whatever. Nobody has given me a handbook to tell me the official title. I just get bits of information from my mentor Edgar, who appears when he’s not busy haunt-stalking whichever Jonas brother it is who’s the hot one. There are clocks, but what good is it to know what time it is when you don’t know what year you’re in? The most disorienting is there is no waking up for breakfast or turning in for bed. No waking up to a new day. Though my concept of a new day had been exhausted long before I offed myself.

I don’t remember much about my last seconds on earth. Probably because I passed out from the booze and benzos. I sort of remember the thought process that brought me to the big sleep on my rumpled navy blue comforter.

Did my mom wish that I had left the bed tidier? Why yes, she did. I heard her say so while I waited for her to cry.

The time lapse between my suicide and my arrival in the afterlife is unclear, but it really doesn’t matter. I laid down in my messy bed and the next thing I knew I was in a waiting room. Such a cliché, right? Everywhere we go, we wait. My last boyfriend, Greg, the one who’s also dead, told me once that we spend about six months of our lives waiting at traffic lights. He used that as an excuse to stop driving and take his bike everywhere. I know that seems like a good idea, but he arrived everywhere smelling like exhaust and armpit.

Unidentifiable music played in the waiting room. It sounded like the longest piano recital in the world, playing maybe a collection of hymns mixed with showtunes. There were three other people in the room but none of us spoke.

A handsome Black man in a timeless dark suit opened a door and said, “Naomi,” with the boom of a microphone. I stood and followed him to a small office. The door closed behind us without either of us touching it, like a prison door. So I’ve heard.

“My name is Edgar.” He extended his hand and we went through the motions of shaking without actually touching. “I’ll be your mentor through grief watch.”

That’s how it works here. There’s no actual contact, but we hang on to our routines anyway. Even things like sitting and hugging. It’s weird at first but you get used to it.

“Naomi,” I said, even though he already knew my name.

“As you may have figured out, you’re dead.”

I looked down to my cleavage. I wore a red stripper dress and platform heels to the party. My nails were lacquered in gold. Fortunately, I took off the shoes before I killed myself. But I was still in the stripper dress. I almost never dressed like that. Why did I choose to die in such a tacky dress?

“Part of the process, I’m afraid. You’ll be able to change later.”

“Did you read my mind?” The thought filled me with a new type of terror.

“No. I just saw the look on your face, and I can see the tragic dress.”

“I know it’s bad. But ‘tragic?’”

“Yes.” Edgar nods his head once. “Okay, listen up. We have a lot to cover. It’s January so we’re at top volume. I have a lot of souls to process.

“First comes grief watch. You’ll be sent from loved one to loved one to witness their grieving. Consider it afterlife voyeurism, and everyone must do it. You’ll have certain tools at your disposal…”

“Can I at least write some of this stuff down?” I asked as he rattled off stuff about emitting scents and some vague shit about manipulating energy. I wanted to ask if haunting and watching were the same thing, but I was nearing overwhelm and didn’t want more information.

“You won’t need to. I’ll check in with you soon.” He smiled in a way that wasn’t quite reassuring enough.

I felt something pull at me from all directions. The room swirled into blues, reds, greens, yellows, grays, and other colors I didn’t have time to identify. There was a “whoosh” sound and I was in my mother’s bedroom. That was where my grief watch began. I don’t know how long ago that was.

I’m in Jamie’s shiny new bungalow now where he lives with his shiny wife, Laney, and their shiny new baby even though he told me he didn’t want kids.

Jamie hooked up with Laney only a few months after we broke up. They got married about two years after the last time Jamie and I had crazy hot drunken monkey sex in his dingy apartment over one of the few bars in Little Rock that stays open past 2 a.m. His place always smelled of cigarettes and most nights the music rose from the floor like smoke from a grease fire.

My best friend, Eliza, came to my place with assorted chocolate truffles and cheap bubbly to break the news about Laney’s pregnancy. That about a year after their wedding. That baby is probably about six months old now, judging by the fat rolls. That’s how I know that it’s been around one year now since I swallowed a fistful of pills and settled in to the horizontal Hilton, and no, I don’t mean Paris.

Laney’s pregnancy sent me on a spiral. The stereotypical depressed stuff: forgetting to shower, eating potato chips for breakfast, carving “we should all just die” into a bathroom stall with a nail file. And no, not because Jamie was having a baby with someone else. Even though Jamie and I had been in love at one point, I had already loved and lost someone else by then. It was because Jamie found someone else to be a worthy vessel for his child. Inferiority slunk down my throat and into my stomach and seeped from my pores.