Archive of Our Own ^beta

What no one has ever told him is that the manner of death affects the grief. There are hundreds of books on grief with parental loss or sibling loss or child loss, probably even nephew or niece loss. Grandparent loss? Definitely. He’s even seen books on how to deal with your ex dying. And he knows there are books about how to deal with the suicide of a loved one, but no one has ever mentioned that the hole they leave is a little more jagged around the edges and that it’s a whole lot fucking easier to start bleeding when someone asks you how you’re doing and the blood mingles with the tears until you’re not sure which is which and anger builds and builds in your chest like a boiling pot overflowing onto the gas stove and extinguishing the ability to feel anything other than selfish, raw, horrible rage that the person dared to leave you, dared to take their life into their own hands and that choice ended with their dead body and him wondering what he could have done better.

People probably have written self-help books about that, but those are just words on a stupid page and they don’t even begin to touch the fucking grief that is a void, all-consuming, leering above his head and waiting for the moment he, too, allows it all to end.

No one talks about being a suicide survivor — about those little ideations still rattling around in your head — and watching your loved one do it to themselves. No one talks about the way time stands still and in their place you see your body, and you see the rest of your family grieving you, and you feel that pain they feel and you realize this could have been me and this would have been me and why isn’t this me and why is this you and why the fuck would you think it’s okay to do this

No one talks about the moment someone hugs you and they tell you please don’t ever do this to me and you know as you say you won’t that this changes everything.

Call it love, he thinks, call it kindness, until you believe it yourself. Just don’t pretend he is stupid enough to believe it too.

Dig under his skin and peel at his muscles and flay his tendons piece by piece until he is nothing but a skeleton, and then maybe he can find the hole that has been left and fill it with something else, anything else to make it stop hurting. Anything to make it not real. Is it a sin to be angry at the dead? Is it a sin to look at photos of them and curse at them? (Is it a sin to wish that he hadn’t witnessed the pain of suicide on those left so he would feel less guilty when he considered it again? Would he consider it again?

Is it a sin to wish that he was dead too? Is it a sin to feel alive when there is death?

Is it a sin is it a sin is it a sin isitasin

itisasin

it is your greatest sin.)

cut me until i bleed your name.

Surely that is punishment enough for not saving you.

bite my tongue until i can no longer scream

And maybe I can stop asking for you to come back.

But what is left at the end of the day when the bloodstains have been washed down the sink and the papers have forgotten the names of the victims and the black ink of the letters you never sent begins to dissolve under the flood of your tears? What is left when nothing has been left? Scraps of love, scraps of affection, scraps of a desperation so profound and compelling it calls his name too. A siren call, the lilt of a void that promises peace — a call he cannot pick up because the ID flashing at the top of the screen warns him it is a scammer. Someone who can sink teeth and claws into him and drag him towards the door but cannot force him through unless he allows.

Oh, he wants to allow it.

beg for forgiveness at the altar of chances you let go

beg for forgiveness for the warning signs you dismissed

beg, sinner, and maybe you will be spared GOD’s (your own) righteous punishment

laughter spills from his throat like a curse.

Suicide feels like a religion, and being on the opposite end of religion is being buried under brimstone and hellfire and the knowledge that you can never earn your way out of your debt. He thinks that this, this guilt that stains the cracks of his fingers, can never be earned away. It can only fade and be covered up and be ignored, but it is there for the rest of his life, however long that may be.

Suicide feels like the letter of a loved one promising everything he’s ever wanted, and it breaks him apart when he burns it.

There cannot be two funerals on the same day in the Jackson family.

areyousureyouarenotrejectingsuicidebecauseyoufearfacingyourmotheragain

His teeth clack against each other as he grits his jaw. His muscles tighten. He wonders how it would feel to pull each string of them apart. Would it hurt more? Or would it be nothing compared to the acid causing his heart to melt against his ribcage and fuse with his bones so tightly he cannot breathe anymore?

Does flaying your soul alive in your mind count as self-harm?

He kind of hopes it does.

Then at least he is repenting.

if you cannot hear the pain you are not truly sorry

He does not wince at the snap of his wrist.

It’s just a monster.

It’s just some monster, he says, when he is asked what happened.

Just… just a monster.

Yes.

That is all.

(all and all and all and all and)

crush my bones to dust and use it to paint my guilt on your tombstone

They say seeing the body helps with closure but oh how scared he is. He knows dead bodies, he has seen them again and again, in war and in peace and in every time between, but this is different. This is so very different, and he is not scared, per se, but he is wondering how much the body will look like his mother.

He doesn’t want that to be his last memory of her. That is not who she was.

you grew me from the dirt under your fingernails and the love in your eyes. you grew me on freedom and kindness and loving strangers enough to save them.

and somehow i could not save you.

i am sorry.

He thinks that this is the worst part — the bureaucracy of the planning. The questions and the arrangements and the snippets of peace he gets before a well-meaning person he has mostly forgotten exists reaches out to him to give condolences and he is slammed back into violent reality. He thinks that this is the worst part — the fragile normality that dangles in front of him and is snatched away quicker than it came. A wound scabbing torn back open hurts worse the second and third and fourth times. At what point does it stop hurting to be ripped open? How many times can a wound be opened before it grows infected and the body stops trying?

There is guilt on his tongue and regret in his blood and love in his eyes. Her eyes. (The eyes his father gave him, but the eyes his mother loved.)

There is everything and there is nothing.

There is this.

atoneatoneatone

you have sinned.

you sin for thinking only about yourself, you selfish bastard

This is about her. This is about what happened.

But it is also about him, and the people she left behind. It is also about the living and how the dead leave the living to deal with their problems. It is about the way he thinks about her services and if he will speak and what he can say to ever properly represent who she was. It is about him, and how he feels guilty for feeling guilty, and how he knows this is about her but why can’t he also talk about him? Why can’t he snapshot the devastation wrought upon him internally and post it as an advertisement against suicide? Why can’t he talk about the jealousness that she did it forst and the hatred he feels for feeling jealous and the anger over the hatred and the grace over the anger over the hatred over the jealousy over over overoverover and

and

and

and

and

and

and

and

and he thinks he is going insane as he digs his nails into his flesh and he tries to see how deep they can go before the pain forces his mind to calm down

and he thinks it is weird when the blood stains the wood of his desk

and he thinks it is funny that the blood matches the color of the wood of his desk of his cabin of his home

and he laughs like that is funny enough to laugh at because

because

because if he does not laugh he will fucking scream

and he does not know how to be vulnerable enough to scream;

he thinks he has forgotten what that feels like.

laugh until the blood seeps from between your teeth as you bite down on the flesh of forgiveness, hoping devouring it will wash you clean like the murderer you are

Everyone asks how he is doing.

There is no right answer but there is certainly a wrong one, and he must find out what that is for everyone else. He does not know what that is for himself. There is no time to consider what he wants. (Wants and needs and hopes and dreams, all ashes of the same fire he learned to extinguish in himself long ago. Not his mother’s fault, but his father’s and his and the universe’s for granting him this existence. But his mother can do no wrong, not even now when she is being buried with her sins.)

Everyone thinks they can help him, that they know enough about grief to be just a little more credible than the previous visitor so he will come and ask them questions and they will feel self-important enough to deign to answer. He sees it on their faces — the genuine concern and the wolf-like hunger to be needed by someone vulnerable. He does not need, or desire, or want, or hope for help. He carves out help for himself out of his own sinew and bones because he does not trust anyone around them and how could anyone ever understand this kind of loss? No, he decides as he thanks them with a weary smile and sends them away, he does not need help and in fact, the more people who know about it, the angrier he gets.

She was his mother. (She was herself first but there is no one left to remember that.)

He does not want to share her memory.

It was always them against the world.

Now it is him and the memory of her that sits in the photo he holds.

She is smiling.

He thinks she shouldn’t be.

His mother — beautiful and strong and forever free. He wanted her to be happy but not like this and it hurts to know that she did this.

It doesn’t hurt because he thinks she chose death over him. He knows that is not the case. In fact, what really happened is so much more painful, because he knows she chose this as one final act of love for him. Because she felt like a burden, so heavy and unwanted and slow and boulder-like, that she thought he would be better off without him.

He doesn’t pretend to agree with that, but he understands.

He understands because he has felt the same about himself.

And, you know, maybe there was another line of thinking that ended on that bridge (water as his beginning and her ending is so fucking awful to him), but he doesn’t know for sure. He wonders if part of her was also just fed up with everything else and she figured she had nothing else to lose. It doesn’t make sense, but suicide isn’t supposed to make sense. (He imagines her at the kitchen counter, having these same thoughts about his suicide. Even in death, they are the same. When he lays in her bed that night, the cold feels different.)

let your anger consume you

let it fester until you can taste nothing else

you are right to hold it

Oh, he is so fucking angry at her.

He thinks he’s never been so angry at his mother, and this is unlike any anger he’s ever felt. It is anger that can only exist because some vital part of him is gone and was not surgically removed but rather taken and ripped out. Those jagged edges are bleeding and growing infected and he bites down on his lip hard enough to break it open because he needs to feel some representation of this anger. 

He watches blood flow like the trickle of a tap not quite turned off and then he wipes it away onto his jeans.

He doesn’t understand why she didn’t call. He doesn’t understand why she didn’t fucking say something because didn’t she know he would have come back and he would have done anything and everything to make her feel better? Doesn’t she know he would have been a good son? (“It’s not your job to look after me, I’m the parent.” But you are also my best friend and I see the cracks in your smile.)

Saw.

Anger, sharp and heated in the fire of grief, turns inward.

He will never forgive himself.

He will never forgive her.

i’m sorry, mom

please come back

i miss you

mom i’m scared

i don’t know what to do without you

mom?

please answer 

Silence weighs on the room and he finds it suffocating and he finds it disgusting and he is still so fucking angry because how DARE SHE—

HOW DARE SHE

HOW COULD SHE

I WOULD HAVE BEEN THERE FOR YOU

People want to talk to him. They want to bring him food. They tell him what kind of flowers she should have at her service and what kind of instrumental music and that if he picks this kind of casket it’s better than this kind because this kind is eco-friendly and also prettier and he could kill someone.

At least if he does it in the funeral home, they don’t have to transport the body anywhere else.

He leaves.

The earth cannot claim her.

i love you

did you know that?

or did my love start burning and i was too busy to realize when it started hurting you?

When did he get so busy that he didn’t see his mother suffering? When did he spend so much time away from her that he didn’t clock the way she pushed him away as a sign of her illness rather than a sign of his inadequacy? When did he forget to pay closer attention?

Yeah, he thinks, if she had died naturally, this would have been easier. (He knows it’s selfish to think that but he also knows he cannot say otherwise. Anything but suicide. Because this way, he must blame himself and he must blame her. Suicide is a mirror held up to ugly truths and he thinks it would be so much easier if she had died some other way so he didn’t have to confront his demons and hers now.)

He sees her demons. He sees her pain. And he selfishly grabs onto it all and devours it like a starving man, hoping that by feeling her pain, he can be close to her again. Just one more moment of closeness, just one more moment with his mom before she disappears forever (and he knows Hades will not let him see her).

he drinks his guilt like alcohol and he throws it up like a hangover

annabeth finds him on the floor, screaming at sally’s picture.

how good it feels when the words burn his throat and scratch his vocal cords and turn his skin so raw he spits up blood.

this is grief, he thinks, eating decayed love and welcoming the stomachache. this is a child’s love for their parent, to cry and curse and understand and beg. the juice of the rot drips down his chin and he does not care.

he should have been a better son.