monkeyfrog:

She’s been threatening suicide in one way or another since she was born. I wasn’t there, but I’ve known her since she came home from the hospital. She has carried a black cloud close to her the entire time, and everyone could see it.

She was always frightened easily. She would lie, she would hide, she would stall, but she would never come clean. She just couldn’t. Not for anyone. She was tormented at school, even stabbed with a pen in third grade. Our home was not conducive to sensitive.

In her twenties, she carried a hand gun in her briefcase. She carried that box everywhere she went, even to the gas station. There was no telling when the time would come to pull into one of the driveways in the national forest near her home and finally finish it.

I got tired. I got tired of hearing the threats and the lies and feeling the visceral pain of never knowing what was coming and so I told her to go ahead. Just fucking finish it. Because part of me had died each time she said it, each time I saw the gun or the stockpile of pills that she pulled out at every visit, as if to reassure both of us she was still ready. I told her to go ahead, because it would be easier than spending the rest of my life waiting for the call.

Her husband will have cancer surgery next week. He is something. I wouldn’t wish either of them on anybody, and how it works is beyond me. He was to work and work during the run up time to the surgery, because there will be no money for a while. Instead, he insisted, like the demanding child he is, to do what he wanted.

I have his DNR here. It’s been here for days. I walk by it and I give it the stink eye. I move it from table to counter to chair to bed stand, glaring at it with each move but not yet reading and signing. Aren’t we all too young?

Today, I hear the phone through the water I’m running. It is quacking, so I know who it is. I rush around, looking for the damned phone which is muffled in my pocket. It is her. I assume she is calling with a surgery time, because I have said I will drive the two hours out to sit with her and wait.

They are going to a biker thing. They will be riding out of state tonight with one tail light on the bike, after dark. She is calling to tell me about her will. She tells me where the important papers are, who the farm will go to. She tells me about the spreadsheet in the computer and she emails me a contact list.

Just in case, she says.

When people give me shit about not having more of a social life, or not going out and spending my weekends hungover and in a haze, I would like to point them to this post by the wonderful monkeyfrog, and to any of the others that I’ve liked tonight or will like tomorrow night, as evidence to the fact that I do have a social life, and that life is made better by these posts, and tweets, and conversations that I am involved with.