Recently someone asked me if my mom was suicidal. I had what was kind of a flash realization about my understanding of suicidality. This realization likely does not apply to all circumstances, so if you are reading and you disagree with me, please take this as from my own experience alone.

In that moment, I thought, you have to be in some kind of relationship with life in order to have the strength, vision, capacity, to end your own. I had the thought, that in some way, a suicide is a declaration of the self not letting the depression win. Yes, its awful, its devastating, its the wrong way. But in that moment I realized that my mom was not suicidal because the depression had killed her a different way - it had kind of subsumed her and taken over her body, like a demon. The longer it could thrive in her, the bigger it would grow and the smaller she would become. At that point, she was barely recognizable to me. She didn’t care enough about life to end hers. Does that make sense?

She stares straight out. She doesn’t maintain basic hygiene, she wasn’t eating. Her body was beginning to deteriorate in other small ways - an old damaged nerve had gone haywire and her left hand was left basically useless, and so on.

I don’t think of this person I describe as my mom. My mom is my hero. She is an activist, an athlete, a driven, witty, loving, courageous woman. The person in front of me is not a person, it is a disease wearing my mothers skin, looking out from behind her eyes. Its something I’ve never experienced before and wish on no one.

The bamboo.

The bamboo is the density of it. I cut and cut and cut this damn plant and it is literally growing up from beneath my feet faster than I can take it down. I can’t see through it. I can’t cut through it. It keeps coming back.