it's been a year since we found out Ally died. about five minutes ago, i opened up my cupboard and found a full bottle of pills.
they weren't the same ones that killed Ally. no, my supply of prescription pain meds stays in my side cabinet, but i was prescribed the same stuff she died by.
i remember being so unsettled, swallowing the same dose that Ally took each night, or should've. in England, it felt strange to smile in photos, cheers with a drink, smile mundanely at an acquantaince knowing that i was there for a funeral, celebrating the life of a woman who smiled wide in photos and always had a drink in hand. should i be drinking?
a friend of mine got a dui in december. we had drunk together that evening, but i thought he went home far earlier in the night than he had. hearing of his arrest the next evening, i felt so much guilt over choosing to gloss over his 5 cocktails when his limit was 4. should i have been so unobtrusive, letting tipsy him make a choice to exceed limits sober him set?
i didn't drink for months after that. partially from guilt/fear, but also because of my antidepressants; i hadn't known one shouldn't drink on venlafaxine until a half-drunk free celebratory gin & tonic post-show had the room spinning for hours.
no, the pills that i had found in my cabinet were the ones that nearly killed me back in April.
when i had serotonin syndrome, I've never been so fearful of myself. I've never experienced mania or active self destructive tendencies like that before, so it was terrifying to watch and feel like I'd inexplicably ruin my life. I'll admit to having passing suicidal ideation. that happens when you live in chronic pain most of the time. (it's been my normal, I'm not actively suicidal, but it's just an intrusive thought that will occasionally emerge. not trying to worry, just giving a smidgen of context.) but l've always reassured my own catastrophizing by ensuring I don't access things that I could harm myself with in the event I'm not of right mind. (I take hella meds, they sometimes interact weirdly, and I'm very paranoid about safety, so better safe than sorry.) and like a broken record, my brain keeps spiralling back to Ally.
she didn't take her pain meds for weeks, long enough to build up a fatal dose and detox it from her system. she must've been in neuropathic pain daily, and i can only imagine the mental anguish she must've endured to refuse the medication just to get to the end. but the thing that really breaks me is that she chose it 100%.
Ally had woken up days after taking too many pills. she read the texts from her loved ones, saw their reminders about her upcoming vacations, heard their care, and then swallowed more pills. given how many people i've lost to suicide in the past few years, the above fact just makes me so mournful. i really had clung to the “view from halfway down” regret like a life raft. if that wasn’t true, what does that mean?
i think back on a memory from a week after ally’s passing. her son, exhausted but emotionless, simply said, “some things were inevitable.” i don’t like that sentiment still. it feels like I’m falling off the edge of a limestone cliff, fingers grasping at the crumbling ledges dissolving under them.
health-wise, I’m still not fully back to where i should be prior to April. I am not as bad as I was last July, but I'm not as good as I was in March. for months, I've had "library will/estate planning" on my to-do list. when i run errands tomorrow, i doubt i will bite that particular bullet. I've had the perpetual debate with myself over my potential funerary arrangements since i was seven.
instead, I think I'm going to go into the garden and place some stones on the grass. in time, the vibrant green of the st. augustine will molt into the sludge brown of decay. bugs and fungi and worms and roots will intertwine, only for their secret affairs to be revealed by the shifting of pathway pavers. i think of my grandmother, whose body had to wait until summer for the frozen ground to thaw before she got peace. the tab for “sky burials” remains open on my phone, alongside “diclofenac toxicity to birds”. my other grandmother chose ash, and i shiver from the imagined heat.
I'm going to try a pimm's cup, and maybe do more than nurse it, but probably not. i'll wander the aisles of a hardware store in early morning, feeling the sympathetic resonance from my 2009 self, doing the same. (she was just beginning to feel not particularly keen on life, which is hard to consider now as an adult who works with that age.) I'II rearrange the mise en scene in the dining room again, shifting the brass figurines from my late grandfather who i never knew.
I'll shift out the dried flowers from the 2020 wedding- perhaps the blooms would remind us all of happier anniversaries instead. I'll bake my mother's favorite lace cookies, but a vegan batch with almond and coconut too. a peace offering to the ever changing.
I'll trim the ferns back, spread the muhly seed, and repot the sunshine mimosa. both of my late grandmothers had lush gardens, and i hope they see themselves in me. sometimes, when i get dizzy in the heat, I'll blink and see grandma sally's overflowing garden beds superimposed over the ligustrums.
