Testimonial written by Mora Martin*
Photographs: Courtesy of the author
If you’ve missed “My Journey Through Grief #2”, read it here.
#3: The Breakdown: Anger, Sadness (and a Wide Disarray of New Emotions)
In my case, stepping into grief involved a lot of talking, a lot of crying, and coming to understand that there is nothing definitive about death, as I thought one afternoon, angry because I was feeling that familiar discomfort creeping back again—the fear of rejection and abandonment. I felt angry because it seemed ridiculous and foolish to continue seeing the world through such lenses. Yet, ridiculous and foolish as it felt, I cried all the same.
I felt sorry for the way the tears came to my eyes, so I hugged myself in the kitchen with my damp hands, and thought, again, of my dad. “Thank you, Dad,” I said aloud. “Thank you for leaving me with this mortal wound that reopens a little every time someone threatens or decides to leave my life. For making me assume that everyone inevitably will.” Because after all, if my dad didn’t want me, who would? Who could choose me? I wondered how others might feel—those who hadn’t been struck by the axe that split me in half and left me with no answers. Would they trust their relationships more? Would they bear less of a burden when one was broken?
Hardly anyone in my circle knows how to talk about suicide, and very few can open up about dealing with grief. That is why I couldn’t bring myself to share with them that I’ve been having conversations with my dad lately, telling him angrily what I never could before: How could he leave me here, without answers, scraping through an old pot of memories that weren’t even mine, inventing others, gathering fragments of stories from relatives to piece together a copy-pasted image passed on to me?
The periods of sadness sometimes turned, too, into long conversations where I asked him why he hadn’t waited, why he hadn’t held on a little longer. Had he really tried everything? Had he truly tried his best to save himself? Wasn’t my existence enough? Didn’t he want to see me grow, and be there on my birthdays? Didn’t he care about the enormous hole his decision would leave behind? And I also blamed him, for not giving me the chance to save him, to talk to him. Because of that, I’ve spent my life trying to save everyone, even Jesus—who, in my way of thinking, also committed suicide.
Amidst the dance of emotions, a wave of calm and gratitude would sometimes wash over me, like a soothing balm. Then, I’d tell him I forgave him, and that we should stay close as I felt we were now. I would ask him to take care of me, wherever he was.
And when I needed a break from the anguish—the days in the swamp of unanswered questions—I began asking him to save me instead. I offered to make him a little altar and to light a candle for him, if that’s what he wanted. And I even asked him, knowing that it didn’t make any sense, to stay. That he would let it hurt all over, that he would cry and sink into his own swamps, that he would wake up and open his eyes, that he would come back.
I tried to travel back to that moment and asked him if he didn’t feel me standing beside him, if he didn’t hear me shouting at him, if he didn’t pause because he thought he smelled me.
I went through several periods of sadness, anger, and sadness again, for all the time we didn’t get to know each other, or to share more, for the time I didn’t get to tell him I loved him. For all the life he didn’t live and the opportunities he didn’t explore, for all the love that he didn’t express and that was left unsaid, on a pause.
Time unshared, stories untold.
Fights on any tired Sunday.
Time.
All of that time we didn’t have together transformed into all the love that I now carry, encapsulated, and that I could only give to him. What do I do with all this now? Where does it go?
In 2022, I joined a therapy group for sons and daughters of people who died by suicide. Week after week, I confirmed that, despite our different stories, we all shared the same inexplicable feelings of guilt, helplessness, anger, and infinite anguish.
Gradually, as I began to empathize with my father’s pain, I found empathy for my own process—for all the steps of a mourning journey that continues to unfold and hurt in new ways over the years. I came to understand that grief isn’t linear, but rather an upward spiral that begins but never truly ends. Because although we revisit the same subject, we are never the same; we keep changing, growing, understanding that what matters more than the event itself is the story we tell ourselves about it, the narrative of how we are experiencing it within.
In one of those painful meetings, I offered my dad to make a pact: that the love we had to offer and couldn’t share with each other would always be a little bit more of a beacon than the anger and the broken heart. Because love, like him, and like me, exists in the present. And that’s stronger and can withstand anything, even death.
“My Journey Through Grief” is delivered in four parts. Continue reading #4 here.
*Mora Martin was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. At the age of 4, she learned to read and write with her grandmother while on vacation in Mar del Plata. From that moment, she realized that the written and spoken word was the gateway to creating her own infinite world of imagination, creativity, and self-growth. As a child, she voraciously read everything she could find and explored poetry and prose, bringing fantastic (and not so fantastic) characters to life. She attended several creative writing courses and non-fiction workshops. She lives in Buenos Aires, where she works in philanthropy and artistic production for cultural events.
