PicoBlog

This year, my father and I made a suicide pact, although I feel the term may be a bit misleading, here. For a phrase that contains the word “suicide” in it, it's really more about staying alive. But maybe I'm getting ahead of myself.

Last December, as we were preparing to celebrate Christmas, my father confessed that, unbeknownst to me, almost 4 years prior, he had made a suicide attempt, and that it would have been successful had he not changed his mind at the 11th hour and gone to the ER. I remember being away on a trip with friends at the time he described. I also remember coming home a week earlier than I'd planned, because I was missing him so much, and I remember how clingy he was and how relieved yet pained he seemed to see me. It was a crack in his mask, a brief moment of vulnerability, one I would not get to experience another time for years.

He hid it from me, as suicidal people do, and he decided to deal with his mental issues on his own, as men do– or at least attempt to do. And of course, as a consequence of that, for all those years, I had no idea.

When he told me, it was like my entire world collapsed. My perception of him as this infallible, unbreakable statue of a man, my perception of myself as this ditzy, carefree woman whose mistakes weren't that consequential, the illusion that either of us was invincible, all shattered into a thousand pieces.

For months, I had nightmares about it. I kept picturing his cold, limp, lifeless body soaking in bloody water, waiting for me in the bathroom. All my sins, expunged from his body in the most visceral way. I felt guilty, of course, because I knew what had made him feel desperate enough to consider death a more viable option than confronting the feelings devouring him from the inside. I knew what part I'd played in it, ignorant as I had been.

That guilt wrecked me for a while, before it was replaced by anger. How dare he attempt to leave me all on my own, to abandon me? To try and leave me heartbroken, with countless questions and no answers? He hadn't confessed anything, hadn't left a note, all I would have had would've been his death. But then I'd remember what he told me– that the reason he'd changed his mind was because he didn't want me to find his dead body and be traumatized. How considerate of him.

It took me months to finally realize what his intentions were when he opened up to me, that December. I'd been so self-centered, I hadn't even considered why he would drop such a massive bomb on me seemingly out of nowhere. Why would someone like him, a very proud man who'd spent his entire life projecting an illusion of strength and composure, who was very attached to the image he had of being above it all, yes, why on Earth would that man willingly bring down his walls?

The answer came in waves. First it stuck out to me that he suddenly seemed oddly preoccupied with my physical health– a fixation on how much I smoked or drank, and then on my mental health. “You're hurting yourself, you know that?”, he'd tell me whenever he caught me namesearching or obsessively reading hateful messages stacking up in my inbox instead of deleting them. And then…

It hit me. He was afraid of me committing suicide.

Of course, at first, the idea seemed ludicrous. After all, I loved being alive, and spite alone made taking suicide-baiting messages to heart impossible. I was a strong, energetic woman who took shit from no one and the mere thought of someone like me taking their own life seemed laughable. But then he'd remind me of how alike we were. My ego was his first, as was my penchant for seeming unbothered by everything and always making light of my potential mental illnesses. The more I looked, the more eerily similar we were in so many aspects, and suddenly, the fear he had of someone as unstable and complicated as me taking her own life seemed extremely reasonable.

He didn't want to guilt me, he didn't want to upset me, he just wanted me to take that threat seriously, and to open up to him as he'd done to me. And so, I did.

Sometimes my anxiety alone feels like it's going to kill me. Like the pain in my mind is gonna reach such heights, my brain is just gonna self-destruct. But bodies don't work like that, you see, they need a little help to go to sleep. They need a rope, a knife, a step in the right direction, or a whole jar of sleeping pills. Okay, Dad, okay, I think I get it.

His confession wasn't enough, of course. Sure, he'd made an effort to open up, but what guarantee did I have that he wouldn't make another attempt at taking his own life?

And so that's where our suicide pact came in. I didn't want him to die, and he wanted me to live. With the guarantee that the other would follow if we ever got carried away with dark thoughts, we were now in a weird, comforting stalemate, incapable of hurting ourselves, for fear of taking the other down with us.

Well, until yesterday, that is.

I don't even know how it came up. Maybe we were being serious, or maybe we were just joking around, but our conversation took a turn when he asked me what would happen if one day, we both wanted to die, at the same time. Who would be there to save us?

Of course I had no answer, so I joked about either of us committing murder-suicide if things got rough, before deciding against it when I realized I didn't want either of us to be remembered as a murderer.

We ended up casually agreeing on a double suicide. Wouldn't it be nice to finally be delivered from the pains of life, to slip into eternal slumber together? No one left behind, only us. Only sleep. Never had death seemed so comforting and peaceful. There was a fun, floating moment when we both realized we felt kinda guilty at our own lack of guilt at the thought of not trying to save each other in a moment of weakness.

“It's fucked up I'd feel fine letting you die, but who would be there to judge me? As long as we do it together, it's not that bad, is it?”

I currently don't plan on killing myself, at least not for a while, and I think Dad's curious to see how much I can improve, so he's not dying yet. Which is why I appreciate this suicide pact so much- as long as one of us wants to live, we are both saved.

And, well, if one day neither of us wants to live anymore, I take it we'll be saved too, in a way.

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