The day Cooper died, while the coroner and sheriff’s lieutenant were still at my house, I found the note Cooper had left on top of his Bible. It was brief, but it was something. Not until his belongings were returned to us a couple weeks later could I look through his phone. I found another, longer, somewhat more comforting note, a note with Cooper’s writing voice. A few days after finding the phone note, I thought to look at his Spotify.
It wrecked me.
When I hit “play,” the chorus of Shawn Mullins’ “Lullaby” started:
Everything is gonna be alright
Rockabye
Rockabye
Everything is gonna be alright
Rockabye
Rockabye
Rockabye
Bye, bye, bye, bye
All evidence to the contrary. Everything will never again be “alright.”
I’m indifferent to the rest of the song, but the chorus is haunting. I tried listening to it again today, over a year later, thinking maybe I’d add the song to the post. No. I can’t. You’ll have to click on the link if you want to hear it. I can listen to “I’ll Fly Away” and “Peace in the Valley,” the songs from Cooper’s celebration, but not “Lullaby.” Maybe never “Lullaby.”
I think my reaction is multifaceted. The lyrics, of course, were immediately upsetting. Drop-the-phone-and-sob upsetting. Clutch-a-tiny-velvet-bag-of-ashes-for-hours-because-I-could-not-let-go upsetting. That’s a given. More haunting than the lyrics are the questions that have tormented me since that day. Was he listening to that song right then, reassuring himself? If he was, did he stop the music? Or did a first responder stop the music? Maybe it was a fluke. Maybe someone just happened to stop the song at that point, leading into the chorus. Maybe I’m making more of it than I should. Could Cooper have stopped the song right there, knowing I’d find it? Was he reassuring me? All these questions over a song! One song.
That’s the thing with suicide, the thing I and other survivors need you to understand; I will never have these answers. There’s just no way. I can contort the circumstances around this song—a possibly-meaningless song, for Pete’s sake—to indicate numerous intentions, but I’ll never really know. It’s just one more question. One more act to explicate.
That’s what I do, what I’ve been doing for over a year—explicating Cooper’s last acts, last words, last days and weeks and months. Sometimes I wander back into his last years, trying to figure out when the illness started, when I missed signs. How long did he struggle? How long did he self medicate before that, too, became an issue? Could I have kept him home instead of having him hospitalized for what turned into a week? I don’t think so, but he hated the medication he had to take after the hospitalization. Yet even though he hated that the medicine kept him from feeling any emotion, good or bad, he faithfully followed the prescription, knowing another psychotic break was likely if he didn’t.
I do know some answers. Cooper and I had long talks in his last two months—the weeks between his hospitalization and his suicide—usually while I was driving us down country roads or while we were in the hammock swings. He was fairly open, I think. He talked about hallucinations and voices, about still not knowing for sure what was real, about things he remembered from his days lost in the wilderness of Shawnee National Forest. In his phone note, he wrote that he truly felt he’d died in the woods and the fact he made it out at all had been messing with him ever since. I don’t understand, but I know that belief was real to him and I’m grateful for the tiniest bit of explanation. Coop knew me well, knew I’d wonder about every single detail. The location of his death, leaning against a cedar tree in a rural cemetery, was a mystery for a couple of weeks. When we could pick up his phone and look through it, I found a second note. The last line says, “*Name of cemetery* means nothing. I just like that cedar.” With those two sentences, he answered some questions. I couldn’t figure out why that cemetery, and nobody would tell me precisely where, but Cooper told me. He knew I’d need some answers.
In that same note, Cooper assured us that his actions were his own, that he was taking back control of some part of his life. Taking back control from me? From the medication? From the darkness in his mind? All of the above? I’ll never know. Maybe knowing would soothe me, but it’s possible knowing would torture me beyond what I already face. It doesn’t matter, because I have no way of finding answers.
In the absence of answers, I and other survivors cling to what we know to be true: Our people loved us but couldn’t bear this world for another day. A friend commented today that Cooper would be proud of me, that he doesn’t want me to hurt anymore and I’m working on it; I really am. I just don’t know how to get there. Saturday’s Out of the Darkness walk helped, and I rode the high of maybe making a difference, of healing a slice of my heart, for a few days. The effects of the walk—the money raised, the personal connections forged, the visible community—will last.
One thing we do know, those of us left behind by suicide: We know the constant wondering does us no good. We know we cause ourselves pain and that we have to make peace with not knowing. With never knowing. Knowing we should stop is one thing; actually stopping is quite another. I know I shouldn’t drink soda or eat pizza but I still do, and those are habits I could break if I tried. Controlling my mind is different. In the dark of night, in the hours between when I crawl into bed and when I finally fall asleep, I have little control over the questions blaring in my mind. We are supposed to sleep in a cool, dark, quiet room. You know what happens when it’s cool, dark, and quiet? Questions. Questions happen. Tears happen. Guilt happens.
Dark and quiet isn’t working. Questions hide in the dark and quiet.
So, I’ve reverted to a teenage-Tonya habit. I leave music on all night. No Sony Dream Machine with a sleep timer for me. I just let the music play softly—I can barely hear it—all night. Maybe some answers will slip into my soul while I sleep. Maybe the music notes can drown out the suicide notes.
I listen to songs and friends telling me to turn it over to God, and I’m trying. I try every day to let go of the things I can’t control, the questions I can’t answer, but every night, the same loop runs in my mind. Spotify on my iPad in the overnight hours can’t hurt. Could help. One thing is for sure — I won’t be playing “Lullaby.” That song does not lull me to sleep and it appears to be full of lies. Rockabye my ass. Everything is not gonna be alright.
Woods Writes 