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A WORTHY HOST
by Trinity Demask
My friend killed herself.
Her daughter called to tell me, to utter, “she took her
life” in a practical, cordial tone that broke like waves on the rocky shore of
those four words. In that moment, I became an unwitting participant in a thoughtless,
invisibly violent act no child should be asked to endure. All the disbelieving
questions died in my throat. I could not ask them of this woman who had been so
cruelly drafted to bear and spread this toxic burden.
My friend undoubtedly had not considered the resiliency of
her pain. She sought to escape it, diving into that gaping unknown where
nothing could follow. In her dash for freedom she unleashed this plague upon
all who loved her, binding her agony to their own, propagating a new suffering fresh
in its virility and ancient in its will to survive; a parasite of misery
perpetually seeking a worthy host to spread its seed anew.
I inherited this infection. The strain passed from my mother
whose emotional firmament is fickle and flighty as the child she’d been when
her father bequeathed his agony to his wife and four daughters. I carry in my
mind two images of him, neither first-hand. My mother possessed only a single
washed-out photo of a squinting, pinched-faced man in a gray fedora.
The other image I hold contains no face, only work boots
swinging just above the reach of the basement’s dirt floor, an overturned
bottle of liquid courage resting on its side on the cool earth. I imagine his
suffering released, floating heavy in the air, briefly disembodied until it
reached the nostrils of my grandmother whose maternal intuition stopped my
mother from descending the stairs.
And so it was my strong, Midwestern, no-nonsense grandma who
found him – she who had already borne the loss of two children and in that
private torment had made acquaintance with the rising waters of despair and had
learned to tread them quiet and steady – it was she who discovered her
husband’s failed attempt to swing above those waters from a thick rope. And
still, after all that grief and the hardship that lay ahead, she arose from
that basement stoic and uncompromising in her will to survive: an unworthy
host.
My mother hosted her share with a willful dissociation that
kept the contagion’s touch at bay even as it crippled her ability to love and
mother with any true connection. She passed it to me without instruction or
explanation, a mark on my cellular memory like a smallpox inoculation scar for
which I have no conscious recollection. Its ownership, however faint, serves as
a warning against the spread of this engulfing despair, an unspoken pact to
contain it within until it can be carried naturally, honorably into darkness.
