Current mood:

frustrated

NaNoWriMo Words 2312 - 2835
There is a whole list of courses for the dead to take to learn how to be exactly what they were. Andrew had been dead for a few years, and was just now completing his requirements. He explained his relationship to me as something along the lines of a “senior thesis.” As a final demonstration of what they’ve learned, the dead must help another to understand their own death.


Unfortunately for Andrew, my case was not a simple one. We watched investigators question my family members in frustration. Had they noticed any changes lately? Was I secretive? Was I often depressed?

The man who was deemed my father seemed completely baffled. “She wasn’t that kind of person,” he pleaded with the investigators, as if they had already made up their minds and he was trying to change their opinion. “I’m telling you, if you just knew her…” His full-time job had become holding my mother up on her feet.

“She was always happy,” the mother chimed in. Her face had aged about ten years in the past few hours. “We were so close, we used to talk for hours. If something was wrong, she would have told me.”

I wished I could ask myself why I’d done it. It complicated matters that I had, apparently, been so secretive that not a single person saw my suicide coming. I could tell that Andrew was getting frustrated about taking my case. “You only get so much time,” he told me. “After a while, the living move on. They stop talking. It’s not like you can ask them what they think. If they move on, you get stuck.”

“Why can’t I just remember it?” I wanted to know. “Isn’t there some kind of class I can take that can help me remember?”

“Of course not,” he teased. “That would make things to easy.”

It turned out that there were all kinds of classes on memory available, but none of them would actually help me to remember my living life. There were classes to help me interpret what I learned about my memories, to preserve new memories, to use memories to predict the future, to forget memories, and to cope with memories, but there was no easy answer to my plight. I could not cut the corners of this discovery – I had to learn the story of my life manually.

Investigators uncovered few dirty little secrets from the scene. Yes, I had blown my brains out, but I had also taken an interesting pill concoction of Percocet, Diazepam, and Advil Cold & Sinus. Apparently, I hadn’t doubted my decision: the pills had been just in case I somehow missed with the gun.

My parents were beside themselves with this news, as it seemed almost ironic that they each played a hand in my death: Valium from my mother, Percocet from my father. It would make fantastic headlines! Secretive daughter steals drugs from parents’ professional life! And even more shame: my mother was a psychiatrist. My suicide would do wonders for her reputation. After all if a psychiatrist can’t help her own daughter, who could she help?