My sister, Anna, pulled the trigger, but the gun didn’t ignite. She drew a sigh of relief and wouldn’t try to die again for twelve years. At the time she was ten.
I was too young for my sister to confide in me, but our cousin, seven years older, knew these small details, snippets of her I collected in the aftermath, recreational drugs she’d done, the secret of her failed suicide attempt. My cousin tried to scare her. She told her she’d better not do anything like that ever again, or she’d go to Hell. Anna replied, I’m already going to Hell.
I don’t believe in Hell, and I don’t think she did either. I think my cousin didn’t believe Anna would ever really do it, or she thought it was a ploy for attention, or she wanted to seem edgy or… or…or there are unanswered questions that I will never know the answers to; I’ll never know the truth beyond the fact that she was neglected and struggling with chronic depression, struggling not to feel empty and worthless.
She wanted to be loved for who she was, but she couldn’t fully be herself because we live in Texas, and in Texas you can’t be openly gay, not even to your own family, unless you live in a progressive city, and even then it isn’t easy.
The second to last time I saw her alive was Christmas of 2007. In her red Jeep she turned to me smiling and said, So you know I’m gay, right? I was casual, Yeah, accepting, of course. Because it had been obvious from the beginning.
That night we picked up her girlfriend, and we went to a bar with the biggest dance floor I’d ever seen. She snuck me sips of her beer because I was just old enough to get in the door. I hated the taste, but like her, I wanted to belong.
I watched her dance to a song about ‘boots with fur’ from where I sat, the happiest I’d ever seen her.
It felt like a turning point. We’d both finished high school, she trusted me with her secret, and I thought we had our whole lives ahead of us.
I missed the fact that she was still living at home, three years after graduating, with an even bigger secret, sleeping away most of the hours in a day, bouncing around dead end jobs, contemplating community college. She loved babies and was an aunt to our other sister’s two boys; she helped out at a local daycare. Nothing ever seemed to stick or pan out. She wasn’t lazy; she was sick. That is the truth.
The truth is we didn’t live together but saw each other every other weekend for eighteen years; she was my stepsister who I’d known since I was one-year-old, who when I referred to her as stepsister, she was bothered and asked me if I’d call her sister. It’s a promise I kept.
The last time I saw my sister, Anna, alive was when I bought my first car three months before she died. The last time I talked to her was when I got rear ended in my brand new Kia, one week later. She was worried and told me to promise I’d call her later after my x-rays, but I was tired. I was okay. I didn’t call.
In late April my dad called me at five in the morning to let me know he found her. I still have PTSD from that phone call, his voice, a tremor, and everything after, dusted in something I can’t quite name, everything, a shade darker, like life became a light bulb that dims and dims until it goes out completely.
I found out the details later, that her girlfriend had broken up with her, got to read her suicide note that reassured us, It’s just me, it’s not my family. It’s just me.
People always wonder how she died, and it wasn’t by bullet. It was more painful, one of the worst ways. My sister, Anna, hung herself.
I know as I struggle with alienation from my family and my own depression, that her suicide changed me, and I’m not sorry. I’m not sorry for talking about it. I'm not sorry for any second of any day except that she felt—it’s just me.
Kaci Skiles Laws is a closet cat-lady and creative writer who reads and writes voraciously in the quiet moments between motherhood and managing Crohn's Disease. She grew up on a small farm in a Texas town alongside many furry friends, two sisters, and a brother. She has known tragic loss too well, and her writing is a reflection of the shadows lurking in her psyche. Her work can be viewed at: https://kaciskileslawswriter.wordpress.com/
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