I keep thinking about my father’s suicide, partly because of Christmas. I spent Christmas with him when I was a kid during my elementary school years and into my early adolescence. I have good memories of Christmas with him. Although now that I’m almost 40, he’s dead, and I’ve had a lot of time and distance to consider things in retrospect, I’ve been having this underlying sense of anger, like it’s leaking out the cracks of my good memories, not exactly ruining them, but definitely leaving a lingering sourness.

Of course, the main reason he’s on my mind is because the anniversary of his death is in three weeks. I want to go to Texas, but I’m not sure I can work it out. I went for the one year anniversary, but I didn’t go last year. I intended to, but I had some kind of cold type illness. Driving solo, halfway across the country and back, is therapeutic, but tedious, and at the last minute, I decided I wasn’t feeling up to it.

I go back and forth in my mind about should I go or shouldn’t I. When I go, I visit the grave, I take a flower arrangement, I remember the funeral, and how if I’d only come to Texas two days earlier, maybe he’d still be alive. If only, if only, if only. When I go to the grave, I always have this sense that I should talk to him. I certainly like the idea that he can hear me and is getting something from what I say, but you know I’m not a spiritual kind of person, so I don’t really think anyone or anything is listening, and I feel like a dipshit. I might as well go talk to a tree or a plate of hot wings. I never have a sense of resolution, and I suppose resolution isn’t possible. As people told me in the days and weeks that followed his death, there is no going back to what I knew. It’s a new normal that happens to be an open-ended void of inconclusion, which apparently isn’t a word, but should be.

Then there’s all the recent gun talk, so that’s got me thinking about him. It rubs me the wrong way when people talk about mentally ill people being violent towards others as if that’s the norm. Obviously and tragically, that happens, but people with mental illness are infinitely more likely to be violent towards themselves. I know it’s morbid, but I’m a visual person, and my mind reflexively fills with images of him shooting himself, a bullet in his head, blood all over his shower, him slumped in a heap. He lived for a couple of hours. He called 911 right before he did it so the police would come. Then the ambulance came, they took him to the hospital, they tried to save him.

He loved guns. He had a bunch of them. He hunted. He probably belonged to the NRA, or at least supported them. Then he used one to kill himself. It was a small gun, a handgun. I don’t know if it was a pistol. Can pistols and handguns be the same thing? I don’t know. I don’t need to know, so if you know, don’t tell me. It wasn’t registered. I think it was old, or at least old enough that it was acquired before registering guns was a thing. My aunt has it. She wanted it, like a souvenir. That seems weird to me, but under the circumstances, I accept it. She’s a lunatic gun freak who thinks everyone should have an arsenal. I hate guns. I think they’re stupid. I don’t understand anyone’s obsession with guns and weapons. Collect cuckoo clocks. Collect model cars. Collect fucking paperweights. I wish guns didn’t exist.

My father actually did collect model cars, but that wasn’t satisfying enough to give up his fondness for guns. He was a little OCD about collecting NASCAR shit. We have multiple boxes of everything from limited edition NASCAR model cars that are supposedly worth some kind of money to a collection of empty Kellogg’s cereal boxes with NASCAR people on them that as far as we’ve been able to figure out, aren’t worth the cereal that once filled them. All of his stuff tortures me. It takes up space, so much of it has no meaning to me other than that it meant something to him, and because I had such a negligible connection to him for most of the last 25 years of his life, it’s all I have. It makes me mad too. I can’t think about all his hobbies and interests, and all the time and money he devoted to his hobbies – cars, flying airplanes, scuba diving, guns, fishing and boats – without being reminded of his choice to spend his time and money on that shit instead of having some kind of better, more meaningful relationship with me.

I’m reluctant to post about any of this. It’s depressing. No one wants to talk about it with me, no one knows what to say, and if I talk about it, then people feel obligated to say or do something. Plus, I feel like a whiner. I want to talk about it occasionally, like now, but there isn’t anyone I want to talk to. I don’t want to whine to people I know. I don’t want to talk to people I don’t know, like on a forum for survivors of suicide. I tried that, and it wasn’t for me. As I mentioned, talking to his grave isn’t the answer, although that won’t stop me from saying something the next time I’m there, mostly just to confirm that it doesn’t work. I started to post on Facebook, and I decided I’d regret posting. So I’m posting here. I never post here anymore, so I don’t think anyone reads. That’s consoling I guess… I don’t fucking know.

It’s Mother’s Day. Mother’s Day used to be all about celebrating my mom, and I never conceived of it as anything else. I can’t say when it occurred to me that it was something more than that. My evolving conception of it has been a few years in the making. As I’ve watched my peers get pregnant and have children, I realized the daughter age bracket had expanded into the mom age bracket, and I started to feel oddly out of place. It wasn’t until last Mother’s Day that it really hit me that most women my age don’t just honor their own moms, but also get to be honored as moms. Last year, Mother’s Day made me sad… really sad.

Unfortunately, not having kids hasn’t saved me from ever-increasing gray hair, so two weeks ago, I was at the salon to get my hair colored. As I stood at the counter to check in, I noticed a promotional sign they had posted for Mother’s Day spa specials, and I felt my stomach sink. The day was coming. Like plenty of grown women, my mom doesn’t live nearby, so other than a short phone call, there would be no brunch or other time spent celebrating my mom. Without that, Mother’s Day has become an uncomfortable reminder that I’m never going to be a full-fledged member of womanhood.

To put this into context, I know Mother’s Day isn’t hard for me like it is for women who have lost their moms, or those who have struggled with infertility and miscarriages. I would never pretend to know the pain those women experience on this day. I can only imagine how difficult it is for them, and my heart aches for them all. However, for reasons that are less clear than might be for those women, I am sad, and I feel alone.

When I was about 20, I started to think having children might not be a good idea for me. The notion stuck, and while I had lingering ambivalence about it, I figured it was the best decision for me, so I got a tubal ligation just shy of my 32nd birthday. A big part of my reasoning was related to diabetes. Having already needed surgery for retinopathy at age 25, and having ever-increasing levels of protein in my urine from kidney damage that was being treated with medication and regular check-ups with a nephrologist, I was fearful that pregnancy would be more than my body could handle. I was afraid of losing my vision, having kidney failure, and most of all, I was afraid of dying.

I was concerned about miscarriages or a complicated pregnancy. I was concerned about having a baby that wasn’t normal and healthy in all conceivable ways that babies are supposed to be normal and healthy, and of course, I was concerned about having a child who could develop type 1. I feel like the guilt of having a child with type 1 would kill me.

There were other non-diabetes reasons that I chose not to have kids. More personally, I don’t have a great deal of confidence that I’d be a good parent because there are aspects of my personality that don’t seem like quality ingredients in the recipe to make a great mom. I was concerned about my depression, how and if it could be managed during a pregnancy, and the likelihood that my child would eventually develop depression, a concern only confirmed after my father committed suicide in 2010, and I subsequently learned more about the mental health issues on that side of my family.

Less personally, I’m concerned about over-population and the environment, because, with all due respect to those who have chosen to have children, having a child is about the worst thing the average person can do to the planet. I’m constantly worried about the state of the country and the world with religious extremism, bigotry, and a long list of societal ills that make me cross my fingers that the world doesn’t self-destruct before my time is up. Not to completely devalue the things that make life and the world beautiful, but when I catch the news, I’m grateful to not be leaving a child in what seems like a perpetual socio-political shit storm.

I’ve given an incredible amount of thought to my decision. I set the choice in stone by getting my tubes tied, and I’m committed to following through despite ongoing ambivalence and doubt. I have very rationally weighed the pros and cons, and when the doubt surfaces, I weigh them again. I always, inevitably, without fail arrive at the same conclusion. Even when I consider the option to adopt, I still can’t reconcile the fact that I don’t think I’m really cut out to be a parent, at least not a parent to human babies – with all my heart, I love and am absolutely devoted to my animal children.

But I wonder. What would it be like to be pregnant? What would it be like to have a pint-sized version of me and Jason? Would the joy be worth the heartache and headache? Would I love it and think it was the greatest thing I ever did? Would I regret it, and wish I had stuck with the better safe than sorry approach I’ve ultimately chosen? Not knowing the answers is really hard.

Because having a child is not something one can take back or do over, my decision to not have a child has been the most careful, thoroughly-considered decision I have ever made. It was not necessarily a hard decision to make, but I’m finding it’s the most difficult decision to live with despite all my perfectly valid reasons for choosing as I have. I think I’ve made the responsible choice. I think it would have been an irresponsible risk to choose otherwise, a risk I wasn’t willing to take, but I’m struggling to be OK with it nonetheless. On Mother’s Day, when it feels like every woman my age and older is being celebrated, I wish I knew what I was missing, and I wish I didn’t feel so alone in my uncertainty.

I’m 39, and this is it. Jason has unequivocally said he doesn’t want children, and my mixed feelings persist – hardly a compelling case to apply for adoption, or get my tubal reversed. There was a time when we could have potentially changed our minds, but the window is closing, and I don’t think anything is going to stop it. Mother’s Day makes me afraid that once it’s closed, I’m going to regret our choice, that on Mother’s Day 5 or 10 years from now, I’ll be crushed that there isn’t a munchkin making burnt toast for me, and giving a handmade Mother’s Day card to me. I’m sad because the opportunity to have children is slipping through my fingers as I maneuver closer to 40. I’m sad because despite all the unwavering evidence to the contrary, I’m scared I’ve made a terrible mistake, and today, and every Mother’s Day for the rest of my life will remind me of that.

Today is the second anniversary of my father’s suicide. I’ve spent the last year thinking I would go to Texas to see some of my family, be in my hometown, and visit the grave as I had done last year, but when Jason and I looked at our finances a couple of weeks ago, we decided it wasn’t something we could swing. Since my father and I didn’t have a good relationship, being in my hometown is the only thing that gives me any sense of connection to him, although it’s a tenuous connection at best. Still, I can’t put to rest the longing to have a connection to him, presumably because I am no more distant to him now than I was during the last few years of his life. The only difference is that the potential for reconciliation died when he put the gun to his head and pulled the trigger.

So today, I’m here at home in Philadelphia, and most everything that makes me feel connected to him is there in Texas, so all I have is his stuff piled in my basement and the memories of that day forward. I think about how this time two years ago, I was going about my merry business while my family was trying to figure out what to do, including how to contact me because I hadn’t been in contact with any of them for several years prior to my father’s suicide. I think about the message from my cousin to call my aunt, the conversation with my aunt. “Your father took his own life.” The sheer incomprehensibility of it. I cried. I called my mom. Jason bought plane tickets, and the next day we went to Texas.

I remember the first night we were there, I abruptly awoke in the middle of the night, scared and out of breath after feeling his presence and seeing a bright white light. I have no idea if it was something outside of me or just my troubled unconscious. The funeral home was able to make him presentable for the casket, and I remember he didn’t look like himself. I remember standing at the graveside for the service, and the short stacked heels of my pumps slowly sinking into the soft, moist soil.

I’ve come to see that there is no true healing from this. Residual pain lingers. There are things that comfort me, like acknowledgement from those who were close to him that my presence in their lives is of value because it’s more than I ever got from him. There are things that remind me of him, like aviation, onion rings, and my own reflection. There are things that remind me of his death, like any reference to suicide or talk of guns. Then are the things that remind me of his absence from my life, both before and after his death, which are harder to label because they aren’t things so much as feelings or a sense of who I am. His suicide often feels unreal to me, but then I consider that he was often unreal to me even in life, and the reality is that I will only ever know him as much as I can the contents of the boxes of his stuff in my basement, and he will never know me, which sadly, was his choice.

This post is in response to the following prompt provided by the WEGO Health National Health Blog Posting Month:

5 things that changed my life. For better? For worse? List 5 things that changed your life as a patient, caregiver, or Health Activist and how.

Eating Disorder & Depression: On the surface, I suppose this looks like one of the things that changed my life for the worse, and in many respects, I’d say that’s true. I didn’t do my health and my body any favors, and I destroyed, maimed, or temporarily soured more than a few relationships along the way because I couldn’t figure out how to manage my mental health. As far as the depression goes, I manage it as proactively as I can, and that seems to keep it from being a disruption to my life. As for the eating disorder, I overcame it, and I’m a better, stronger person for it. I have tremendous faith in my ability to overcome the seemingly impossible, and I have an appreciation for health, both physical and mental, that only those who’ve been down a dark road that has neither of those things, can know.

Insulin Pump: I was on injections for 26 years. I started with a single injection of NPH and Regular before eventually going to two injections a day, to three, to more, to Humulin N and R, to Lantus and R. Finally, in 2004, after having had the pump suggested to me by endocrinologists for several years, I decided to go for it because I thought it could help me better manage my diabetes. I admit the adjustment was a little difficult because pump or no pump, my management left a lot to be desired, but eventually I got to the point where the diabetes was coming together, and I loved my pump. Sometimes it’s a pain to be attached, and site changes are always a chore, but overall, my BG management is better than it’s ever been, and I love the flexibility it affords. I have never regretted the choice to pump insulin.

Carb Counting: When I was a kid, the exchange diet was standard diabetes management protocol, and I was comfortable with it. In my mid 20’s I was introduced at carb counting, but that was a disaster. It made me obsess over what I was eating and how many carbs were in everything, which during a few short months of being eating disorder-free, became my total undoing. Seven years later when I decided I was ready for an insulin pump because I wanted to get my diabetes on the right track, it was time for me to revisit carb counting. I struggled for some time with it, partly because I was still struggling with my eating issues, but eventually I conquered my self-destructive behavior, and found a way to make carb counting work for me. Today, I have a pretty healthy relationship with food considering diabetes makes that nearly impossible. I’ve learned to eat the things I like, both the healthy food and the food that has questionable nutritional value, because I believe in balance, moderation, and not depriving myself of the foods I enjoy. It’s important that I feel like nothing is off-limits, and carb counting offers that for me. It’s a delicate equilibrium, but I’ve achieved it, which has made a world of difference in my physical health and my mental health. Considering how diabetes makes food so complicated, I don’t think I could ask for much more than that.

The DOC: The DOC, before I knew that’s what it was even called, helped save me from myself. Once upon a time, before blogging, TuDiabetes, or Diabetes Daily, I experimented with diabetes groups and listservs, but never really got much from it. In 2004 when I was working with at-risk kids, I made a myspace account to snoop on the activity of the kids on my caseload. I started poking around for myself though, and discovered a discussion group for people with diabetes to connect. When I started using that group, I was still struggling with my eating disorder, but I found I wanted to help people with diabetes more than I wanted to be the person with diabetes who needed help. So I did what I needed to do to defeat my demons in order to be the person I wanted to be: blogger, health activist, and art therapist for people with diabetes. The DOC has been good to me, and I live to return the favor whenever I have the opportunity.

Jason: I wish I could say I got my shit together because I wanted to be healthy for me. I like to think I was at least headed in that direction, but whether or not that’s how things would have gone if I hadn’t met Jason is anyone’s guess. While we were dating, I started to get back on track, but it was a lot of two steps forward, one step back. Once we were married, it became clear that my long held expectations of dying young were not an inevitable fact as I’d always assumed, but a self-fulfilling prophecy that I was going to make happen if I didn’t pull my head out of my ass. Jason and I spent a lot of time talking about my health, my eating disorder, and our future, and he said a lot of things that made me reframe my perspective. I started to understand that by taking care of myself, I was taking care of both of us and nurturing our marriage. To this day, six years free and clear of an eating disorder, I still feel like my motives for getting on track with my diabetes weren’t as pure and noble as I wish they had been. However, I also see that what counts most is that I got on track, I’ve stayed on track, and most importantly, I plan to stick around as long as I can because I love Jason, I love being married to him, and I want to be there for him just like he’s been there for me, ’til death do us part, which is many years from now if I have any say in the matter.

Today I am celebrating 33 years of type 1 diabetes because…

1. DOC
2. Camp Sweeney
3. Rules about not eating or drinking or having food on my person do not apply to me
4. I am a cyborg
5. Diabetes Art Day
6. The World Diabetes Day Postcard Exchange
7. Because I have an invisible disease, I try to be more sensitive to others’ invisible struggles
8. When I say my husband is a life-saver and superhero, I mean it
9. I can shoot up and be high without interventions, rehab or prison time
10. When someone invents a trivia game about the carb counts of various chocolate bars, I will win
11. I know D-Moms are special because of how special my D-Mom is
12. I don’t post like I used to, but I still love that I can come here, write stuff, and a few people will be there to read. I’ve made so many wonderful friends because of this blog.
13. D meet-ups
14. I decided my sense of purpose in this life is to try to help people find their silver lining in the black cloud of diabetes, and that brings me joy
15. So does finding meaning in what otherwise seems like meaningless, horrible events and circumstances
16. The diabetes road has been rough, but it eventually led me to Jason
17. Jason has a dependable shoulder to cry on when I need it, and with diabetes, that counts for a lot
18. I understand the value of social media because I’ve benefited so much from it
19. I have a valid excuse for having done chemistry experiments with pee-pee when I was a kid
20. I can appreciate the notion some have that diabetes shouldn’t be used as an excuse, but the universe dealt me the diabetes card, so I’m not shy about playing it if the circumstances call for it
21. Along those lines, “I’m sorry, but I can’t _______ because my diabetes is flaring up” is both practical and funny
22. I hear I can get a cut-in-line-and-bypass-the-crowds pass at Disney parks
23. There’s nothing untoward about waking up at 5am, topless, with 3 EMT’s in my bedroom
24. Jason has mad glucagon skillz
25. Diabetes camp friends are forever friends
26. I am who I am because of this disease, and I’m damn proud of that
27. Every time this disease knocks me on my ass, I get right back up and keep going because I am greater than diabetes
28. I’m going to be Dr. Thill because…
29. I’m out to prove that glitter glue and paint are useful tools for diabetes management
30. Every morning that I wake up brings me the much appreciated gift of a new day
31. It takes a disease like diabetes to appreciate the great joy in something as inconsequential as diet soda
32. Art therapy can heal that which isn’t cured
33. While luck and happenstance have something to do with reaching this 33rd milestone, especially considering that I didn’t take care of it very well for almost 20 years, now I’m dedicated to managing my diabetes, enough so that I don’t regret eating an ice cream sundae with 3 scoops of Forbidden Chocolate, hot fudge, marshmallow topping, brownie chunks, and whipped cream. I earned it.