CN: Sui*. Adapted from a thread at the Bad Place, originally posted July 15, 2021.
Today is my friend Mary’s 48th birthday. She didn’t live to see her 30th. I want to tell you about her.
This is Mary in 1997, when we met. We were both in Structure of Life, a full-time, year-long coordinated studies program that was basically a biology immersion, from the molecular to the organismal. (That’s how we rolled at Evergreen.) Needless to say, we were all huge nerds.
It was my fifth year (I was going for a dual degree), her fourth. The way those programs worked, you spent a lot of time with your classmates.
Among the interests we shared was opera. Back then, if you organized a group of 20 people to go to the Seattle Opera, they’d give you a free ticket plus 50% off everyone else’s. I took up the challenge. Driving to Seattle for opera night became a regular thing. We’d meet in a huge group and go out to dessert after. We’d all share our cake. (Those were the days…)
I remember the one time I saw Mary in full femme mode, at the opera, in a long black dress with her hair down. She only did it the once. I remember her laughing so hard during Don Giovanni she nearly got reprimanded by the usher.
We both loved ballet, too, and would go to Seattle to watch the Pacific Northwest Ballet. We had opposite tastes in music. She liked minimalist, atonal stuff. Stravinsky and Britten. I was all Bel Canto and Romantic. Bizet and Puccini. We always knew one of us would like the show.
After I graduated, I worked with her that following year, her senior year, on a molecular study of local mussel populations. We were trying to find out if nonnative specie were escaping from farms. We had no funding, and we were both broke, so we literally washed labware in exchange for enzymes.
Our experiments should have been simple, but didn’t work. It was immensely frustrating. At one point we help hands over the PCR machine and chanted. When we got promising results, we couldn’t repeat them.
During that year, I got a job doing cancer research at the VA in Tacoma. On a whim, I wrapped up one of our gels and took it to work. What had been a blank at Evergreen lit up at work. The light on the fucking UV table had been broken the whole time.
I talked my boss at the VA into giving Mary a summer internship after she graduated. She was better at the job than I was. I never cared enough. She did. She liked to put her feet on my desk—it annoyed the hell out of me.
I think that was the summer when she joined the National Guard.
I got laid off and moved to North Bend to work for a startup. I moved to New Orleans to start grad school. I got married. I changed programs and moved back to the West Coast, and moved to a small town on the Olympic Peninsula. I stopped having money and time for things like opera and ballet and driving to Seattle.
We didn’t see each other much.
2001 happened. The US invaded Iraq. I flew to DC to beg my delegation to stop it.
I saw Mary before she left. She was angry. It wasn’t what she’d signed up for. She said it was an illegal war. She said the National Guard had no business going. But she went.
I was terrified for her. I wasn’t just afraid for her life, but for her soul. I was just as afraid she’d have to kill as be killed.
I wrote to her every week for the 18 months she was there. I baked her cookies and sent her books. I needed her to not forget she was loved. I somehow imagined if I loved her enough, it would bring her home safe.
I went to Costa Rica to do my master’s research, and we kept writing. We talked about mitichondrial DNA and the Democratic primary. (I wanted Kucinich; she wanted Clark. We were both willing to compromise on Dean.)
She came home in 2005. Something inside me that had been clenched for years relaxed. She was safe. I forgot to keep reminding her someone loved her.
I saw her one last time. We went to the ballet. We went to a shitty sushi buffet and ate too much.
The last time we talked was in April 2006, over email. I was about to move to Canada, and I asked for her help. She couldn’t make it, but asked how I was.
I didn’t reply. I had a lot going on.
I got the call in…May? June? of that year. They left a message. It was the alumni foundation. I needed to call them back right away. They said it was about Mary. I called her mom instead.
Her memorial was the next day. They hadn’t known how to reach me. Luckily I happened to be back in Washington, visiting my mom. I didn’t know anyone. Mary kept her life very compartmentalized.
I met her CO. I told him she was a lesbian. He said he didn’t care. I know he thought he was being supportive…but I wanted him to care. I wanted him to know what an important part of her this was. What it meant to hide it.
Those were the MySpace days. With her mom’s permission, I easily hacked her Yahoo email account and then her MySpace, and set it up as a memorial to her. I posted the news there. (It’s all gone now, of course.) I connected online with her friends. People I’d never met. We raised money to buy her a llama from Heifer International for her 30th birthday.
Mary and llamas…it was a thing. You had to be there.
I had nightmares for months. I’d wake up and think she was in the room, glaring at me. I still need trigger warnings for hanging.
The Dewey Decimal System classifies suicide under 362.28. I went to the library and cleaned out the entire shelf. I needed to know why. I can tell you many, many things about suicide, but I still can’t tell you why. Words like “PTSD” and “depression” aren’t answers.
There was no note.
(But studies show survivors who are left notes feel no more closure or understanding than those who aren’t.)
I don’t think there’s anything in my life that’s had a greater impact on me than Mary’s death. It changed the fundamental texture of the world, forever.
That last email Mary sent me? This was her signature: “Our integrity sells for so little, but it is all we really have. It is the very last inch of us, but within that inch, we are free.” Five years after her death, I had it tattooed on my shoulder, with a red rose.
I lost another friend to suicide that year. The next year—2012—I went to San Francisco to walk in the Overnight walk for suicide prevention. I walked for Mary, and for W. Seven years later, I went back and walked for me.
I went to see her in 2016, 20 years after her death. I brought her roses.
Happy birthday, Mary. We’re 48 now.
I wonder if you got your PhD. I wonder if you got married. I wonder if you worked on the vaccine. I wonder if we still go to the opera.
Things got better—and they didn’t. But I have it on good authority that our best years are ahead of us.
