grieving

May: Mental Health Awareness Month

Trigger Warning: I describe mental illness and suicidal ideation as well as suicide and suicide attempts. A link to a variety of resources is provided.

Normally, my website is a place for my poetry or my fiction, but after a conversation with a colleague last week, I felt a renewed sense of why I advocate for mental health and talk about how important it is to reach out if you are struggling.

My co-worker talked about how his nephew committed suicide, and I personally have lost a few friends to suicide as well, but their stories are not mine to tell. However, I can tell you about the aftermath. The hole that the loss of their lives ripped through my heart.

I, too, have tried to kill myself, whether it was from an overdose of pills or because of a psychotic-fuelled nightmarish episode where I ran into traffic in a fit of a hallucination.

I know there is a lot of stigma surrounding mental illness, but I am now willing to be vulnerable about my bipolar and my complex posttraumatic stress disorder. If by being honest about these illnesses can help save lives, I’d share my story as many times as it takes.

Of course it’s scary to share it, but what’s scarier are those who are dying undiagnosed or living with mental illness, struggling each day.

If I can do anything to ease your pain, know I would do it. I am just one person, but I am one person who cares.

Please reach out to a person you trust if you need support or if you can’t find anyone, try the list I have here if you’re feeling suicidal.

But please don’t wait until you feel that hopeless. Get help soon. People do love you and care about you. We want you here and we want the demons to be silenced, too, but there’s a way to silence them without ending your beautiful life.

The world needs you in it.

Isabelle Palerma

Funeral: a Poem

Housed within my ribs
is a metronome that on a good day,
glistens like a cluster of amethyst,
but most days, it burns
like an arsonist’s proudest achievement.

It is an anatomical feature
I thought I disposed of
when sitting on fire escapes,
waiting for lovers to save me from the clutches
of my own sins & sorrows.

But she wrapped some grass around my obituary
and smoked it.
The vapors felt like my soul parting from my body,
but you did not say goodbye.

That day,
you made love to my ghost while a part of me watched.

That’s the shame of dying –
no one knows where we are
& I exited the room silently.

Isabelle Palerma

Memories: a Poem

Forgive me.
Memories are a wound &
I must carry them.
Nostalgia lies close to my skeleton bones,
and yet my past is clouded
like a mirror with its shine worn off.
Whenever I try to recall the small details of you,
it’s like gazing at a blurry photograph taken
many years ago
of someone I once loved.

& remembering your voice,
though I could listen to it the rest of my days,
is like hearing a phonograph underwater.

The way it falters in my mind
as though you have a stammer,
though I know you never stuttered.
It’s my mind that creates the gaps.

Memories are a wound &
I must carry them.

As I carry them, the past becomes less certain
and I wonder if my memories are true
or perhaps just something I wrote down
in a book.

Storytellers don’t always make the most reliable narrators,
but even through the gauzy haze,
our memories glimmer with a whispering beauty.