Gabs said this to me a couple of years before she died. It hit home. I didn’t really understand it. Was this true? I wanted to know more. How could Gabs embody her mind so fully and instantly, while I had to wade through countless internal arguments to get to a shadow of my innermost beliefs?
She had something I didn’t have for sure. And now it seems so strange to say, because how can someone who knew themselves so well and was so good at acting on their own behalf, kill themselves?
It gives credence to the idea that she knew what she was doing. But did she?
It is yet another sorry story saga that can not be resolved from this cruel suicide. When she said it, it invoked a deep understanding of our differences. And a great pain of loss in me, before she was even gone. Long before I lost her, I lost myself.
Gabs was full of wisdom. Over the years many people would turn to her for advice. She knew the exact right thing to say. She saw reality easily. Mostly. She held out a compassionate defiance for anyone accepting anything less than they should. Always female-centred view. And men loved her gutsiness.
Gabs lent her confidence to others to help them to see their own value and to fight for themselves. She surrounded herself with strong women who she loved deeply.
Don’t get me wrong. She could tear people down mercilessly, unflinchingly. But her command of language and indomitable spirit to fight for herself, and her friends, and what was right, was the Gabrielle so loved by others.
And she was so so funny. Brutally funny.
Now I think:
How can someone be alive and not have themselves and someone dead who did have themselves?
Did a boundary violation of the pristine, yet battered intellect cost her life?
She told me the worst thing that could have happened to her when she was taken to hospital was they read her diary. This was a pain that she could not overcome. ‘Mum, but they read my diary.’ Over and over she repeated it like her world had fallen and would never be retrieved.
That was meant to tell me everything that I needed to know. I was meant to understand an horrific wrong was enforced on her that could not be rectified.
But for me, I thought
‘Oh well that is truly terrible Gabs, but let’s just move on now?’
Insufficient attention to her boundary violation, reflected by my insufficient attention for my own boundary violations. The boundaries I had given up on made her fight all the harder for hers, in that mother/daughter way.
Were the boundaries in the wrong place? or the right place? Is it society’s demands on us a bridge to far for those individuals who are unwilling to compromise on themselves? Or is this a wrong perspective on reality?
It reminds me of Janis Joplin saying something like she would rather have ten years on smack than a hundred without it. Wow that must be something really special for her to willingly shorten her life. Do we buy that? Or was that the drugs talking?
The rock stars, the uncompromising on their own self interests, were the people who appeared to jump over their fears and really live. The scared, conforming ones lost their intrinsic self as they swapped out integrity to that scared child self.
There feels a shame in that. Any trade on integrity begets shame, whether front of mind or not.
But is it even true? Do some people have ‘themselves’ more than others? And what could that possibly mean? How much of what we do, how we act and decisions we make are connected to what our innate human self desires? What was the price of it?
This little girl, me, I had plans. One of them is to most certainly to exist. In the world. With full mind, heart and body. One part of the plan is writing. This girl has stories to tell. In fact that is all I ever want to do and hear these days are stories. That is all that is left. The risks taken whether taken or not leave any older woman shaken. By this age the untaken risks appear a little scarier than just doing it.
Having my mind and my body and my heart working together to support the human. Me. I have things to say and creative works that have waited a lifetime literally to come together. If it is the last thing I do, I am going to push her forward. Joani is going to live because if I don’t have me I don’t have anything, that’s the value of a daughter. I no longer have her. The Gift of the Gab. I have the memory of what she taught me.
So now I work hard to get myself back. Both new opportunity and a old responsibility. Bittersweet knowledge that I would give anything, everything for this not to be the truth of the matter.
But it is. I don’t have a choice.
I don’t mean I will be whole. Wholeness is a furphy, it never existed.
What exists is a universe that is continually breaking new ground, in new time, with new unknown and impossible to put together scenarios. Reality. You just can never predict reality. It is it’s own entity and you can’t mush with it. But the more you can be fully yourself, the more you are ready for what reality presents.