So No One Told You Life Was Gonna Be This Way?

TW: Mentions of Suicide, and the television show Friends

As the story goes, Phoebe Buffay’s mother Lily Buffay committed suicide by way of carbon monoxide poisoning when Phoebe was 14 years old. 

Cue the laugh track! 

Phoebe grips the neck of her guitar and sings in that voice that’s both good and bad all at once.

I made a man with eyes of coal and smile so bewitchin’ 

How was I supposed to know that my mom was dead in the kitchen? 

La lala La la lala la lalala la la…

My mother’s ashes, even her eyelashes, are resting in a little yellow jar. 

And sometimes when it’s breezy, I feel a little sneezy. 

This is funny! You can laugh.

It’s hilarious how Phoebe kept her mother and her hairs in a little yellow jar. A mother! In a jar! It’s painfully hysterical how I keep you in my desk drawer. A father! In a drawer! Asleep in a slim silver tube. Encased in a black velvet sleeve. Ha!

Where will I spread you? Like strawberry jelly all over Central Park or the woods we walked in Maine? I saw David Schwimmer one early morning in Washington Square Park. What if I spread you there? Wouldn’t it be so funny if I just poured you onto the subway tracks? Scattered you all over the L train? So you’re with me on every commute. I can hold you in one hand, now. Like I did as a kid in the neighborhood swimming pool. With all that buoyancy and shit. A father I could cradle. 

As the story goes, Phoebe Buffay is flighty and silly and batshit. As legend has it, this is what happens to girls whose mothers gas themselves to death. 

I can hear the writer’s room. Give her a backstory. She can’t be fucking crazy for no reason! A bald guy named Randall chimes in. I’ve got it! Suicide. Suicide is funny! 

Virginia with her overcoat and stones. Sylvia with her oven. We’re all pissing ourselves laughter.

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You showed me Friends when I was way too young to be watching Friends. You told me to never tell my grandfather about it or he’d kill you. You’d pause the show whenever Rachel, or Monica, or Joey etc. mentioned “sleeping together.” You’d explain to me that, “In real life, people don’t sleep together as much as they do on TV.” I took “sleeping together” literally to mean, when a man and woman kissed each other so much, they’d have to button up their jammies, curl under the covers, perhaps cuddle, latch onto each other’s feet and hands, smooch a bit, and fall asleep. You never paused the show to tell me about suicide. 

In Roxanne Roberts’ essay, “The Grieving Never Ends” she writes of losing her dad to suicide when he was 46 and she was 21. She writes, “It has been 20 years since his death and I am still cleaning up.” 

Phoebe cleans up with songs about smelly cats. I guess I clean up with essays. 

In the thickest moments of grief I could barely wade through, I’d keep Friends on in the background just for some noise. Something so comforting about their voices that sound different from TV voices now. Something about that ridiculously huge apartment on Grove Street. Something about everything turning out okay. 

The interim guidance counselor at my college told me I had a greater chance of taking my own life because my father had taken his. The girl I work with says “I’m gonna kill myself” all the time in a joking way, like people my age do. Like the way I have done. I laugh along with her. 

Roxanne Roberts writes, “This year, thousands of families will begin the process that ours began that night 20 years ago. Studies show that their grief will be more complicated, more intense and longer lasting than for any other form of death in the family. They will receive less support and more blame from others. Some will never really get over it: Children of suicides become a higher risk for suicide themselves.” 

Maybe that’s why Phoebe never shut up about it. Maybe that’s why I’ll never shut up about it. 

La lala La la lala la lalala la la…