“I drag myself out of nightmares each morning and find there’s no relief in waking.”

-Finnick Odair, Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins

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My father tried to kill himself when I was 10.

When I tell people that (not that I do so often), I’m met with expressions of shock and dismay and sympathy. Any mention of suicide seems to invariably bring that out in people. Or maybe it’s my age at the time of the incident that stuns them. Or, I suppose, it could be the bald tone of the words…the way I say it…I don’t know, I’m at a point where that’s just how it feels. Stark, and factual.

Ever have an experience where you share details about your life that you don’t think much of, and people just stare in astonishment at you because apparently none of what you’ve said is normal, but you didn’t realize that because you’ve never known anything different? That happens to me a lot.

In a recent session with my therapist, I found myself recapitulating over twenty years’ worth of traumatic history pertaining to my father. (I know, normally I write about my mother, but I was “lucky” enough to have two sucky parents, and it’s only in recent years that I’ve figured out my father was actually the less sucky one. I’m still processing it all.) Three quarters of an hour later, my therapist asked me how it felt to go through outlining everything. I told her frankly that after all that insanity – and that wasn’t even all the insanity! – it feels like it’s a miracle I can function at all.

Three months after his suicide attempt, my father left us for another woman in California, whom he’d met online in a chat room. (This was 1999, the internet was still in its infancy.) To make a VERY long story short, that didn’t work out for him either. His health as a noncompliant diabetic continued to decline significantly, and eventually he returned to the east coast and resided in a long-term rehab center. It was there that I had my final visit with him, when I was about 16. If apologies from him were overdue after everything he’d done wrong, they didn’t come. He died in April 2007 at age 46. I was 18.

I get a lot of sympathetic looks about that too.

Treating these details about some of the most formative events of my life (the ones mentioned here, and plenty of others) as simple statements of fact help me to cope. I’ve dealt with them in emotional ways over the years, some healthy, some not so much. At this point, neutralizing them with just basic acknowledgments of their existence is what enables me to compartmentalize so I’m not overcome by pain all the time. One thing I’ve learned unequivocally is that there is no such thing as closure. Not in the way most people think of it.

Closure doesn’t come from the people who’ve caused you harm. If they’ve developed a long-term habit of hurting you, they’re not going to recognize that anything they’re doing is wrong, not even if circumstances change eventually, and probably not even if you tell them so. They’ll either outright deny they did anything wrong, find ways to justify what they did, or deflect by focusing instead on some other injustice (those first two are my mother’s favorite songs, so to speak; that third one is what my father did when I last saw him). If closure exists at all – and I’m not sure it does – it comes from within. It comes from the effort you put into healing your own pain. No one can do that for you, least of all the people responsible for putting it there inside of you.

Closure isn’t a cork; it’s not a stopper for the bottle, to seal your pain inside and contain it. It’s a decarbonator – it takes the bubbles out of your pain, so that when on occasion you get shaken up (because that’s inevitable, no matter how long it’s been since the trauma), you’re much less likely to explode as a result.

A lot of people who reach out to me about my experiences with healing from trauma express that they want it to be over, they want to just go back to normal or get past it all. They want the pain to go away. I relate, but I don’t have good news for them. Closure doesn’t end anything, it’s never over. It’s just a place you reach where you’ve learned how to live with the hurt so it doesn’t rule your life.

I have times where I think I’ve reached that place, only to get dragged back down in the undertow of my past when I least expect it. I guess the key is that I work very hard to make sure that I don’t stay down. I don’t live in those feelings anymore. I make time and space for them, but it’s not a permanent state for me like it used to be. If this is as close to closure as I’ll ever get, such as it is, I suppose that’s not so bad.