Page 6 of Pretend
I don’t like being home; the noise gets loud, but it gives me an opportunity to visit my mother’s grave.
After landing in North Carolina, I went straight to her tombstone. I sat there for an hour, and instead of placing her favorite flowers, I placed her favorite chocolates.
Margaret Hannibal
Died on Valentine’s Day.
Every year since I became a SEAL, I do the same thing. I visit her and tell her all about what war is like, what I’ve seen, and how evil the world can be.
My mother had postpartum depression after having my little sister but never sought treatment. My father discouraged it and said to seek God instead.
Everyone saw her in a bad light. Everyone in my mother’s family treated her like she was overdramatic, ungrateful, and idiotic for feeling that way after she gave birth to my baby sister. She didn’t ask for it. She didn’t ask her mind to turn into a prison she couldn’t escape.
She killed herself. And all my life, I resented her for it. How could she leave me? How could she be so selfish as to leave her children and husband? How could she be that cruel?
I stare at the wall in the dark.
“I think I get it now, Mom.” I laugh out loud to myself with no one around but a dark room in my lonely one-story house.
No one will want me like this. A man full of scars. The scars on my skin and the ones engraved into my soul.
Ever since I was tortured, these thoughts haunt me from time to time. I don’t think about it too much, but they’re there.
I understand my mother better now.
I get that you can be in so much pain that you want it to end. To become so numb with zero percent chance of hope, it’ll go away.
You just feel so fucked and alone.
Nobody talks about how lonely it feels when you come back home after what you’ve experienced at war.
Death after death.
And when you think you’ve seen it all, you haven’t.
“You weren’t alone, Mom. You had me. You had me, Mom…you had me.”
You had me.
You weren’t alone.
Youwere strong.
You weren’t alone.
I wonder what she would think about.
What were the last thoughts that drove her to kill herself?
Mental illness is as real as any other illness, and it ate my mother alive…because she felt like she couldn’t get help. She felt like if she sought help, she would have gotten her children taken away from her.
I wish there were more awareness and empathy for women who experience postpartum depression.
Sometimes, I do get angry at her for taking her life, but at the same time, I get it.
I fucking get it now.
She was in pain, she was lost, she was so far gone that she felt like killing herself was the only escape from the pain. She didn’t mask her pain with anything. One day she said it was enough and slit her wrists.
