There were two things he could be at that moment: angry, or sad.

There was his baby girl, sitting there, leaning over the toilet bowl while he sat uncomfortably on his bad knee beside her. His baby girl.

So, he was sad.

Things slowed down as the night grew on—the sounds of his daughter retching, the other, innocent, daughter coming up the stairs and trying so hard to make it seem like she hadn’t just been crying.

His wife talking on the phone.

After she started getting sick, he’d gotten different versions of the story from his daughter.

After ten minutes, she admitted to taking two strong aspirin pills.

After twenty minutes, sobbing, she told him she’d taken six.

After a half an hour, his wife had check the aspirin bottle. There were at least thirty five gone.

Then he was angry.

All he wanted to do was shake this little, fourteen-year old girl throwing up in front of him and ask her why she’d done it. Why the hell would you want to take your life? It was the only thing of value that a person truly had.

At nine o clock, his wife—who was almost in hysterics—came back to the now very rancid smelling bathroom and told him that they were ordered to take their daughter to the emergency room immediately.

It really hit him as they walked to the car; she was dying.

The girl he’d held at just ten minutes old, was dying in his arms. There was nothing he could do.

When they got there, a nurse eased her into a wheel chair, and asked her questions. He’ll never forget what she said.

“I wanted to die.”

The fear that a doctor would come out to tell him she died while he was sleeping kept him awake all night, until he was finally able to call his wife at two o clock in the morning and tell her that their eldest daughter was going to live.

His wife told him that she’d already made arrangements to send the other daughter to her grandfather’s house, and that hit him hard.

Was it somehow his fault she’d tried to kill herself? Was it in his genes, was it maybe in him as well?

The next day was spent going from the hospital to a recovery institute, filling out papers and still wondering why.

They didn’t get to his wife’s father’s house until nearly 12:30 at night, and saw that the youngest was finally asleep on the couch.

Talking with the grandparents alerted them to the fact that even though she put up a strong front around everyone, while alone in the next room she’d broken down and they’d caught her sobbing on the phone to her best friend.

Terrified at the possibility of another mentally unstable daughter, they woke her and took her home.

When they got there, he walked into his daughter’s room to say goodnight to her like he almost always did, and found her sitting on her bed.

He pulled out a chair from her writing desk and sat in front of her, speaking slowly.

He told her that his own father had hanged himself at the age of 42, when he himself was on 15.

She listened without saying a word, tears in her eyes threatening to fall, and he wondered why he was telling her at all. Why he was torturing her with this knowledge.

Over the next week he barely got to see his younger daughter, he was either working or with the eldest at her institution. In that week he relived memories he thought he’d forgotten, dug up things he’d buried long ago.

-

That man was my father.

February 18, 2006, my sister attempted to commit suicide.

He hasn’t said ‘I love you’ to me since.

How come he still says it to her?