This past Wednesday morning, I found out that my baby sister, Nikkola Una Walsh, had died. She was 27. Nikkola died by suicide; she and her partner jumped off the Atlantic Place parking garage in downtown St. John’s on a sunny and busy Saturday afternoon. I found this out by being woken by a phone call from the Royal Newfoundland Constabulary, as they were trying to contact her father through me since my Aunt Minnie didn’t have his phone number.
For context, I hadn’t had a proper conversation with Nikkola for about 7 years. Sometime after our mother died, and my wife (who Nikkola saw as a big sister) died suddenly seven months later, Nikkola cut ties with me. The ties were cut after an exchange between us where I admonished her for ignoring her baby brother, Samuel. I was ostracized in the extreme, as was the case with just about everybody else in the family. Like everyone else, I tried to reach out to her several times over the years in vain, but, like all the others, she didn’t want me in her life.
A phone call from the police to notify next-of-kin of death is a shit phone call to receive. After the immediate discombobulation and shock of hearing such news, and taking the necessary immediate next action steps to answer the Constable’s questions, the reality sets in as the adrenaline dissipates. That reality manifested itself initially as guilt for everything I wanted to do and should have done but didn’t. There was a sense of failure from everything I tried to do but couldn’t. There was a palpable sense of sadness that set in that my baby sister was actually dead. Ironically, these initial feelings and senses were followed by an overwhelming sense of grief as my positive memories kicked in from the “good ole days” with imagery such as the way her lips looked on the night she was born when I saw her for the first time through a pane of glass at the hospital. I cried as I thought about how Pop used to have a nickname for her as a baby and toddler “Poppy’s Little Boogli-oog”, and how he had a custom t-shirt made with the moniker prominently displayed. The floodgates were now open and my heart ripped as I thought about how she used to like to cuddle after story time in bed by playing with my ears even though her nails were sharp and it felt like my ears were being torn, but you just suffer through it as a big brother because she’s just so damn sweet, innocent, and cute. There was the mental picture of the radiant smile she used to have before she started doing drugs. Other less fond memories crept in such as the time I made her cry because I got frustrated trying to teach her proper spelling techniques during homework one night. There was the memory of the big bear hug Nikkola gave Mom after Mom sat Nikkola and me down at the kitchen table to be told that Mom had an upcoming biopsy in a couple of days for a lump in her breast which happened to kill her a couple of years later. After the rush of tears and pain from the initial onset of grief-inducing memories subsided, the deadpan note of finality hit me as the desperate false hope of reconciliation that I previously clung to evaporated.
Much of that first day was spent trying in vain to contact Nikkola’s father, my former step-dad. It turned out via my texts with his brothers that he was on a flight to Asia, and so couldn’t be reached in-flight. I knew that I needed to talk to Nikk first. As her dad, he deserved to know before anybody else, and certainly not over some Facebook post or message. Unfortunately for me, when you ask someone’s brothers if you’ve got the right phone number, and with Nikkola’s troubles known to everybody in the family for so long, there’s no way not to sound ominously ambiguous. Finally, I had to tell Nikk’s siblings after they got home from work; it just couldn’t be put off any longer. Around the same time, Nikk also landed, and I could finally break the news to him and each sibling one by one, each person’s heart being shredded into confetti as I broke the news bluntly. The only worse sense of dread than I had between phone calls to my loved ones was the sense of dread that I felt 8 years ago on my way home from the hospital as I was logistically planning out how I was going to tell my 5 and 7-year-old, that Mommy died. These are not pleasant conversations to plan. Everybody I phoned loved Nikkola, and everyone, like me, clung to the false hope of reconciliation.
Nikkola had a big family who loved her. I think that on some level she knew that; she just decided to turn away. No loving family is going to sit idly by and willingly watch their loved one destroy their life with drugs and poor choices. Although she lost her mother when she was only 18, there was still a whole family of loved ones to support her. She had a Nan and Pop who loved her. She had many aunts and uncles who loved her, not to mention a swath of cousins. Despite the various failings and shortcomings of her father, he loved her too, and, to his credit, he tried to make things right between them and reconcile for many years. She had her little brother and her former stepmom who loved her. She had a couple of potential stepfathers in my own father, and Don, who loved her like their own. She had the love of close family friends like Lori and Chantal who loved Nikkola, and saw caring for Nikkola, as one of the few ways in which they could honor their dead friend, my mother. Nikkola had my own two kids who loved her, her niece and nephew, Lucy and Luke. And, she had me, her big brother. Our family is by no means the Leave It To Beaver family, but we all loved Nikkola, like a whole lot. The fact that she rejected all this love makes the soul-shattering heartache all the worse.
There’s a sense of shame and failure that comes with the death of a loved one due to suicide. As a big brother, your job is to protect and love the little sister. I didn’t protect her from the drugs that eroded her mind and body, and I didn’t make her feel loved enough to outweigh the overwhelming depression and regret that she must have felt in the end that compelled her to jump off the parking garage. This sense of failure and shame feels all the more poignant for me, as a young widower, since a small part of me still feels like I also failed to protect my dead wife from the sepsis that took her away from her kids. I know these feelings aren’t rational, but it’s how I feel, and you can’t reason with emotions.
There’s another component to the sense of shame and failure, the religious aspect. It’s the belief that in committing suicide, your loved one has done something fundamentally wrong as a last act in their sorry life, keeping them out of Heaven, Nirvana, or name your own religious-happily-ever-after-paradise. But, I don’t think Nikkola’s chances of an afterlife are any bleaker than those of anybody else. As a practicing, liberal Christian, I have my own beliefs and interpretation of the Bible. While many of my fellow Christians will disagree that the Bible is subject to interpretation, I would respectfully counter with the statement that if the nine greatest legal minds in the USA have fundamental differences in the interpretation of a four-page legal document that’s 200 years old, I can’t see a how a collection of texts that’s over 1,200 pages and was written between 1,900 and 3,500 years old, isn’t more subject to interpretation. Anyways, no matter what your belief system is, I think that it’s fair to say that we all live in sin. I believe that sin separates us from God. Redemption, forgiveness, and the shedding of sin happen through regret and remorse. It’s a feedback loop that we create to improve our lives and our spiritual health. Personally, I don’t envision Nikkola being filled with anything but regret and remorse, as the bleakness of her life’s state set in. While we Christians seek forgiveness in the rituals of communion and confession, in my opinion, it’s more about the penitent heart and the remorseful state of mind than about the actual ritual. As such, I think that it’s conceivable that if the Christian ideal of an afterlife exists, then Nikkola’s soul isn’t burning in some “lake of fire”, but is instead, finally joined with the soul of our mother, my late wife, and Nikkola’s two grandparents who have died before her.
In the end, Nikkola’s life played out like a Shakespearean tragedy. It started brightly, full of promise, potential, happiness, and love. Through some bad luck, misguided thought processes, and a few key poor decisions, our tragic protagonist, Nikkola, slowly became vice-gripped in a world of mental anguish and despair that she just couldn’t cognitively escape from. The crescendo of Nikkola’s play was the final act of her life in which she and her partner formed a suicide pact and jumped from the parking garage on a pleasant sunny Saturday afternoon, consciously deciding to leave this world Romeo and Juliet style. As Macbeth said: “So foul and fair a day, I have not seen.” I don’t think that the folly of the needlessness and stupidity of that final decision dawned on them. It was just the worst decision after years of poor decisions and addiction.
All in all, there aren’t many valuable lessons to take away. It’s just a sad shitty story. As I futilely attempt to shed the feelings of anger and bitterness I feel towards Nikkola for committing suicide and rejecting the love that I had for her, I feel grief and longing. I can’t help but long for that imaginary parallel universe where if only a few different choices were made, Nikkola would be happy, healthy, and able to self-actualize. But, I’m also left with a feeling of gratitude. I’m grateful to the police for thoroughly investigating her death. I’m especially grateful for the first responders and medical staff who tried in vain to revive her. I’m grateful that Nikkola is no longer in psychological pain. I’m grateful that our mother isn’t alive to experience the death of her daughter. I’m grateful for the belief I hold that Nikkola is now in the afterlife with our mother, our maternal grandparents, and my late wife. I’m grateful for all the members of our family who loved her so deeply. I’m grateful for everybody’s efforts to care for her. Lastly, I’m grateful for the good times that I had with Nikkola, and that I was able to be a part of her life, at least for a while.
