Suicide Survivor Guilt

When I was growing up, my father thought about ways to kill himself as regularly as I outgrew my shoes. There were pills to my penny loafers, carbon monoxide to my jelly sandals, razors to my Doc Martens. I was 4, 10 and 28 when he made his most damaging attempts.

We found him: on the side of the road, on the side of the bed, in my grandmother's garage where he'd tried to make a tomb of the giant powder-blue Oldsmobile we called Orca.