LILY JOY’S STORY
"As Children Do"
My father, an artist, taught his four girls many ways to interact with the world around us. We watched him use a compound saw to cut pieces of wood just so, assembling a sturdy frame, which he used a staple gun to tightly fasten stretched canvas. In his neatly organized studio nestled in the basement of our East Village home, he showed us how to mix pigmented paints with our hands, the thick substance reaching up to our elbows as we dug into the gallon-sized, aluminum cans. We watched him and observed him and learned from him, as children do, absorbing everything from their parents’ indiscriminately.
In my sister, Eva Evans’, Don’t Mind Me, “A Letter to My Father,” she recounted our father’s suicide threats to her starting when she was seven years old. The same years that we sawed and drilled wood together to create unconventional doll houses, we walked on eggshells around our father’s moods: Sometimes a fawning Daddio with boyish charisma, others an angry giant with rageful outbursts followed up by a tortured soul choking on elephant-tears of shame. We rode that rollercoaster with him. And like her, I spent years of my life wrapt in fear, feeling responsible for his life, trying to make him feel loved.
Reading the letter she wrote on tending to mental health, I so badly wish to rustle her awake and say, “open your eyes, Evie; you know what it takes!” Because she knew the importance. She wrote, “you work on yourself, you collect the tools that might one day save you. You might not always be able to ‘handle it’ with the skills you have right now,” about taking action with immediacy to develop healthy coping skills, move through trauma, anxiety, depression, and, for us, to gently undo the patterns our father passed down for handling sensitivity and emotional overwhelm.
We lost our father to suicide in 2018. We lost Eva to suicide in 2024.
Often, my mind gets caught in thought loops, and I can’t sleep. Sometimes the magnitude of life bubbles up and it feels too big to contain, or my heart aches so badly it feels like I will implode, but at least everything works. So I try my best: I go to therapy every week, read books that provide perspective, practice gratitude and compassion, attend embodiment practices like 5Rhythms and sound ceremonies, call my friends (especially when I don’t want to), play with children (the ultimate lesson on presence), apply myself to my career, and, ultimately, try to create a life I don’t want to escape from.
We are so much more than the weight of our thoughts, our fears, and our emotions. Like Eva said, “Let’s celebrate and prioritize our own responsibility to our mental health.” Let’s practice intentional mental hygiene. Life offers countless versions of itself, and if the one we’re living doesn’t fit, we owe it to ourselves to try another. I tried another and am starting to look at one foot in front of the other, instead of five miles behind me and five in front.
There is a book, After Suicide Loss: Coping With Your Grief, that off the bat presents three tenants to remember:
“You must take care of yourself”
“You will learn to cope, but you cannot do this alone”
“Even though it may not seem like it now, you will survive this”
Prudent advice to remember whenever crisis comes knocking.
And with that, I offer my eternal love for my father, Matthew, and for my sister, Eva, as remembrance – might more lives be honored and fewer memorialized.