Semi;Colon: A Grief Tattoo Story

A writing work in progress as I continue to process my father's death ten months in ...

Sharing something a little different this week. It’s a piece that I wrote earlier this year shortly after my father passed away. I submitted it to a competition and it was recently rejected from that with a short note that was really supportive. I realized, re-reading it, that it was too soon to write this piece. Even ten months in, I'm still figuring out how to process the loss, and I need continued time before I edit this piece. But I don’t know when the editing will happen so I wanted to just share it with you here today in its current raw form.

all images in this piece by Kathryn Vercillo

I never wanted a tattoo until I did. Sure, I had thought about it from time to time as most people I know have at least one. But there was never any symbol that I felt like I needed on my body or any place that I wanted to have it. And then, on the plane headed towards what I knew would be my last days with my Dad, the desire to get one solidified. I wondered if my siblings would get matching ones with me, but I already suspected that they wouldn’t, and somehow just them being there with me would be enough.

I mentioned it at some point while we were in the room where my dad lay dying. He had been in the hospital for three weeks, getting increasingly more ill, and he asked repeatedly to be allowed to just go home to die (although it was hard to understand him, his voice weakened from days on a ventilator, from medications, from a stroke, from a long life of fighting so many sicknesses that no one ever thought he would make it to the age of seventy that he did.) So we took him home, although home in this case was my brother’s house in Los Angeles, not his home in Tucson, Arizona or his hometown of Ashland, Ohio.

He had been visiting my brother when he collapsed from internal bleeding. He had known that he was bleeding. He didn’t want to go to the hospital, didn’t want to get treatment, didn’t want to keep trying. He had been bleeding when he decided to get on the plane to my brother’s house. Although he had trekked across the country with us three kids in tow many times over the years, it had been a long time since he had gotten on a plane, and he was nervous, but he went. He wanted to be with my brother. He wanted to do work, help him get his new house in shape.

So he went, and he did work, putting in wooden floors in this downtown Los Angeles historic home. He had recently put new floors in at his own house and he came and put them in at my brothers’ - working solidly until they were done. And then, project complete, he collapsed. He didn’t want to go to the hospital, but we took him. What else can you do? You can’t let him just die there on the floor of the home. And yet, you also can. The doctors couldn’t save him. It was the end. And he wanted to go home.

From dad’s journals

And so that’s the home that we took him to when he left the hospital, the home that hospice set up a bed for him in. His hospice bed was placed in the only room in the house that already had a bed, so we sat on that other bed, slept in that other bed, while he breathed heavily in the hospital bed next to us. And at some point, we looked over, and we realized it was done, he was gone. And we cried. And we were silent. And eventually we handled the business of calling the people that handle these things.

And two days later, my brother and sister went with me to a tattoo shop. I picked one at random, a nearby place that seemed to take walk-ins, and when we arrived, we discovered it was next to the cigar shop that my dad had recently gone to. And that felt … like something. I hated my Dad’s cigars all my life. Dad hated tattoos, developing strong opinions of them in recent years as he tutored the “kids” in his woodshop who mostly had stick and poke designs. And yet somehow I think he’d smile at the idea of me getting a tattoo, barely flinching in pain, just a little tiny bit, when I was always the one who hated pain so much. And I’ve noticed that when a cigar is lit up around me these days, I nostalgically like the smell I’d always hated.

When I suddenly knew that I wanted a tattoo, I also knew that I wanted a semicolon. The semicolon is a mental health symbol, a symbol that you’ve chosen to keep your story going when you could have ended it, a tattoo made popular because of Project Semicolon. Earlier that year, I’d stared down the face of the worst depressive bout of my life. Dad had untreated, not officially diagnosed, depression his entire life, or at least my entire life that I can remember, although whether or not he would agree with that statement depended on his mood. We talked about it often, he read my writing about it, he’s one of the few people who knew how bad it had gotten this time. We both, separately, spent much of his last year mired in depression.

I had reached the point where I passively thought about death a lot, about checking out, about stepping out into a busy street and just being done. I wasn’t suicidal but I didn’t want to keep living exactly. I went to Italy with my partner on one of the best vacations I could possibly have asked for and even though so much of it was beautiful and I had so many moments of happiness, it was awful how hard I had to work to tune in to those moments. It was then that I realized depression had crept on me in the worst way again, and it was then that I decided to get help.

But I didn’t get help right away. And when I came home, there was a night I took a Xanax to calm me down, and instead of helping, it made me feel a million times worse, and I actively thought about suicide for the first time in well over a decade. And I made a plan, when before I had never made a plan. And I got sad but in a wistful way. And I almost realized my plan except that I had done enough work on myself at that point to know that the Xanax was the problem and that beneath that the depression was the problem and that I know how to get help for depression. So I did. I crawled out of that hole and I went and got new help so that by the time my dad was dying a few months later, I was able to be there, be present, be with my siblings, feel the feelings without coming to a complete emotional standstill.

In the ten months since he died, I have grappled with whether or not I consider his death a suicide. He died because of medical complications. However, those complications came about because of deliberate choices that he made regarding his medication and health care. I know that he was done. I know that this was a deliberate act. Sometimes I call it a suicide. Sometimes I don’t. I doubt that my siblings do although we haven’t discussed it yet. Mostly, I call it a choice. He made the choice to die.

I survived. The depression. The suicidal impulse. And I would survive the death of my father, a thing I had been afraid of most of my life. I was 17 when I was first told that my dad probably wouldn’t live another six months. I was 42 when he died. In between there was a whole lifetime of amazing and mundane experiences. A whole changing relationship. So many times when he was sick and we were sure that he would die. A final year of coming to that brink of death again and again. And then, here we were, Christmas Eve 2022, he actually died, and it didn’t feel real exactly but I could feel it. I wasn't numb.

So, the semicolon, because of my own mental health struggles, because of his, but also because I am a writer, and he was a writer, and it is punctuation. The semicolon is a pause, longer than a comma, that separates two related thoughts that could each stand on their own. The sentence before was the life that I had with my dad in it. The sentence after is the life that comes next. In between, the semicolon, because these two things could be separate, but they are not, they are forever related. They each stand on their own. But they are connected. Always.

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