Nine Years Gone

 

Noah’s grandpa had a custom of dedicating a fruit tree in his yard to each grandkid by marking it with a souvenir California license plate. When his house sold recently, I retrieved the little license plate for our yard. I hung it on the dwarf apple Noah planted with my husband Bryan in 2013, a couple weeks before Noah’s death. His name on that tree hearkens back to the grandpa he adored, to our years of nurturing Noah, to the balm that gardening became for Bryan after the suicide. Did Noah know then that he was leaving that tree behind for us? The profusion of spring blossoms evoke the growth that might have been for Noah.

Nine years is a long time.

I find myself thinking a lot of “Noah would have” statements lately. Noah would have admired the animated documentary film, “Flee” with its artful depiction of trauma and world events. Noah would have scoffed at the hydrofoil surfboards we saw turning capers in the ocean this morning—or would he have coveted one? Noah would have clambered up his brother Ben’s art installation with the ease of a cat and perched on top.

Nine years of would-haves.

I’d been saving stones from our travels to put on his grave, some from pre-COVID times. When I finally made it to the cemetery last week, after my usual procrastinating, I realized I had one for each year he’d been gone and lined them up alongside his marker. A lot happens in nine years, I told him. A lot for us, a lot that could have been for you.

This week, when I finally opened Noah’s memorabilia box--the one that for a while felt too radioactive to touch--I was struck by the heap of stones he’d saved in a plastic bag. There were some of the same beguiling green serpentines that I’d been saving for his grave. The same shade as his wide eyes that seemed to see beyond his years. The color of a cresting wave on the central coast on a cloudy day. I wonder, did we find these stones on the same beach, the one where Bryan and I go to remember him? Did he know that serpentines are considered healing stones, symbolic of heart energy? All the healing that might have happened over nine years. .  .

Let objects stir the slow simmer of memory.

In the memorabilia box I found another license plate, the real one Noah saved from his funky little vintage motorcycle. He was so excited to buy it, though he had to keep fixing it. It was too small for him and when he took off down the street with his long legs bent far out on either side, he looked like he was riding into a cartoon in a puff of dust.

In Noah’s stone collection were several flat smooth ones perfect for skipping on water. Noah would have …

In loving memory of Noah Langholz

June 28, 1991 – March 19, 2013

March Sadness

To my fellow survivors: How have you been? Please forgive the long silence on this blog. I could say I’ve been busy but that’s no excuse for being out of touch. In the past few months, I’ve been consumed first with sciatica pain, then with leading a sponsorship group for an Afghan refugee family. Both these things left me little energy for reaching out to others, much less for reflection. Now I’m ready, I hope, to reconnect.

The star jasmine on our back fence is in bloom again with its sweet, enticing fragrance. In two weeks, our son Noah will have been gone nine years. As my physical pain has ebbed, my February/March sadness has come creeping in. Not in its usual way of weeks of dread in anticipation of his death anniversary and anguish at re-living his final stage of life, but in small spells of tears. Like when my niece turned 25 the other day and I thought of how Noah adored her and how unfathomable it is that he wasn’t here to celebrate her milestone birthday–or his own.

How can my precious child live only in the past? At least in the first months and years after Noah’s suicide, his spirit reverberated in the present; his face, his smell, his friends, his opinions and conversation still enveloped me. Everything—birds, rainbows, beaches—felt like messengers of his enduring presence. I miss the intimacy of that early phase of grief, how I could hold him close, how my heart was wide open with love and hurt. Even my sense of guilt and echo chamber of “what-if’s” kept us connected.

Over time, Noah is more memory than presence. This makes me feel furious, bereft, confused. What can I do with a memory? How do I love and mother it? How do I ask it everything I yearn to know about Noah’s struggle and his dreams? Some force like a tide keeps pulling him away from me with ever fewer remnants left on shore.

The sad truth is that Noah takes up less and less space in my mind and my life. In one way, this is natural and healthy; life goes on without him in it, without my being engulfed by grief. But the press of other things can crowd him out for weeks, even months, and I feel terrible about that. It feels like a betrayal of Noah and of the loss that defined my life in the early years.

I’m learning that if I want to be in touch with my grief and memories of Noah, I have to open up space, let the heart slow and soften, put myself in certain places or with certain people. Like standing arm-in-arm with my cousin in front of Noah’s little shrine last Thanksgiving and her saying, “Sweet Noah, we love you and miss you so much”—how it touched me to hear someone else call out to his spirit.

I first learned to pray in 2012 when Noah was suffering with severe depression. I was taught a blessing practice with lines like, “May you be blessed with peace, may you be blessed with compassion, may you be blessed with love.” I recited it like a mantra, first for Noah, then after his death for my family. Today during a guided meditation, I was startled at the thought of Noah himself as a “vessel of blessing” who might heap wishes on the family that mourns him. Who might, in his own irreverent voice, call on us to find peace, ease, and joy, however we can.

To my fellow survivors: What do you do with the memory of your lost one? How do you keep it alive? What blessings do you think that person would wish for you now? You may want to check out this advice about continuing bonds with a loved one from Alliance of Hope and this additional advice from What's Your Grief.