Post-its on a Portrait

Sometime in the third year after Noah's suicide, a friend asked if I still talked to him and I said, regretfully, no -- except sometimes at the ocean or in the shower. She suggested I write little notes to Noah as if including him in the day's conversation. So I started writing messages on post-its and sticking them to the frame around his self-portrait, surrounding him with love and care, keeping him in my field of vision in the family room.

This weekend, my husband and I will display Noah's self-portrait at the memory table at a celebration of his life for what would have been his 25th birthday. I'll remove my messages and make room for the messages of friends and family who will surround us with their memories and love for our son. Here are a few of my post-its before they disappear:

 

The Other Suicide: An Appreciation of My Father

Last week was the 34^th anniversary of my father’s suicide. He took his life when he was 55 and I was 26. I haven’t written much about that loss here, yet it was a formative experience that shaped much of my grieving self and how I’ve responded to Noah’s suicide. I’ve been so consumed with mourning Noah these past three years that I couldn’t face thinking about my father and commemorating his anniversary; at survivors gatherings, I’d talk about Noah and have to be reminded that I’m also a survivor of my father’s suicide. That's shifting this year due to writing about my father’s suicide for a grief memoir, re-grieving him, and starting to talk with others who have lost parents to suicide.

As I try to integrate the story of my father’s life and death more fully into my life, I want to introduce him here. Just as Noah’s name is already disappearing from conversation, my father’s name is even more lost to the world. In future posts, I hope to describe how each devastating loss has informed the other and how it feels to be doubly cursed by suicide.

            My father, Irwin Auerbach (1926-1982), grew up in an Orthodox Jewish family in Brooklyn and attended yeshiva for his entire K12 education. Though he later rejected God and Orthodox ways, his early training may have honed his analytical mind and argumentative bent; I was never clear on the roots of his social conscience. As a young man, he studied sociology and wrote poetry, along with letters to the editor of the New York Post, like one printed in the 1940s in favor of integrating the U.S. military. He remained outspoken all his life on civil rights, civil liberties, consumer, environmental, and local government issues; his obituary by the editor of the local paper was titled, “He Spoke Up.” 
           My father met my mother in the Brooklyn College library, no doubt wooed her with his wit, and married her in 1951. They were both determined to escape the confines of their Orthodox (him) and Eastern European immigrant (her) families and neighborhoods. They had me, their only child, in 1956, and in 1958, moved to suburban Maryland. They enjoyed travel, visiting museums, and hosting a playreading group.
            My father's idealism led him to work for the still-young New Deal-inspired Social Security Administration and to become a civil rights activist with Congress for Racial Equality (CORE) in Baltimore, where he strategized behind the scenes for fair housing and employment. In 1967, he sold our house in a white suburb to a black family over the “blockbuster!” cries of the neighbors, then moved our family to Columbia, Maryland, a planned community that was unique for being racially and economically integrated by design. I remember going to the Poor People’s March on Washington with my father and seeing him cry for the first time when Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed. My father continued to write to public officials, consume news voraciously, and support liberal causes all his life.

He was absent for much of my childhood, either because he was out or because when home, he was often behind a newspaper. He'd emerge to share jokes or puns, play word games, or watch “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” together. Every Wednesday night when I thought he was at a union meeting, he was actually meeting with a psychiatrist, my mother later told me. I never knew anything else about my father’s mental health until near the end of his life. He left my mother when I was 14, part of what seemed like a mass migration of middle-aged men out of their marriages in the 1970s. He thought that the divorce and early retirement would make him happier, but he still seemed lonely and restless.

All through adolescence, I resented my father for leaving my mother and me and was disdainful of his little habits; we got along best when exchanging letters or discussing current events. We did family therapy to try to repair our relationship after my mother died in 1976, but it took longer for me to forgive him. He surprised me by volunteering on a community crisis line; I had no idea that my intellectual father may have felt the pain of people in distress. In fact, I barely knew my father.

I began to know him better through his letters from 1980-82 when I was living in Greece doing folklore research. He was my most reliable correspondent. (When I was in college, he’d send back my letters with edits in ALL CAPS; weird, I know, but he was trying to help me be a good writer and his advice was on point!) He confided that he was depressed and had chronic back pain. He made himself to do “comedy therapy” late at night with New Yorker cartoons and TV talk shows. I tried to cheer him in my letters and encouraged him to pursue his dreams of being a librarian or opening a bookstore. Did he notice that I was trying to forgive him and be a more loving daughter? In the way of the young, I didn’t fully take account of the extent of his suffering in either body and mind.

In May, 1982, I got a telegram: Being treated for severe depression. Call home. When I did, my father sounded alarmingly disoriented, and I arranged to fly home from the village where I lived, which took a few days. In the middle of the night before my arrival, my father drove to a nearby lake, left his wallet in the car, and drowned. The new anti-depressants in his system may have given him the energy to take a previously planned action, as with many suicides. My uncle identified him for police; I never saw his body.

My uncle didn’t tell me what happened until we were halfway home from the airport. I remember staring down at the floor of the car, unable to speak or breathe. I felt punished and betrayed; how could my father do this when I was on my way home to help him? I was an only child without a mother; how could he destroy my last vestige of family?

I learned a lot about my father in the stunned silence and speeches at his memorial service. I didn’t know so many people admired him. Several expressed bewilderment and dismay that such a courageous man could take his life, implying that suicide is cowardly. It was much like Noah’s friends years later, who couldn’t square Noah’s charisma and love of life with ending it. Both my father and my son shed their pain only to pass it on to me and others left behind.

My father passed on so much else, like an affinity for social justice, the confidence to speak my mind, and an appreciation of writing, nature, anthropology, photography, and whimsy. Only recently, I recovered the memory of how, when I called him in hysterics at 4am a few days after my mother’s death, he came right over, covered me in blankets, sat by me and stroked my hair, and made me breakfast. This week when I light a candle for my father’s yahrzeit (Jewish calendar anniversary), I’ll try to remember his love, honor his courage, and hold him in the light.

Seeing Signs

On Mother’s Day morning, I was alone on a wisp of beach in Santa Barbara. The day felt fresh with limpid light and newly swept sand. I wasn’t expecting any pampering or tributes with Noah dead, Ben out of the country, and my husband busy. So I put my heart in neutral and tried to breathe in gratitude. I was grateful to be in that spot at that moment, bathed by the breeze. I scrolled through photos of Ben and Noah on my phone and my Healing album of people and things that have sustained me over these three years. When I looked up through tears, I saw not one but two whales blowing, then breaching, close to shore. The playful show of spray, flanks, and flukes went on for an incredible five or ten minutes, transfixing me and a passel of surfers. These two creatures showed up right on time for Mother’s Day brunch, along with a missed call from Ben that I noticed later. 

 

The next week, I was at the lake in my home town in suburban Maryland where I scattered the ashes of my mother and father in two separate places many years ago. The man-made lake used to swarm with fish, birds, and waterfowl but now seemed eerily empty. I walked around it starting at my father’s end, thinking about how I need to make room for his memory in my heart and how it’s losing Noah that has taught me this. As I paused at my mother’s end of the lake, a mallard paddled by with a flotilla of impossibly tiny ducklings in her wake, there and gone so fast I hardly believed it. Later, as I rounded the curve at my father’s end of the lake again, a figure stood in profile on top of the dam, regal and still and tall as a child. It was a blue heron gazing into the stream below. I crept as close as I could for a photo. My father, a bird lover, would have been pleased at the heron’s appearance, glad that I stopped long enough to notice what I least expected. If only I’d stopped to notice my father as a person in the few years we had together as adults before his suicide.

“The mourner’s mind is superstitious, looking for signs and wonders,”  writes Meghan O’Rourke in The Long Goodbye. We’re forever seeking meaning in things both ordinary and rare. Is it because we’re in a state of heightened receptivity and emotion? Because our minds are so attuned to yearning that everything becomes proof of the lost person’s presence? As suicide survivors, blindsided by a seemingly random act that upends our faith in the universe, we’re desperate to recapture a sense of order and a thread of connection. Signs affirm that connection by making it visible. They remind us of the enduring beauty and beneficence of the world and its random acts of kindness.

All this serendipity is a balm for the open, broken heart. 

Milestones in the Parallel Universe

After each milestone, I expect an arrival of sorts, a sign. I should be in a different place after the third anniversary of Noah’s death, right? I’m further along the mourner’s path but still on that path, as if in some parallel universe. I step onto the treadmill of ordinary life for a while till I tumble off again and onto a parallel track, slower, more circuitous, with blind curves. 

The tears come less often now, more a fleeting sprinkle than a drenching downpour. So, too, sadly, do thoughts and memories of Noah. I’m less preoccupied with his life and death, more preoccupied with my own. I wear my loss and my identity as a mourning mom less and less visibly. “Over time, the sadness moves from our skin into our bones,” writes Claire McCarthy, who lost a child. “It becomes less visible, but no less who we are. It changes into a wisdom, one we’d give up in a heartbeat to have our child back.” 

 

I was teary again this weekend. It started at the communal memorial services that mark the end of Passover, when I felt my husband trembling beside me. First I held him, then he held me. This morning, I crumpled thinking of what Noah might have written in a card for his dad’s upcoming birthday. So I wasn’t surprised to learn that yesterday, May 1, 2016, was Bereaved Mother’s Day. I’m gratified that mothers who’ve lost children—mostly through miscarriage or infant death--have organized for recognition of their parallel universe of motherhood. Their efforts bring sweetness to this bittersweet time of year for mourning moms.

Spring is still full of landmines for our family. The anniversary was prolonged this year since there was a month between Noah’s secular anniversary and the yahrzeit, or personal memorial day, on the Jewish lunar calendar. In the weeks before and after the anniversary, my body signaled the date with a dull, persistent pain in the abdomen as if to say it’s always here. This has been happening like clockwork for three years with no apparent medical cause. Like it did at the beginning of this journey, the body still says no and stops ordinary time. 

 

We hosted a Passover Seder again this year, again without our usual energy. Now it's almost my husband’s 60^th birthday and he’s said no to any parties or grand gestures; “I’ve kind of forgotten how to celebrate,” he admits. 

I seem to have caught my husband’s wariness of planning trips away from home; the prospect feels too complicated and exhausting. But maybe for good reason: We’re planning a celebration of Noah’s life at our home on what would have been his 25^th birthday in June. One of Noah’s gifts was bringing people together. So we’re inviting his local and far-flung friends, along with family, and hope it will be a chance for people who loved Noah to meet, reunite, share memories and Noah’s favorite foods. It’s hard to see past this event to know how we’ll feel or what this milestone will mean.

Meanwhile, I’m very pleased about two milestones that coincided with the third anniversary. First, we finally started a small nonprofit foundation, the Noah Langholz Remembrance Fund, thanks to my husband’s diligence. The fund will support suicide awareness/prevention efforts, as well as organizations and activities that interested Noah and shaped his life, like international student exchange and wilderness experiences. Second, I finally completed a draft of my book about losing Noah. Now it will wend its way through comments, revisions, and publisher queries. All of us who loved Noah carry his legacy with us, but it’s largely invisible. Both the fund and the book will make Noah’s legacy visible in ways that we hope will be healing and enriching for others.