Avoiding Halloween

Please note: This post has disturbing images from the scene of my son’s death that you may wish to avoid.

Ten years ago, I scouted out weird Halloween displays in front yards to show my kids. Our own strobe-lit porch had giant spiders, skeletons, Day of the Dead ornaments, unearthly didjeridu music, and hundreds of trick-or-treaters. 

This October, when I walk in my neighborhood, I am assaulted with ghoulish images that are someone else’s idea of fun. I am surrounded with effigies hanging from trees, a daily reminder of images I am trying hard to forget. 

When I found my son hanging in the garage, the scene was so macabre that I thought it was an effigy of him someone had strung up for a prank. I couldn’t believe he had done this violence to himself. For weeks, I was haunted by details of the scene, especially the sight of his bare feet dangling helplessly above the ground—a place no human feet should be. I wonder if anyone who has seen a loved one hanging can ever look dispassionately on a hanging scene at Halloween, much less in a movie or a historical photograph. I still can barely stand to look at rope, or even the word ‘rope.’ These things are my enemies, doorway to nightmares. 

I didn’t count Halloween on the list of tough holidays I anticipated this year. But the profusion of hanging figures, open coffins and RIP gravestones disturb my peace. There is no RIP for people who kill themselves and the ones they leave behind. Every day is a day of the dead for survivors. Every triggering effigy, another sign that I am walking the mourner’s path, as if at a great distance from the everyday.  

Letting In Halloween

I let in Halloween this year. It just sort of happened. I found myself peeking with curiosity at outlandish yard decorations that I passed in my neighborhood instead of avoiding them like I’ve done the past few years ; I don't need so much protection from death images that are someone else's idea of fun. I put out a pumpkin and bought candy to give to the little kids next door. When I saw them prancing around giddily in their princess and Batman costumes, I couldn’t help marveling at their cuteness and how exciting this day is for kids.
 

I remembered how our two boys loved Halloween and how we used to make a big deal of it, draping heaps of sticky plastic spider web over the bushes and setting up the strobe light and didgeridoo music on our front porch, making ever-weirder big jack-o-lanterns and scooping out the insides for my mother’s pumpkin cake. Ben and Noah helped give away hundreds of candies to what seemed like an endless stream of trick-or-treaters. One year when he was 12, Ben sat quietly on the porch in a hockey mask and black cape, then reared up suddenly with a roar when a hesitant little girl coming up the steps wondered if he was real.

                                                   (Noah as cowboy with brother Ben)

Noah never stopped loving the holiday. As a child, he often ended up not wearing the costume we had so carefully planned but he didn’t miss out on any of the action. Candy was a rarity in our house, so Noah couldn’t wait to get home with his friends and dump out his loot on the floor, amazed at his good fortune. He’d count and sort it, then make trades for the optimum assortment.  (I put his stash away in a high cupboard to be rationed out over the next couple weeks, while I secretly threw most of it away; Noah never seemed to notice.) As a teenager, Noah would meet up with friends and gallivant in the dark streets in some random assortment of odds and ends from our dress-up bag. At college, he appeared as a convincing geisha one year, Abe Lincoln the next. For a party in San Francisco, Ben recalls, Noah wanted to be a narcoleptic person with a pillow taped to his head but ended up as a boxer in short shorts and a bathrobe with his drink taped to his boxing glove.

                                                (Noah as geisha with college friend)

 I’ve returned to normal thoughts for Halloween instead of haunting images. For Thanksgiving, too, instead of dread, I’m thinking ahead to how we can avoid the traffic and who will do the clean-up. Letting in more light.

International Survivors of Suicide Loss Day this year is November 19. To find out about gatherings in your area, including screenings of a new documentary "Life Journeys: Reclaiming Life After Loss," click here.

Rethinking Triggers

When you’re a new survivor, painful triggers lurk everywhere. Your heart and mind are so fixated on and tormented by loss, your body so shaken with shock, that everything reminds you of the tragedy. In the early months after my son Noah’s suicide, my mind would be wandering and suddenly, I’d flash on finding him dead; I’d be so traumatized, I’d have to stop everything, including the car, and talk myself down. Or just the sight of the driveway would pummel me with the realization that a smiling Noah would never walk up it again.

Many loss survivors have PTSD and need to avoid triggers of traumatic memories, like the site of the suicide. Some of us use EMDR and other therapies to exorcise the worst of these from our minds. We need to do this to claw our way out of the pit we’ve landed in or, once out, to maintain our delicate balance. 

I’ve tracked grief milestones on this blog by noticing how some triggers shift in shape and lose their sting over time. There was the point when I could look at Halloween decorations again, drive through our old neighborhood again, make it through Valentine’s Day without crying. 

Six and a half years out, some triggers still crush me. Like when reading a survivor’s story comparing her husband’s major depression to cancer as a disease complete with remission, drug resistance, and terminal risk, I came to the part about how the final months of his life were like being in hospice care except his family didn’t know it. I let out a howl and had a big cry, haunted by images of Noah’s last numb weeks at home. It was the worst grief surge I’ve had for a while but I was overdue.

I was grateful to the author for giving me new insight into those terrible weeks. As a psychologist notes, triggers are "unhealed emotional wounds" that can be our teacher; "they give us an opportunity to observe and reflect, which enables us to heal." I was also grateful for the catharsis of tears that brought me back to my grieving soul. Because it doesn’t surface as often anymore. As the years mount since Noah’s suicide and life fills with other things, grief still resides within me but doesn’t take up as much space.

It’s easier with time to choose which triggers to let in. Like at a ballet lecture, watching a video clip of the scene where Romeo finds Juliet dead, holds her limp body in his arms, and—to my horror—actually begins to dance with her corpse. I turned away; I couldn’t see the beauty in movement that reminded me of holding Noah’s dead body. Just like I don’t need the colorful, down to earth reminders of Día de los Muertos/Day of the Dead that death is a part of life; it’s been ever too much a part of mine. 

There will always be dangerous triggers for some survivors and for those who’ve been traumatized in other ways; dealing with these is tough work that can take years. Some people with anxiety wrestle with triggers on a daily basis.

But for others who are years out from a traumatic event, triggers need not always be feared. After all, to trigger something means to cause it to happen, to set it in motion—so the question is, what do triggers activate in each of us? The answer is so individual. For me, triggers can unlock a door that’s stuck and lead the way back to the mourning grove when I’m overdue for a visit. Or they can open a window into memory, both good and bad, that still needs processing. So at this stage, I welcome most triggers because they remind me of what I’ve lost—and because I can handle them now. Both are blessings. 


To my fellow survivors: How do you look upon and handle your triggers? Have they or you changed over time? I’d like to hear your take on triggers, whether in a comment on the blog or at susanauerbach56@gmail.com  Find out more about emotional triggers here and many reputable places online. And if you’re haunted with highly disturbing, disruptive memories or flashbacks around the suicide, I hope you’ll seek help for PTSD.

Meditations on Rope, Part 1

Another Halloween, and this time I am prepared. I take walks through the neighborhood with my head down, avoiding front yards full of gravestones and hanging effigies that stung me last year . This year, no surprises, no tears. How lightly they take death who have not felt its tragic weight. Yet is it any surprise I’ve been thinking and writing about rope the last couple weeks?

Chance*

You took chances.

So many ways you could have died

on surfboard, snowboard, motorcycle--

just one blindsiding wave, curve, car.

I worried, you scoffed, we played

our parts; you stayed intact.

Disasters I conjured

but never this torrent

swamping your soul.

You took no chances.

You could have set it up

to disappear at sea, plunge

off a cliff, but

a rope over the rafters

leaves no mistake,

no clue,

no you.

*All poetry in this blog is original work-in-progress, unless attributed to others.