Of Birthdays, Rainbows & Trauma

My son Noah would have been 33 today. How I wish I were making him apple pie à la mode, his go-to birthday treat in the last years of his life. Or at least talking to him on the phone, wherever in the world he might have been. (My guess is he would have been in France helping the host family from his exchange student days move out of their beloved houseboat and into their first-ever home on land.) My husband and I went to a French bistro called Entre Nous last night to reminisce about Noah and the food and people he loved. How I wish that Noah were still among us to enjoy that place, to have a rendezvous with me to reconcile “between us.” How I wish that I did not need to start a new computer file called “Blog Posts – Year 11 and Beyond.”

I was recently interviewed for the podcast “Untethered: Healing the Pain from a Sudden Death”  by traumatic grief specialist Dr. Jennifer Levin. It was an occasion to look back over the years and explore how my grief has evolved with time. The biggest change is simply that grief takes up less space in my heart and mind than it did in the first 3 or even 5 or 6 years after Noah’s suicide. In the early years, the intensity of traumatic loss filled my every waking moment, and my role as a suicide loss survivor was at the core of my identity, relationships, and activities. Gradually, with a lot of work processing the loss, the intensity subsided, leaving room for other feelings and experiences. Joy, faith, and gratitude crept back in. Grief and regret over losing Noah will always be a part of me, ebbing and flowing, but they no longer dominate my days. I hope this gives hope to the newly bereaved after suicide who question if it ever gets better. (Dr. Levin’s podcast  is on a break at the moment but I recommend browsing past episodes to learn from many types of suicide loss survivors, as well as grief experts, and checking out the resources on her website .)

There are signs of this shift in grief orientation as I walk through the house and notice my different reactions to pictures of Noah and my living son, Ben. The pictures of Noah are years old and static; they will never be replaced by newer ones. The pictures of Ben are ever-changing on a digital picture frame full of his adventures and our family gatherings. I blow kisses to images of both my beautiful boys. But when I see Ben, my heart quickens in anticipation of talking with him, visiting him, traveling with him, seeing him with his cousins and grandparents—all the ways we continue to deepen our relationship and enrich each others’ lives. With photos of Noah, there is no promise of connection, no future together—only memory, weighted with regret and unanswered questions.

Lately, I’ve been feeling Noah’s presence in a more vital way in, of all places, the bathroom. Some afternoons there’s a trick of the light there that bounces off a bevel in the mirror, bending into little rainbow shapes on the tub and floor. Rainbows are rare in our southern California skies and I long ago decided that any sighting of them is a sign from Noah—even if he, unlike his biblical namesake, never got a chance to witness the miracle of a rainbow after the deluge that engulfed him. When I see the little wisps of rainbow spectrum in the bathroom, they cheer me. It’s as if Noah’s spirit found a way to reach out after all in the most humble of places at unpredictable moments. In a poem to him, I wrote: “You are teaching me not to seek/ but to notice what is given.”

Speaking of poems, I want to leave you with excerpts from a couple that may resonate. First from “trauma is not sacred” by Kai Cheng Thom :

all bodies know how to heal themselves given enough

time …

beneath the skin of every history of trauma
                there is a love poem

waiting deep below

And from Padraig Ó Tuama’s “The Lifeline”:

            When death sounds, I forget most

            of what I learnt before …

            I carve that hole in my own

            chest again, pull out all my organs once

            again, wonder if they’ll ever work again

            stuff them back in again. Begin. Again.

To my fellow survivors: Wishing you many lifelines as you move through grief.