Dredging Up Anger, Part 1

“It’s a good thing they closed the coffin or I would have socked him one,” said my older son after Noah’s funeral. I couldn’t blame him for being angry. All this time, I’ve been acknowledging anger as natural but not letting myself fully feel it. Anger at Noah, that is.

 

It’s been much easier to fume at other people and things. I hate suicide and people who romanticize it. I hate rope and knots and how simple it is to end a life. I hate the gruesome suicide of Noah’s good friend that set off his decline. I’m mad at relatives who didn’t or couldn’t speak openly with us about his death. I’m furious at psychiatry for its primitive understanding and treatment of mental illness and suicide risk. Why did it take decades and more than 1,500 suicides to finally (this year) approve protective barriers at the Golden Gate Bridge? Suicide survivors often share and commiserate about these frustrations, tiptoeing around the real source of anger.

I hate having my life hijacked by this nightmare. But how can I be angry at a child who was in desperate pain and not thinking clearly? If he was ill, how can I blame him? How can I rage when he’s dead and gone, and no fuming will make things right? Anger gets quashed and tamped down by these rational thoughts and the need for compassion. It dissolves almost instantly into tears of frustration and grief. Why can’t I own and express my anger? As the old Leonard Cohen song says, “It begins with your family and later comes round to your soul.” Anger seems lodged deep inside, stuck in the muck of this loss. It blocks my way forward, especially toward forgiveness. I have to dredge it up and chip away at it, but how?

I try reciting rage directly to Noah, spitting and cursing into the wind as I take a walk:

            How COULD you? How DARE you throw your life away and hurt us all so much?

            You stupid, stupid boy. You did a horrible, brutal, senseless, unnecessary thing that can NEVER be undone. You didn’t give yourself a chance.           

You BETRAYED us. While we were trying to help, you were planning this.

            I gave you everything I had as a mother and you give me THIS? You thought I was strong and I could bear it? THANKS A LOT!! I can’t believe you left without a goodbye or sign of love. I can’t believe there’s no more chance for reconciliation.      

Game OVER. Only it wasn’t a game and it’s far from over for us. I am furious you are GONE forever and somehow I have to learn to live with you gone, my poor, sweet, stupid child.  

            This DIDN'T have to be.

These words are true but feel scripted and awkward, detached from my body. I am fluent in pain but how do I speak anger? 

Maybe raging sorrow goes beyond words. Let it out, let it out.

Post-Pilgrimage: Now What?

My pilgrimage to Europe on Noah’s behalf was packed with more pleasures than expected, though bittersweet. I managed to enjoy many sights, tastes, and experiences, especially when retracing Noah’s steps in France. I talked and mourned a lot with Noah’s French host mother; it was comforting to know she is still grieving and trying to understand, and to see reminders of Noah in the family home. We exchanged memories and photos and I met a few more of Noah’s French friends. I felt his presence most when alone on the family’s houseboat; I could almost see his long legs loping along the deck or bounding up the stairs, feel his energy reveling in a new life and language there. Some of my saddest moments were airplane departures, a reminder of Noah’s ultimate departure and the leavings and endings that have become so difficult. At those times, I felt alone and vulnerable, intensely missing my husband, my dog, and my living son. No wonder my husband has been unwilling to travel.

            The problem with going away, of course, is that you have to come back. I came home to the same unbelievable, unacceptable, incomprehensible, heart-sinking fact of Noah being truly and forever gone. Nothing had changed. There it was in my face again, undeniable. My husband’s loving welcome blunted the harshness a bit.

Jet lag mingled with let-down. I had completed my mission to reconnect with Noah’s French family, which I had yearned to do for more than a year. It felt like closing a chapter. What now? What more can I do—what more do I need to do--to mark this death and move through this grief? I am waiting for the addition of Noah’s name to a stone in our local Children’s Memorial and Healing Garden . I am starting to think about the daunting task of transforming this blog into a book. But in the near term, what is the next step in the journey, the next milestone to set? And what is there to look forward to with summer still ahead and no family vacation planned?

I knew I’d see my living son a couple weeks after my return, on what would have been Noah’s 23^rd birthday . I held onto that. It was an unsettling weekend of downs and ups; then he left and the let-down and dis-ease resumed.

Maybe it’s finally here, the depression I’ve been warding off for months. A normal part of grief, I know. Since Noah’s suicide, I’ve been flooded with sorrow, yearning, anger, guilt, remorse, but have usually resisted numbness. Yoga, music, prayer and meditation have helped keep it at bay and reconnect me to the flow. I will keep trying for balance and line up some summer pleasures. But it’s taking more energy now to push back glumness. Do I let it in?

More Than?

Noah was more than a person who took his life.

His life was about more than his suicide or any illness he may have had.

His biography is more than its last line about how he died.

I am more than the parent of a child who killed himself.

My relationship with Noah is more than my reaction to his death.

My parenting is about more than failing to save my youngest child. 

What does this mean? Refusing to be defined by labels and stigma, even though we assume some people judge our family. Refusing to let the suicide swamp our life force or overshadow memories of the lost child, alive and well. If all these things are “more than,” then there is much to salvage: more memories, more relationship, more parts of ourselves that have been on hold since the suicide. How do we hold this truth in balance with the immense, unacceptable weight of the fact that our child is gone and that some days, that is all that matters?

I’ve heard that a bit of a newborn’s DNA crosses the placenta into the mother—so it is not just sentimental for biological moms to feel that our lost children live on within us. Or that a part of ourselves has died with them. How can we be more than their struggles when we are so enmeshed with them?

My life and identity as a mother should not be defined by, minimized by, or permanently damaged by having lost my younger child to suicide. Yet this is the hardest thing to believe in my bones. My sense of myself as a mother still feels fragile and confused, contaminated and upended in pieces on the ground. Everything I did to raise this child remains in doubt, thrown into unanswerable question. It is humbling and humiliating. When I catch myself wanting to encourage or advise other parents with their “normal” family dilemmas, I realize I am the last person who should talk. I need to step back and listen and learn all I can. I need to be a good parent with my living child, including letting him go through this grieving time in his own way.

It’s the shaming, crippling parenting aspects of the suicide loss experience that I have thought and read and written least about, maybe because it's so threatening. Questioning one's parenting is a subtext in suicide loss memoirs from Iris Bolton’s classic My Son, My Son to the present, as if too hot to handle directly. Might parent survivors need to fully confess our doubts, regrets, and yes, sense of guilt, before we can embrace what it means to be "more than" parents of a suicide?  Just as survivors may need to fully experience our anger at the loved one who left us before we can forgive them.

We lose more than our future when we lose a child.

Second Birthday

It’s been a long year since Noah’s 22^nd birthday, just three months after his suicide. I am less in dread of dates now. I was not tormented weeks ahead in anticipation of his birthday this year. Instead, I was traveling to Paris and Berlin on his behalf, often grieving but not thinking of his birthday. Once home, I was too busy with the rush—or jet-lagged slog--of my own life. All I’ve managed to do in planning for his 23^rd birthday tomorrow is to reserve a table at one of his favorite restaurants and wonder how I will spend the rest of the day.

Like last year, my husband went to the cemetery to talk to Noah. For me, the cemetery remains a painful place, suited only to marking and mourning his death. Maybe because I still cannot accept that Noah is there now, underground, forever silent and unmoving.

If I could, I’d go to the ocean for Noah’s birthday, to one of his favorite surf spots. It is by moving water that I feel closest to his spirit, whether by sea, river, or stream. I thought about him in France as I watched the rolling current on the Marne River, where he used to swim and kayak and feed the swans. The current of life that pulses onwards, whether straight and stately or wildly curving and crashing, to places known and unknown—the current he drifted away from and finally deserted when he jumped ship. The same current that carried a tiny homemade raft from his French memorial, laden with messages from friends and family there.  

On Noah’s birthday, we’ll be home with our living son, his girlfriend, and funny little dog. We’ll be immersed in them and their lives, taking some of the sting out of the weekend. We’ll go to Noah’s restaurant and make a toast to him, but we’ll likely not dwell on his life or death. It might hurt or exasperate our living son to turn this precious weekend visit with him into intense mourning time for his brother. Noah’s birthday this year reminds me of how I need to pour my love and attention into mothering my living son.

Marking the birthday of a lost child should be about celebrating his life with the people, places, and things he loved, or that remind us of him, or that he would have enjoyed had he been here. Our family always made a fuss over birthdays and Noah loved it. We should let ourselves imagine what life would have been like had he recovered his health and lived. I imagine Noah a a 23-year-old college graduate, having made that cross-country drive west that he always wanted to do, working a summer job, going out a lot but sure to be home for his birthday BBQ with grandparents, cousins, and us—chasing the dog and the chickens, playing chess with his dad, maybe consenting to talk with his mother if I caught him at some magic moment. Growing up, seizing on pleasures, trying to find his way.

If only. If only we had a life to celebrate with normal ups and downs and a healthy son smiling at the table as we toasted him. Or even a suffering son smiling weakly but still with us, letting us love and help him as he fought his way upstream and back into the flow.

But we have only memories, the good ones still hard to dredge up through the muck of grief, anger, and bewilderment. Even our fantasies of what might have been will likely fade as the years move past the child we knew, frozen in time on the cusp of 22.

Lament for a Lost Child

I'm home from my trip, only to resume the journey of bereavement. A year and three months ago, we lost our son. A year and a couple weeks ago, I started this blog. It seems a fitting time to share this lament, another work-in-progress. I imagine it will get longer the longer we live with this loss. Right now, I can't see how the verses will end.

The stream is rushing in the canyon

The wildflowers coming into bloom

You’re not here to see this springtime

Because you had a sense of doom

Refrain: How I wish that I had told you

Every day and every night

That I loved you and would help you

And everything would be all right

I could see the darkness falling

Like a veil across your face

If you'd only gone for treatment

Could despair have been erased?

Everyone is grieving for you

Do you know how much you’re missed?

No more late night conversation

No more curly head to kiss

I’ll forever beg forgiveness

For what I said and what I did

If I’d known, I would have done otherwise

But you kept the worst things hid

I made that trip to Europe for you

Walked along the Spree and Seine

Where the young come out to party--

Another place you should have been

You would have come to love our puppy

If you had seen him with your old eyes

We couldn’t bear this year without him

He is our consolation prize*


*Note: All poetry on this blog is original unless attributed to others.