Opening Up New Vistas

My husband, Bryan, and I brought our sons to the mountains from an early age, strapping small packs on them and the dog for slow hikes to local campgrounds. Ben and Noah loved whittling sticks, playing in the stream, and roasting marshmallows while watching “campers’ TV” in the fire pit. As a

teenager, Noah (center) went backpacking with his dad, best friend Sammy, and Wags, and with youth wilderness organizations in California and the Northwest. He played hackey sack on the summit of Mt. St. Helens, then slid down the steep scree. He admired the peripatetic leaders of the youth trips, who could survive anywhere and converse with anyone as they traversed the back country.

Last week, it was Noah’s legacy that brought Bryan and me to the mountains. Our mission was to meet staff and students from Outward Bound California at “Helipad 2.0,” a huge granite slab near Wishon Lake in the Sierras. We’d been invited because the Noah Langholz Remembrance Fund is helping support scholarships for the organization. We knew we were in the right place when we saw a row of dusty bear canisters and a circle of dirty, enthusiastic teenagers who’d just emerged from two weeks of backpacking. They were fantasizing about good food and cellphones but had managed fine without either and formed a tight group in the process. We listened to their stories and pitched in with cooking, clean-up, and the impressive drill of “de-issuing” gear like helmets, spices, and blister kits. The director told the students that “the real adventure begins now” with what they’d learned about themselves and others. The air fairly crackled with the optimism and energy of young people with their whole lives before them. As Noah should have been, I couldn’t help thinking.

From our shady campsite, Bryan and I looked down on lakes and forests we’d never seen before. The air was fresh and piney, the river below a rollicking torrent. A slip of moon in indigo sky gave way to stars so thick and close, they looked fuzzy. We were here, exploring new vistas in the Sierras and meeting these great people, because of Noah. At least there’s that to be grateful for, and future trips with our son, Ben, even if we’ll never again share a campsite or anything else with Noah.

We left the mountains in time to spend Noah’s should-have-been 26^th birthday at home. We brought a foot-long Jeffrey pine cone to place on his rock in the Children’s Memorial and Healing Garden, along with a rose and an apple from a tree he planted in our yard shortly before his death. That tree bears sweet fruit now, 4 ½ years later. Bryan’s new corn crop is a marvel. After so much hurt--I had a can't-stop-crying/shaking fit the day before the Outward Bound meet-up--what can we survivors do but continue to seed the ground and treasure what harvest comes to us?

Pets and Other Comforts

 A photo of Noah that I hadn’t seen in years fell out of a cabinet the other day. He was about 4 or 5, in his summer PJs, flopped on his stomach on the bed with our new dog, Wags, spread out beside him, one paw draped protectively over Noah’s back. Noah beams up at the camera in complete happiness, already secure in his bond with this dog.

A patient, long-lived Lab mix, Wags remained Noah’s spirit animal for years. She taught him to love as he doted on her, took her on adventures, kept her well hugged and kissed. He went on to befriend every pet he met, even a notoriously mean cat, who he curled up with to sleep.

In a photo of him holding another cat during his college years, he looks searchingly into the cat’s face as if wishing his life could be as simple as hers. He found our chickens ridiculous, amusing himself by throwing them in the air to take pictures of them startling, but he held them tenderly, too.

 Pets were Noah’s link with love and the life force. He needed their complete understanding and loyalty, the steadiness of their animal breath. He had joyous reunions with Wags—snout ever whiter, gait ever slower--when he came home from study abroad and from semesters of college. 

The onset of Noah’s major depression coincided with Wags starting to sleep a lot and drag and teeter on her walks. We had to put her down at age 19 in early 2012, just when our 20-year-old Noah was  struggling on a year off from college in San Francisco, far from home. In Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass, which Noah read as a kid, everyone has an animal daemon who shares their fate. Did Noah begin to die inside when he lost his beloved Wags?

Eleven months later, we found a handsome, high strung Shepherd-Shar Pei mix at the pound, who we named Lobo. I thought having a dog in the house again, especially a young, energetic dog, would cheer Noah on his visits home. But he barely petted or teased Lobo in what turned out to be the last months of his life. He’d lost the will to laugh or play. 

In the last photo we have of Noah, he’s smiling down at Lobo after running the Los Angeles Marathon. It was the first real smile we’d seen in a long time. Something about Lobo’s essential dog-ness managed to penetrate Noah’s despair, at least for a moment.

Two days later, Lobo was the last living thing to see Noah before he took his life in the garage. I’m guessing that Noah in his altered state didn’t notice Lobo at all. In the days and months that followed, Lobo would learn to stand beside weeping people and lick our knees.

Now, the animals that once comforted Noah are a lifeline for my husband and me. When Lobo finally stops squirrel duty for the day and lies down on the floor in the evening, I lie down and drape myself over him, just like Noah used to do with the much more compliant Wags. We scoop up Miso, our son Ben’s little French bulldog, and cuddle her tight; she grunts and gurgles contentedly, as if purring.  We kiss all the animals on the head, even the chickens. (Actually, only Bryan kisses the chickens, daring to defy the health recommendations of the CDC .)

“That’s ridiculous,” Noah would have said about the CDC's warning. He would have tackled Miso on the rug and chased Lobo in circles around the yard. How we miss his animal spirit.

To my fellow survivors: How have animals been part of your loved one’s life and your own grief journey? Spending time with animals, whether yours or borrowed, becomes more precious than ever after trauma. Let’s hear it for the simple power of pet therapy!

 

A Bittersweet Taste of Italy

I recently had the good fortune to travel to Italy with my husband, Bryan. He ended the long-distance travel ban he'd clung to after we lost our son, Noah, to suicide in 2013. Before, Bryan needed the routines and comforts of home —and the reminders of Noah there--to keep him centered, while I craved travel as a grief holiday . Now, Bryan was more willing to venture into the unfamiliar and put up with the discomforts of travel. As it turned out, this trip was full of reminders of Noah and the need for the healing routines of home for both of us.

This was no pilgrimage like my last trip to Europe, alone, one year after the suicide. I didn’t need to carry traveler’s blessings and protective poems anymore. This was a pleasure trip that I was intent on enjoying, starting with the beautiful roll of Italian on my tongue. And enjoy it I mostly did, though still in the somewhat blunted way of everything joyful in the past few years.

Flying over the quilt of gold and green fields in Europe, I thought of Noah’s passion for the place and how he imagined himself a polyglot citizen of the EU. As an exchange student in France, he met international students and wanted to visit all of them. He wished he could move freely among the EU countries and attend great universities gratis, as they did. He visited his good friend Filippo in his home town in the Italian Alps and was supposed to meet up with him and other friends in Berlin a few weeks before he died. (Here is Noah, center, in Paris in 2009, with Filippo on the right and another exchange student on the left.) I’m sure that had he lived, Noah would have flown often over the route we were taking. He would have made many sojourns in Europe to master its languages, savor its views and cafes. He would have visited Florence again, this time with cash in hand so he wouldn't have to sleep in the train station.

On the streets of Italy, we saw tall, dark, bearded Noah look-alikes with curly hair and Roman noses. I realized, in a tiny osteria in Siena and in a long line outside the cathedral in Florence, that I found excuses to talk with these young men so I could get a better look at their faces and linger in the fantasy. Please, could you translate what’s on that blackboard? Where exactly is that concert tonight? Flashes of familiarity—Noah yet not Noah--in places where he might have, should have been.

In churches and museums, I gravitated to sculptures of the Pietà that I never cared much about before. Mary’s lamentation, frozen in gesture over the centuries, cried out to me; I knew her anguish cradling a dead adult son in her lap. I was struck by how sorrow and shock transfixed the figures around her in Ippolito Scalza’s Pietà in Orvieto. I got teary as I approached each Pietà and backed away. Yet I wish I could have seen more of these monuments to a mother’s grief.

Despite having Noah so much in mind, Bryan and I somehow forgot to pick up a stone or other little memento of our trip to bring home to put on Noah’s grave. I guess we were too busy taking in all the delights.

I wonder if Europe will always feel infused with Noah’s passions while tainted with sadness. Agrodolce: bittersweet--a powerful draw.

With Hearts in Hand: Grief Tokens and the AAS Healing Conference

While groping in my purse for a pen, my hand closes on two little hard objects. One is a tiny, pointed crystal, the other a strip of porcelain with “always” printed on one side and “believe” on the other. I’ll always love you, I think. I’ll always believe you loved me and loved life as long as you could.

I never took notice of such things before losing Noah to suicide. But in the pit of early grief, I needed little tokens to anchor me, sprigs of lavender in my pocket to breathe in calm. Now I collect talismans from survivor gatherings--ceramic hearts, gratitude stones, miniature origami cranes-- to carry with me or array beside photos at home. In my wallet, a fortune cookie promise: You will find happiness in mind and heart. On my wrist, the nine charms of a memorial bracelet , each an emblem of Noah and our connection. Thus fortified, I go out into the world.

I got the crystal a few weeks ago at the closing ceremony of the annual American Assn. of Suicidology (AAS) Healing After Suicide Loss Conference , which was the highlight of a long day of talks and workshops. The session was led by Iris Bolton , a wise, warm, and gracious founder of the suicide loss survivors support movement and author of the classic, My son . . . my son. . .: A guide to healing after death, loss, or suicide (Bolton Press, 1983) as well as the new Voices of healing and hope: Conversations on grief after suicide (Bolton Press, 2017). Iris slowed our breathing and brought our hearts into the room with the mellow tone of Native American flutes and drums. We passed tissue boxes around and introduced ourselves to our neighbors. I can’t remember what was said, only that some 40 years after the death of her son, Mitch, Iris could speak to the pain of all in the room, from the stunned newly bereaved to the stalwart 20-year veteran. She invited each person to come up and choose a crystal from the table, then form a big circle around the room. We spoke, first, the names of those we had lost and finally, one word for our feelings in that moment. Thus held gently in community, we could return to the world.

It wasn’t like that at my first healing conference in 2014, about a year after Noah’s suicide. I went desperately seeking answers, but the onslaught of information on suicide prevention and postvention (care for survivors) couldn’t penetrate the daze of my grief. I was especially shaken at the time by the stories of people who had attempted suicide and lived. By the end of that day, the closing ceremony felt rushed and formal, leaving me exposed and bereft in the hotel lobby.

This time, three years later, I could hug and reassure other mothers, enjoy meeting people, recognize some names on the conference program, and marvel at the many ways survivors had “turned grief into action” with research, advocacy, and outreach. I could show people notices for my book that will be out in a few months, I’ll Write Your Name on Every Beach: A Mother’s Quest for Comfort, Courage, and Clarity After Suicide Loss, and feel a rush of gratitude when they pointed to the title or the cover photo (of Noah’s name written in the sand) and said, “I’ve done that, too!” In the conference registration area, I could find the color-coded heart stickers for name tags and put a red heart (for losing a child) on one side of my name and a purple heart (for losing a parent) on the other and feel relieved to publicly wear my heart(s) on my sleeve. And I could see others with similar stickers and strike up a conversation with, “I see we share a heart.”

To my fellow survivors: Indeed, we do share a heart, whether a sticker on a badge, a token in the hand, or a memory of a loved one. I hope you have a chance to unburden your heart in the company of others who understand your grief. See the Resources section of this blog to find support groups in your area or an online community like Alliance of Hope for Suicide Survivors  , and consider attending the next AAS Healing Conference, Saturday, April 28, 2018, in Washington, D.C.