Grieving Suicide Loss in a Time of Pandemic

To My Fellow Survivors After Suicide:

Deserted streets. Stages and stadiums dark. Schools, workplaces, houses of worship suddenly empty. The world as we know it has shut down.

It reminds me of the windows going dark in my son Noah’s mind and the light draining from his eyes during his decline. How by a month before his suicide, he was almost completely shut down and we couldn’t get through to him. How after his death, life as I knew it collapsed. 

If you’re a recent survivor of suicide loss, you've likely been immersed in mourning one tragic death. Now, you’re surrounded by a global tragedy, unthinkable numbers ticking ever upward, each number another person gone and another circle of family and friends plunged into grief. Maybe you’ve struggled to see a path forward for yourself after the suicide; now the whole world is awash in a sea of uncertainty. Just when you’re trying to adjust to your own “new normal” without your loved one, everyone around you is talking about multiple “new normals.”

Maybe you’re so consumed with private anguish that you feel numb to the larger disaster of the pandemic and have to wall yourself off from it. Our son’s mental state was in shambles at the time of the Sandy Hook school shootings in December, 2012; I was so preoccupied trying to figure out how to help Noah, I didn’t have the bandwidth to follow the news or mourn along with the nation. Noah’s seventh death anniversary last month coincided with the declaration of a world pandemic and the first stay-at-home orders in the U.S. My eyes teared constantly at the thought of so much death; I had to tune out the grim statistics.

Do any of these situations sound familiar?

-       Your body is still reeling from the shock and grief of suicide loss, just when doctor visits have been restricted, eliminated, or shifted to videocalls.

-       You already felt isolated in your bereavement; now, you’re ordered to self-isolate. You desperately miss your lost loved one, who would have helped you get through this time.

-       The friend you used to walk with who really listened to your grief doesn’t want to meet in person anymore. Others who might check in with you by phone, text, or email are now checking in with lots of people, meaning less time for you; some of them are on “empathy overload.”

-       You finally joined a survivors’ support group and now it’s either on hiatus or switched to an online format—better than nothing but you really miss those hugs!

-       The comfort you used to find in your faith and religious community has been upended by social distancing. Online services, prayer, meditation, or classes are OK but you really need that fellowship coffee hour when you can hold someone’s hand or look into their eyes.

-       You’re already depleted by grief and here comes a whole other layer of exhaustion and sleeplessness on top of new routines for getting work done, watching the kids, buying groceries and staying safe. It’s enough just to get through a day.

-       You’re grateful every day to be healthy, fearful every day for another loss that touches you.

-       You’ve read about how grieving people shift back and forth between a loss orientation (preoccupied with mourning and memories of the loved one) and a restoration orientation (taking steps to return to living). You were just getting back on your feet, spending more time returning to living, but now you feel triggered by each day’s news.

On days when you feel anxious or overwhelmed, you can limit your exposure to the news and try mind-body exercises to calm yourself, like this yoga-inspired alternate-nostril breathing exercise that appears in my memoir, I’ll Write Your Name on Every Beach: A Mother’s Quest forComfort, Courage & Clarity After Suicide Loss (Jessica Kingsley Publishing, 2017):

With your right thumb over your RIGHT nostril (closing it), inhale slowly through your left nostril for three beats. Now lift off the thumb and close your LEFT nostril with your right index finger as you exhale through the right nostril for three beats. Then reverse: Keeping your right index finger where it is (over the left nostril), inhale through your right nostril for three beats.Finally, with your right thumb again over your RIGHT nostril, exhale through your left nostril for three beats and repeat the four-part pattern. Repeat the pattern for a few minutes, then sit quietly to feel the effects of the exercise.

Traumatic grief, depression, anxiety, suicidal feelings and other mental health struggles often feel magnified amidst a larger emergency. Below are a few resources for coping with your grief and staying mentally healthy in this tough time, in addition to whatever your county mental health department has to offer:

- From What’s Your Grief  

- From the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention  

- From the CDC  

- From National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI)  

- From the Suicide Prevention Lifeline  

Please remember: You are doing the essential work of grieving. Your needs matter. Limit your exposure to the news and social media. Reach out for fellowship and support however you can. Find one way to take good care of yourself every day. Have compassion for your grieving soul.

In shared sorrow,

Susan

If you or someone you know are in crisis and thinking of suicide, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, 24/7, at 800-273-8255.

7th Death Anniversary Amidst Fear & Uncertainty

Day after day in this coronavirus pandemic, another piece of our social fabric is ripped away. Day after day, I’m overcome with crying spells that I know are mostly for my son Noah’s impending death anniversary and memories of our family’s distress in the weeks leading up to his suicide. But surrounded now with collective anxiety and uncertainty, I’m also crying for—and fearful of--the vulnerability we share. Plus I’m on edge from sleep deprivation and sciatica pain that spiked this week—the body, right on schedule, howling its protest.

Know that we are connected/in ways that are terrifying and beautiful, writes Lynn Ungar in the new poem, “Pandemic.” Know that our lives/are in one another’s hands.

Noah would have been incredulous at the shutdown of everything he adored--travel, parties, movie theaters, cafes—even in his beloved France. He would have scoffed at the restrictions, strained against social distancing that went against his nature. He would have worried about his grandparents in California and his friends in Italy.



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Scanning through photos of Noah, landing on this one at age 16 in the Alaskan tundra, I’m reminded of how his teenage hair sprang full and fluffy atop his head like … a corona. How I loved to pat that springy hair; how still today I stroke his head in pictures. 

The photo was taken on an extended family trip at a time when Noah scorned smiling for pictures. Was he really as brooding as he looked? Did the tumultuous sky and bleak expanse remind him of an inner state that he was starting to feel and didn’t know how to express? There was no place in his fun guy persona to put that darkness. There’s so much we’ll never know about the wilderness of Noah’s despair, how vast and unnavigable it seemed to him, how it drove him five years later to take his life. 

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More lines from Ungar’s poem for everyone suffering from fear, anxiety, and isolation in this pandemic:

Reach out all the tendrils/of compassion that move, invisibly/where we cannot touch./Promise this world your love--/for better or for worse,/in sickness and in health,/so long as we all shall live.

Would that Noah and others who died by suicide could have kept the promise. 

Would that the tendrils of compassion and self-compassion reach everyone who is struggling with traumatic grief or mental health conditions at this difficult time.

National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 800-273-8255

Losing Faith in Trust

One of the deepest wounds of the suicide loss survivor experience is losing faith in trust. When someone we love takes their life, we lose trust in everything we know and believe about relationships, human nature, life itself. We can no longer rely on anything or anyone. And forget God or whatever we call the beyond. All bets are off. We’re left suspended in grief, shock, and confusion without a solid landing pad.

We thought everyone was in this life together, committed to the long haul and to helping ourselves and others with the hard times. But our loved one couldn’t stand the pain and slipped out of that social contract. We trusted that we knew them yet we didn’t fathom the depth of their despair, the plans they were making, or their capacity to act on those plans. Or maybe we knew that they had suicidal feelings and they’d promised to call us if it came to a crisis. We trusted them to confide in us and let us love and help them. Bereft, we feel utterly betrayed.

Can we ever fully know the people we love? Survivors are rudely confronted with this question as a matter of life and death. No matter how much we investigate, we’ll never fully understand why our loved ones took their lives.

Can we ever really change another person, much less control their actions? Survivors are forced to face our limitations here, too. We may struggle mightily with the “what if’s” and “if only’s.” But sometimes, no amount of love and care and treatment is enough.

Even more unsettling after suicide is loss of trust in ourselves. When I lost my son Noah at age 21, I lost all faith in my parenting, intuition, and emotional intelligence. Friends would tell me about some family problem and I was mute; I could no longer offer a word of insight or advice. Why would anyone trust anything I said? I had failed to save my child in his hour of need; I was, literally, clueless. All my ways of relating and understanding were broken. Any love I might still have to give? Untrustworthy.

This massive loss of trust on so many levels is what psychologists like Dr. John Jordan call the shattering of survivors’ “assumptive worlds”—the upending of everything we thought was true based on the experience of a lifetime. It’s terrifying to be suddenly robbed of that foundation.

Rebuilding trust in an unfaithful spouse, dishonest friend, or unethical institution is a slow, painful process.  Having to rebuild trust in everything—in trust itself, in life itself—when you’re grieving is especially daunting. I’m still not sure how I did it, though I’ve documented some of the steps in this blog and in my book, I’ll Write Your Name on Every Beach: A Mother’sQuest for Comfort, Courage & Clarity After Suicide Loss (Jessica Kingsley Publishing, 2017).

In the worst of the aftermath of suicide, I held onto a sliver of belief that I would heal, engage in life and be myself again. I sensed I could do this partly because I’d been through suicide loss before and survived. I have a stubborn attachment to the life force that persisted through the horror, a dim pilot light to follow. For a while I couldn’t handle the spiritual practices that had kept me grounded; I was just going through the motions of yoga, meditation, Shabbat. I had to learn to trust that my grief could be held in those places before I could finally reclaim their comfort.

What also helped was realizing that my story was safe with more people than I expected, whether fellow survivors in support groups, old friends who resurfaced, or readers of this blog. Love and support popped up in surprising ways, paving the path back to trust. Finding my voice again as a writer and seeing that my words could move and help others gave me hope. Gradually, I came to trust my instincts again and to renew my faith in the goodness of the world. 

A class I’m taking on Jewish middot (spiritual traits) has recently been discussing the balance between trust and control. I've always tipped overmuch toward control so balancing these traits is a key part of my personal “spiritual curriculum.” I can keep trying to develop and flex my “trust muscle.” But I can also give myself credit for how far I’ve come in being able to trust anyone or anything since March 19, 2013.


To My Fellow Survivors: Our paths to rebuilding a sense of trust after traumatic loss are as individual as our life paths before that loss. How have you been rebuilding and reconnecting? I’d love to hear your story. Comment here or contact me at susanauerbach56@gmail.com

Graveside Chat

I tend to avoid the cemetery where my son Noah is buried. So it took my older son Ben’s suggestion that we go together to get me there as part of his recent New Year’s visit home. 


I hate that Ben was robbed of brotherhood in adult life by Noah’s suicide. 


I hate that I was thwarted in my resolve that no child of mine would be an only child like I was. 


I hate that our family has to spend time in cemeteries talking about death and remembering Noah.


But those are the facts of our lives. And it was a comfort to spend time at the grave with Ben, to see him stride directly to the spot and set up the golden Nepalese prayer wheel he’d brought from his travels while I added tiny redwood pinecones to the side of the marker. He settled himself cross-legged on the ground above the gravestone, slumped with silent crying. Does he cry, as I do, as much for himself and the hurt our family suffered as he does for missing Noah?

I’m pleased that Ben is not afraid to cry, to talk about death, or to be among the dead. At 30, he’s asking more questions about the cemetery and the sorry business of death in America. He was appalled to learn the cost of burial and how my husband and I were offered a nearby plot for ourselves as part of a package deal at a time when our minds were so addled with grief. (All I could think of then was how I wanted to be close to my child forever; we took the plot.) I felt wistful imagining how Ben would have to come alone to these patches of ground someday.
  
We sat for a while in the breeze amid the whir of nearby pinwheels. I put my head on his shoulder. 

My husband had left a little red dreydl (spinning top) by the grave when he was there at Hanukah. Ben picked it up and gave it a spin on the gravestone. Noah would have laughed at that. Our boys used to have dreydl wars, setting a dozen spinning at once and trying to knock each other's tops off the table. 


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A week or two after Ben left for his home overseas, my yoga teacher told me, “I can see your son is with you during meditation.” Not sure I’d heard right, I agreed it was nice to have shared her yoga class with Ben during his visit. “No, I mean your other son,” the teacher said. She’s known about Noah’s suicide for a while and not said anything. Did it take meeting my living son for her to be able to visualize my dead one?

How much of Noah is still channeled through Ben, in his own eyes and in the eyes of the world? What part of Noah does Ben carry with him? I hope it doesn’t bother Ben that I keep asking that question among the many questions I ask about his life. From his brother, cousins, friends -- I still desperately need to know any way that Noah’s spirit lives on within them. It helps me to cherish his memory.


To my fellow survivors: What’s it like lately for you to visit your loved one’s grave or other place of memory? Have you tried going there with someone who shares your grief? I treasure the visits another survivor mom and I made to each other’s young son’s graves, lawn chairs and lemonade in tow, just as I appreciate the visits I make with Ben. Bringing someone with you can lighten the dread of those visits and stir conversations that might not happen otherwise, bringing you closer to each other and to your loved one's memory.

Choosing Poetry Over Survivor Day

I missed this year’s International Survivors of Suicide Loss Day , which I’ve attended religiously for seven years on the weekend before Thanksgiving and recommended to many new survivors. The event brings us together to remember our dead, process our grief, and reconnect with community at a time when it feels like everyone else is celebrating. Survivor Day has been a touchstone for me since losing my son Noah. 

This year instead of focusing on my loss, I was pursuing one of the life-affirming new directions that has grown out of it: I was at a poetry writing workshop led by a favorite poet, Ellen Bass. When I first heard about the workshop and realized it conflicted with Survivor Day, I only hesitated for a moment; then, I chose writing. Poetry and prose have been precious vehicles for my grief since losing Noah, so I knew going to the workshop wasn’t a total departure from talking and thinking about loss. And reading grief poems, like those in the excellent anthology, The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing, has inspired me to cultivate my own mourner’s voice.

I first discovered Bass through her poem, “The Thing Is,” which we had read aloud at Noah’s memorial. It’s still one of the most stark and honest expressions of grief that I know, yet somehow also hopeful:

            The Thing Is | by Ellen Bass

to love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it
and everything you’ve held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat
thickening the air, heavy as water
more fit for gills than lungs;
when grief weights you like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief,
you think, How can a body withstand this?
Then you hold life like a face
between your palms, a plain face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again.

Much of the poetry I’ve written since Noah’s suicide in 2013 has been in the key of grief. “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” Wordsworth famously wrote; “it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.” Powerful feelings I’ve proclaimed in spades, though not always from a place of grace. Still, I believe even emotionally raw poems are worth writing—and maybe some, worth reading.

Two poems that I wrote a few years ago were recently published in a literary journal for medical professionals called Please See Me, which aims to humanize the doctor-patient relationship.  The theme of the issue was Pain. “Takeaway” comes from a dream I had shortly after Noah died that rewrites the script of the day of his suicide; that poem probably wouldn’t meet Wordsworth’s bar. “Tending the Shrine” comes from a more reflective place of regret.

A newer poem, just out in Greensboro Review, uses the cento form, altering and arranging lines from other people’s poems to form a new composition. The lines and structure of my “Grief Cento” came together effortlessly from the dozens of grief poems I’ve been collecting—and living--as if channeling my experience through well-known poets’ voices. One of the lines in my cento is from Ellen Bass. 

For a while now, I’ve cherished the dream of publishing a chapbook of poems about Noah as both tribute and testament. At the workshop, I found myself writing about my mother’s death and my fraught relationship with my father, who also died by suicide. Maybe there’s room in the chapbook for other expressions of loss. Meanwhile, there’s so much to learn about crafting poetry and about writing in different tonalities, beyond the key of grief.

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The blessing of this Thanksgiving was hosting a young cousin who Noah adored. Four years older than Noah and infinitely cool, Gabe led him on adventures in surfing, cooking, hiking and travelling. Having Gabe with us at the table after a few years’ absence made it easy to share childhood stories about Noah, like his awe at Gabe’s daredevil skateboarding and firecracker setting. I was grateful for the chance to bring Noah’s name and memory so easily and lovingly to the holiday table.

On their way to our house on this rainy Thanksgiving, friends saw a huge rainbow that spanned the city of Los Angeles. I wish I could have seen it. I wish Noah could have seen the beauty and serenity that can follow in the wake of a terrible storm, like his biblical namesake did. Since Noah’s death, I’ve decided to take every rainbow—even the little prism of colored light on the floor of my yoga studio--as a sign of Noah’s spirit. How he dazzled us with his conversation, talents and passions. How he surfed, transfixed, in the vastness of sea and sky. How his short life spanned worlds.

To my fellow survivors: Wishing everyone hope, 
healing and openings for shared memories in this season of light.

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.

Preparing to Forget: Notes After Burning Man

My husband Bryan and I went to Burning Man this summer to see an art installation by our son, Benjamin Langholz . Along with desert survival gear, costumes, angel lights, and gifts for the community that Ben told us we had to bring, he encouraged us to bring photos or mementos of Noah for the Temple. 

The Temple is the largest structure at Burning Man, a quiet sanctuary for people to rest and grieve or simply sit with their losses, regrets, and sadness. Ben told me he was grateful to have a place to bring such feelings in the early years after his brother’s suicide. The burning of the Temple at the end of the week-long encampment, for Ben and many others, is a cathartic release of the pain of loss. “Leave behind what no longer serves you,” read signs as you drive into Burning Man and as you walk into the Temple.


As readers of this blog know, I’m a holder-on, not a letter-go, especially when it comes to Noah’s memory. I’m so concerned that I’ll forget facets of who he was and how he lived that it’s hard for me to even consider what I want to forget. While preparing for Burning Man, I forced myself to make a short list of forgetables, all related to Noah’s mental health struggles and the scene of his death. 

Among the things I want to forget:

- seeing Noah dead

-       - Bryan’s face when I told him Noah killed himself

-       - Ben’s wail when the coffin was opened

-       - the coffin being lowered into the ground

-       - watching Noah suffer over two years as his demons stole away his heart, soul, and life force—his terror at near-death anxiety attacks, his agitation during a psychotic break, his months of affectless numbness 

It pains me so much to remember Noah’s suffering; of course, I’d rather picture him in the prime of his life. Yet if I allow memories of his struggles to recede, will I ever reach a truer understanding of his despair? Already after six and a half years, the “facts” of Noah’s decline reveal themselves differently; if I loosen my grip, what future insights might I miss? I decided that I wasn’t ready to release those memories at Burning Man, but I could bring a photo of Noah from the last year of his life that didn’t look like him, so transformed was he by his illness. I was glad to surrender that image to the ashes, along with the first few items on my list.

Inside the Temple, I was struck by the hush of hundreds of people silently filing through an enormous collective shrine. The walls inside and out were plastered with large pictures of the dead, their clothing, shoes, jewelry, and prized objects, along with their stories. There were way too many photos of young people and I couldn’t help thinking: suicide and overdose. I was touched by how many Temple visitors stopped to read the stories and immerse themselves in others’ grief or to hold someone who was crying. With all the cool-headed “leave it behind” messaging, I hadn’t expected to feel such a communal outpouring of sorrow. I regretted that I hadn’t thought to bring bigger pictures and reminders of Noah’s life to add to the mix. 

Driving home from Burning Man, Bryan and I indulged in our usual would-have/should-haves while traveling: how Noah would have jumped at the chance to help build Ben’s installation, how he would have thrown himself nonstop into Burning Man revels and delighted in meeting fellow free spirits from around the world. Of course, we have no way of knowing if, had Noah lived, Ben would have become such an avid Burner or reinvented himself as an artist. As Ben said as we were leaving the Temple, grief can be a mighty spur to creativity. If so, then Ben’s installations are, in part, his brother’s legacy.

In the wake of Burning Man, at the end of Suicide Prevention Month, in the middle of these days of awe and remembrance in the Jewish calendar, I like to think that had Noah lived, he would have channeled his intense feelings after a friend’s suicide into his own artistic vision and recaptured his life force.

To My Fellow Survivors: What are you ready at this point to set aside about your loved one’s suffering and suicide? What is on your list of forgetables?