Lost in Loss

Lately, I’ve been obsessed with the word “lost” when it comes to suicide. How does a person become lost? How is it possible to lose a child? Did our son, Noah, slip through our fingers like some trifle left behind on a park bench? Were we not paying attention to guarding our greatest treasure? How could we have made not just a fumble, like any parent, but a fatal mistake that can never be undone?

Te amo más que mi vida, goes the song on a Spanish radio station.

The truth is we started losing Noah some time before his suicide as the wit and spark drained from him. I saw him slip deeper into the muck of depression and didn’t know how to pull him out. I steered him toward therapists and meds—sometimes successfully—and tried to draw out his feelings or engage him in things he used to love—unsuccessfully.

I thought I knew my son from years of extraordinary closeness. But I knew nothing of the extent of his despair and his craving for oblivion. And I didn’t know how to reach through his pain or my own frustration.

My fatal mistake was, on the last night of his life, urging him yet again to see a psychiatrist and get a part-time job. What I should have said was: It gets better. We love you and are here for you. Take all the time you need to heal.

My fatal mistake was, on the last day of his life, staying late at work because I dreaded coming home to a depressed, near-catatonic child who refused to get help. Had I found him two hours earlier, who knows?

I’ll always regret what I said and did. I’ll be atoning for it the rest of my life. I’ll never know if I pushed Noah over the edge or could have somehow saved him from the brink. These feelings stick in my gut, though I know that ultimately, a suicide is no one’s fault and there are no guarantees that any one action might have prevented tragedy. Indeed, one of the losses survivors confront after suicide is the loss of the illusion of control with those we love, as Dr. Stacey Freedenthal eloquently explains .

Amy Biancolli, who“lost” her husband to suicide, wrote a memoir whose very title—Figuring Sh!t Out: Love, Laughter, Suicide and Survival (Behler Publications, 2014)--speaks of her remarkable resilience and humor. I was struck by the light touch in her book and wondered how she managed to dodge guilt. But in a recent TEDx talk, “You’reStill Here: Living After Suicide,” she admits she’ll never be done with the guilt and the questions. In the face of that enormous loss of control, Biancolli had to focus on what she could control and reinvent herself. So she put this list on her fridge:

Live

Give

Love

Laugh

Grow

Learn

Pray

Be grateful

Be present

Make music

Have faith.

That’s a list I’ll gladly sign onto. We survivors need these simple reminders when we feel we’ve lost everything.

Three Questions After the Fourth Death Anniversary

Psychologist John Schneider advises those confronting any type of grief to consider three questions: What is lost? What is left? What is possible? The answers for me keep changing with each passing year after Noah’s suicide. Surely some things are possible now that I couldn’t imagine before. The loss itself takes up less space in my thoughts and daily life. But so, too, has the loss deepened and solidified, a stone lodged in my heart.

A partial list of answers to the three questions @ 4 years:

What is lost? Our precious boy – his many gifts and how he inspired and teased and amazed and worried and exasperated us. The things he would have done and places he would have gone and people he would have met. The endless list of all that was contained in a life, obliterated, never to be recovered. But most of all: the exchange of love. A family of four. The chance for reconciliation and a return to our lifelong conversation. The chance to see him grown and happy. A normal life.

What is left? A stone in a cemetery. A stone in a park. A small box of artifacts in a closet.

Doubt. Guilt. Regret. Questions. Tears.

The embers and tatters of memory.

The photos he made. The people whose lives he touched.

A living son, far from home.

Our puppies and spring garden and contented chickens.

Those who understand and share our pain, whether we’ve known them for years or just met them at a survivors’ gathering.

The beauty and wonder of the world.

What is possible? Remembering. Forgetting. Seeking wholeness. Opening the heart.

Continuing to try to understand.

Moments of happiness.

Helping others on this path.

Being grateful for 21 years.

Bearing unbearable loss.

To my fellow survivors: So many questions will never be answered after suicide. But we can try to answer for ourselves: What is lost? What is left? What is possible? How do these questions and their answers sit with you today?

Four Years Gone

Four years gone today.

We see Noah afresh at 18 in this portrait made by his Aunt Boehr. We'd never seen it till this year. What a magnificent discovery! He was on the cusp--just recently back from his year in France and about to start college.

May we unearth more memories, more insights into who Noah was to hold him living in our hearts.

3 Moments Before the 4th Anniversary

 

   

      1.   In yoga class the other day, my teacher had us stretch out our arms and tilt them like wings. “Fly like an eagle,” she said. 

Instead of feeling expansive, I was waylaid by tears as I flashed on the great reach of Noah’s arms straining to touch the walls in our breakfast nook or spanning the width of the goal in water polo. Willowy, boyish arms that grew muscles overnight, it seemed, the summer before 9^th grade when he got up every day at 5am for swim practice. Long, lanky arms that paddled out into the surf, carried sailboats, juggled clubs behind his back for hours. Sore arms that craved shoulder rubs whenever we watched a video. Wild arms that he threw all over the dance floor at college. Open arms that wrapped friends and cousins in hugs. 

I was thrilled when my tall teenage boys stood on either side of me and perched their elbows companionably on my shoulder; I could have stayed that way for hours. Ben (6’10”) still perches like that sometimes but there’s no little brother (6’4”) to balance the other side.

 

2    2.    I choke up reading the suicide note of a kamikaze pilot in Ruth Ozeki’s novel, Tale for the Time Being. “I know you know my heart,” the pilot writes to his mother, “and will not judge me too harshly.”

Did I know my son’s heart? Maybe when he was young; not in his last few years and definitely not in his last moments. Unless his heart hadn’t really changed and I can trust my intuition. This is my task now: to try to plumb Noah’s heart with every memory and dream, every hunch and scrap of information. And in doing so, to let go of judgement.

3.     3.  “The purpose of death is the release of love,” wrote Laurie Anderson in a tribute to her partner, Lou Reed,  and in the film, Heart of a Dog. Did she mean a mystical emitting of love by the dead in the moment of dying? Her words remind me of the outpouring of love by the living that’s palpable at funerals and memorials, hovering over the crowd. 

Those who take their lives can’t imagine the love that surges up in their wake. Too often, they kill themselves because they feel worthless and think they’re a burden to others. I can’t bear to think that Noah may have felt that. 

If those of us left behind are to take any greater purpose from the suicide of our loved ones, let it be to replenish our reservoir of love and release it out into the world, again and again.