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My mother killed herself. Two weeks after my 13th birthday.
She had attempted suicide several times before. On two of those occasions, I witnessed snippets of the aftermath. Terrifying images are seared into my memory: My father breaking down the front door to our house after she swallowed a bottle of pills. Puddles of bright red blood on the bathroom floor after she slashed her wrists.
On the morning of her death, from the time I opened my eyes, a menacing feeling nagged at me. I’d never experienced such a strange feeling before, nor have I again. Before that day ended, I would realize it was warning me that something terrible had happened. Something that was about to change me – and life as I knew it – in ways I couldn’t possibly imagine.
For years after her death, I felt lost and abandoned, aimless, alone. With nobody to talk to who had even an inkling of what it is like to be left behind that way.
Until a dreary March morning in Maryland five years later.
— David
My mother killed herself. I was 14. She was one week shy of her 40th birthday.
My sister and I waited in the car in the garage next to the downtown hotel where Mom had taken what Dad referred to as a short “vacation.” Dad went in to get her, leaving us in the white Rambler station wagon. But for the longest time, neither of them showed up. I kept my sister occupied. We talked, told stories, played games. A stranger suddenly appeared and told us Dad would be with us shortly. More time passed. My nerves signaled something was terribly wrong, but I dutifully tried to keep my sister – and my mind – occupied.
When I finally saw Dad walk down the sloped floor of the garage, his head bowed, our rabbi was inexplicably by his side. Seconds later, I broke into tears.
For several years after Mom died, I felt trapped in a dense fog. I was vaguely aware of activity and events around me, some in slow motion, others at triple speed. My sister, brother and I – and our father – had no extended family around us and few friends, none of them particularly close. I felt alone.
Until a dreary March morning in Maryland three years later.
— Rick
We needed empathy and honesty – and found it in each other . . .
We are each the rare exception for the other, someone who also experienced as a young teenager the crushing loss of a parent to suicide.
Many others showered us with sympathy, and pity, when what we needed was a genuinely empathetic ear and honest heart; finding one another gave each of us that and built an intimate friendship that would span our lifetimes. And not a minute too soon, as we came to appreciate more and more over time.
In fact, our unexpected fast friendship, more than anything, furnished us with an outlet for expressing our hurt, anxieties and confusion, and offered us the kind of solace unavailable anywhere else. In each other, we recognized that we were not alone in bearing such an inconceivable loss. No small revelation at the time.
The burden of suicide is with us, always . . .
Though the passage of time is supposed to heal all wounds, it hasn’t for any of us.
The wounds cut too deep and too close to the heart to ever fully heal. Time does dull the aching, making it less constant. Sometimes, we may forget about the suicide for a time, or trick ourselves into imagining that it occurred in another life. Yet, no matter what else we do, the hurt of such an unspeakable loss is always part of us.
For each of us, as it must also be for others fated to endure a loved one’s suicide, the legacy bequeathed to us is to endlessly ponder the tormenting question of why – that yearning to unearth the reasons that drove our parents to take the most desperate and irrevocable of human acts. “Why?” was the question we grappled with when suicide first entered our lives, and it’s the very same question we ask ourselves today, decades later.
If any explanation ever existed, it died with our parents, who somehow justified their final decision in life by devaluing their own lives and miscalculating – or perhaps never considering – how killing themselves would forever reshape and burden their children’s lives.
The need to share, talk, let it out, never ceases . . .
“It seems ironic that when people like us most need to share this terrible grief, some of us have no one to turn to – or, more important, no one we’re comfortable turning to – to discuss this most sensitive and painful time of our lives.
“Whether it’s Dad, Mom, brother or sister, your minister or a very close friend, I believe it’s crucial we begin talking our way through the myriad emotions and feelings which can so quickly overwhelm us. Keep it bottled up inside and you’ve swept things under the rug temporarily, even as you start the clock on a time bomb ticking away inside you.
“The fallout from that emotional explosion can be crippling – or worse. As you cry out for help, you need a person (or people) you can talk to and confide in. But to open your heart and fully expose your feelings, trust is essential.”
— Tom, in an email
A friendship so open, so timely, it filled our hearts and restored our souls . . .
“This process – this frank 4-way email exchange – is uncovering more than I ever imagined.
“It seems the four of us have already forged a special bond I strongly suspect is permanent, and unlike any other we’re ever likely to have. I realized this as I immersed myself in your heart-rending monologue of the multiple ways your mother’s suicide changed you. Yet, the scars you carry from that death, that irreplaceable loss, left a hole in your heart, as it has in all our hearts – a hole that can never be filled.
“Opening our locked away souls to one another vividly illustrates how the echoes of our hurt and yearning to better understand reverberate through our words as we recall a nightmare we might wish we could forget, but is never more than a whispered reminder away.”
— David, in an email
Net proceeds from sales of Sons of Suicide will be donated to nonprofits focused on suicide prevention, survivors, grief counseling and mental health.