Welcome to a conversation
Bring a mug of hot tea or a glass of something sparkly and sassy, and we’ll chat about love and related hazards. We will explore the legacy of suicide with honest emotions, hard truths and the healing momentum of dogs. In lieu of flowers, we will be kind. Meet Charlotte.
States & Stages
I WOULD HAVE hoped that something called the “Five Stages of Grief” could be a relatively orderly practice. I imagined the five stages as a sort of Life syllabus for the grieving process. A bit like the developmental stages of infant-toddler-young child, with a clear trajectory, even if there are some points of overlap. First, he turns from back to tummy, then he sits, then crawls, walks, and runs. The actual grief experience, however, is much less defined and quite a bit louder.
The chaplain hands me a simple pamphlet, describing the five stages: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance. The whole process seems tidy and manageable, all summed up in an 8 page glossy format. I read the whole thing in less than seven minutes. It seems reasonable enough. Almost refined.
Euphemism
ONLY RARELY DOES the actual “s” word appear in an obituary. You might see “suddenly,” or “unexpectedly” or “tragically,” all potentially code. You might even read “accidentally” or “after a brief illness” or simply “at home,” which could be accurate, albeit misleading. Death is harsh enough without the added stigma associated with having been self-inflicted. It’s not surprising, then, that many obituaries avoid the term altogether. “Suicide” is an ugly, loaded word, and the obituary bears a peculiar gravity, as if it is, indeed, the last word on a person’s life.
Suicide sticks to its victim in a way that seems to threaten the rest of his existence. There are, of course, other manners of death that invite judgment – lung cancer, cirrhosis, overdose, AIDS, maybe even heart attack, depending. As if life isn’t harsh enough.
I Want You To Know
HERE’S WHAT I want you to know about my husband’s suicide: I didn’t see it coming. In retrospect, I can read some of the signs differently, but at the time I did not know he was so close to the edge.
It wasn’t my fault. It wasn’t his parents’ fault, or his kids’ fault, or his cousins’, or his sister’s or his friends’ fault. It wasn’t his doctor’s fault, or his boss’s fault or any of his colleagues’ or clients’. It wasn’t entirely Sam’s fault. It just was, and I cannot explain the why of it any more than anyone can explain why some people develop cancer or multiple sclerosis and others don’t.
It wasn’t for lack of love. His death is not a reflection on our capacity to love him. Or his capacity to love us.
Conviction
YOU MIGHT NOT have known what she’s been through when you see her in your weekly yoga class, arriving on time every Tuesday, appearing, as she consistently does, to be so well put-together, a tall pretty blonde, donning the Lululemon yoga pants and corresponding black lycra jacket favored by stay-at-home moms and PTA presidents, freshly pedicured, a mother with the means to work out (and maybe work, depending on whether she prefers hiring a nanny to take the children to the zoo and Music Together classes or taking them to the park herself, but definitely with the seniority and flexibility to take them to the pediatrician when the cough lingers too many days or the fever spikes too high); no, you might not expect, based on her.
driving lessons
WE HAVE – ON either side of our fireplace – framed portraits, each of a family of four. On another prominent wall we have a portrait of our family of six. Our goal has not been to replace anybody, but to create our own unique family. With kindness, mutual respect and a lot of humor.
It took us a long time to get here.
This is how I explained it to my sons: There is a daddy-shaped space that will be in your heart forever. Nobody will take his place. Nobody else fits. But here’s the thing about love… If somebody special comes into our lives, your heart will grow. That’s what love does. And there will be a new space just for him. It doesn’t take over the daddy space – it’s its own thing.
Fast forward a couple years, and I shared this same idea with my step-son, but he wasn’t buying it. He had definite ideas about where the wicked step-mother space should be, and let’s just say it wasn’t a prominent place in his heart.
Variations on a Theme
I HAVE BEEN triggered. You have been warned.
I am generally open to offering perspective or insight. I have not exactly been shy about this path I’m on, as a woman who lost her first husband to suicide, and as a mother to four children who lost a parent at entirely too young an age. I willingly share resources that I have found particularly helpful, books, therapists or organizations, my go-to radical self-care avenues, I share stories of success and failure from my own life. If you think that I personally might be able to help your “friend” (or to help you help your friend) who is struggling because whatever whatever whatever, then I’m in.
If, however, you are calling me to gossip about somebody who “lost her husband in the worst, most tragic way,” then call somebody else. I’m not interested. Do not call me to compare death by heart attack to death by some other attack. Not because I think that my path to widow was worse than anyone else’s. On the contrary, all the ways to widow suck.
Quintessential
I WAS SO disappointed the last time I saw my dad. Not in him, but I had hoped that the flowers I had brought over just a few days earlier would last the week. Instead, the crystal vase on the nightstand next to his bed in the nursing facility was empty, the wilted flowers having been discarded, and the vase itself wiped clean.
My parents had just celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary. We weren’t allowed to release dad from the convalescent home, not even for such a significant event, due to certain, labyrinthine insurance coverage rules. Instead, my mother and my sister and I brought the celebration to my father, an elegant luncheon in the gardens. It was an intimate affair including only our immediate family, but with careful attention to detail, table linens, flowers, my mother’s favorite ganache cake, and a few bottles of my father’s favorite drink, a sparkly and benign apple cider.