Eight

Some years ago, a young man stopped me after church.  His little daughter played happily in an empty pew behind us.  “How will I know, “he asked, “when the time comes – how will I know the difference between typical adolescent angst and something more sinister, something life-threatening?”  His sister, a young adult, had died of suicide; his father, grief-stricken, had followed her five years later.

I have some answers, now, for his question. I know what to look for, what to ask, how to find help – both emergency and long term.  What I do not know is how I have survived long enough to have leaned those things.  How have I lived eight years without you?

I do not pretend to be in possession of answers for anyone else. I know so many mothers now . . .  so many women who live, sometimes in the shadow, sometimes in the light, of life’s most crushing blow.  Some have found answers in deeply-held faith; others shrug their shoulders when asked whether God lives, or cares.  Some have become activists and pour themselves into causes in the hope that their loss will mean something, will be transformed into other lives saved;  others run as fast as they can in other directions; and a few isolate themselves.  Perhaps most of us sense an impetus to respond in all ways simultaneously – I have had dinner conversations with friends after long days in Congress in which we have seriously have the possibility of simply walking away from our lives.

Where are you?  I wonder . . .  How might you have influenced your world, you with your multitude of gifts, your expansive education, your wit and geniality?  Who might you be – business executive, architect, photographer?  Husband, father? Where will you be as your father and I age, and we and your brother and sister need you to help us?  Need you to be present in our lives?  The door has been slammed shut on the answers to all of those questions.

Work . . .  that helps.  The women I know who have survived have all embraced creative, other-centered lives.  Brilliant artists, every one of them – painters, restauranteurs, nonprofit volunteers, writers.  Finding one another . . .  that helps.  We need others who understand when we exclaim, “And you won’t believe what that person said to me . . . ” .  We need others who understand about the birthdays, the holidays, the vacations, the . . .  the everything, actually.  Re-forging relationships from the past that is no more . . .  that helps.  Few people really know us anymore, but they do care about us.  And we, about them. 

Eight years.  The weight that threatened to suffocate me has lifted.  I sleep, frequently through the night.  I can concentrate for hours at a time and often on several things at once.  (My short-term memory does seem to have been a permanent casualty.)  My family remains intact.  My own work is challenging and joyful.  My life is no longer defined by loss, by horror, by grief.

But: eight years.  Never a day, seldom an hour, passes in which you and the you-now-gone, are not foremost in my mind and heart.   I love you.  My darling boy.

Eight

Some years ago, a young man stopped me after church.  His little daughter played happily in an empty pew behind us.  “How will I know, “he asked, “when the time comes – how will I know the difference between typical adolescent angst and something more sinister, something life-threatening?”  His sister, a young adult, had died of suicide; his father, grief-stricken, had followed her five years later.

I have some answers, now, for his question. I know what to look for, what to ask, how to find help – both emergency and long term.  What I do not know is how I have survived long enough to have leaned those things.  How have I lived eight years without you?

I do not pretend to be in possession of answers for anyone else. I know so many mothers now . . .  so many women who live, sometimes in the shadow, sometimes in the light, of life’s most crushing blow.  Some have found answers in deeply-held faith; others shrug their shoulders when asked whether God lives, or cares.  Some have become activists and pour themselves into causes in the hope that their loss will mean something, will be transformed into other lives saved;  others run as fast as they can in other directions; and a few isolate themselves.  Perhaps most of us sense an impetus to respond in all ways simultaneously – I have had dinner conversations with friends after long days in Congress in which we have seriously have the possibility of simply walking away from our lives.

Where are you?  I wonder . . .  How might you have influenced your world, you with your multitude of gifts, your expansive education, your wit and geniality?  Who might you be – business executive, architect, photographer?  Husband, father? Where will you be as your father and I age, and we and your brother and sister need you to help us?  Need you to be present in our lives?  The door has been slammed shut on the answers to all of those questions.

Work . . .  that helps.  The women I know who have survived have all embraced creative, other-centered lives.  Brilliant artists, every one of them – painters, restauranteurs, nonprofit volunteers, writers.  Finding one another . . .  that helps.  We need others who understand when we exclaim, “And you won’t believe what that person said to me . . . ” .  We need others who understand about the birthdays, the holidays, the vacations, the . . .  the everything, actually.  Re-forging relationships from the past that is no more . . .  that helps.  Few people really know us anymore, but they do care about us.  And we, about them. 

Eight years.  The weight that threatened to suffocate me has lifted.  I sleep, frequently through the night.  I can concentrate for hours at a time and often on several things at once.  (My short-term memory does seem to have been a permanent casualty.)  My family remains intact.  My own work is challenging and joyful.  My life is no longer defined by loss, by horror, by grief.

But: eight years.  Never a day, seldom an hour, passes in which you and the you-now-gone, are not foremost in my mind and heart.   I love you.  My darling boy.

Seven

If you had told me seven years ago that I would survive the events of the following week, I would have told you that I would not.

Which is true, in some ways.  That girl is gone.  She disappeared late one night in Chicago, hours before she even knew it.

Because our minds no longer work as they did before, it took me seven years ~ seven! ~ to register the proximity of the coming and going days of the children of the four women, me included, who met online soon after our children died, and shared much of those first tender years together.  Two birthdays in the past couple of weeks.  Another loss anniversary in the next few days.  And then, the day Josh was born, followed by the day he died.  I am inundated ~ not unhappily ~ by words and pictures from heroic women, women still moving forward.  Seven and eight years later.

I could not tell you how we do that.

It seems to me that at seven years, I might have words of wisdom to share. 

I am grateful, so grateful, to be his mother. 

I am not grateful that he is unable to live out his life, that the world does not enjoy his many gifts, and that I no longer share his company.   I am, by turn and all at once, horrified, bereft, angered, heartbroken, baffled, lost.

 

I can hardly stand it, actually.  Perhaps that is the wisdom I have to offer: You wouldn't believe how far you can continue to walk when you can't stand it.  How brave you can be.

 

One of my FB friends, who lost her son to suicide only two years ago, posted this song last year.  A vampire wedding song?  There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio . . .   .  A thousand years, and a thousand more.

Dream Workshop

Only the dreamer can interpret her own dreams.

That was my main takeaway from a workshop I attended a couple of weeks ago on dreams and spiritual direction offered by Jungian analyst and spiritual director Janice Bachman, O.P.  Our focus was on helping people (including ourselves) to notice and understand what our dreams might be saying to us in the context of helping people to find what God is doing in their lives rather than on analysis of dreams such as one might do in therapy, but the principle of self-interpretation holds true.

The best and worst of my dreams over the past five years have centered, of course, on Josh.  Some of them, fragmented and terrible nightmares, seem to be means for absorbing and processing what has happened to us.  I didn't sleep much the first few years after he died, but apparently I slept for periods long enough to fall into the REM sleep required for dreaming.  The dreams themselves indicated a mild form of PTSD, although it didn't feel mild at the time.  I often thought that I stopped sleeping more than a few hours a night because my dreams were so horrific. These days, I still have the dreams, but it seems that I've gotten used to them.

Others?  Like most parents who have lost children, I have vivid, joyful dreams of my son, of all my children, to which I try desperately to return when I awake.  Josh is so alive in those dreams.  It astonishes me, that our brain circuits retain so much detail of times and people long past that they seem to live in complete fullness as we sleep.  The voices, the gestures, the shining hair ~ all as it once was.  I wonder sometimes whether those dreams are indeed a form of communication, whether Josh, or God, or someone, is trying to tell me that he's fine, beautiful and whole and healed.  Or are they merely wishful thinking, brain circuits working overtime, trying to recover an irretrievable sense of well-being and security?

I wish that I had the confidence in dreams that Biblical dreamers demonstrate.  We spent a chunk of our workshop on Jacob's dream, reflecting upon it in great detail as a way of practicing what we might explore with a spiritual directee.  Rich layers of meaning that can be extracted from the symbols and repetitions.  Can I apply to my own dreams the reverence that Biblical dreamers applied to theirs?

Ironically, this past week-end, my daughter and I went to see Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat, her Christmas present to me.  Joseph, of course, does interpret the dreams of others, and thus changes the course of history. I wonder whether we could alter our own lives if we could fully access and understand our dreams.

Saturday Night Musings

. . . A significant ten days lies behind me.  Chicago last week-end and the suicide prevention walk today.  What do I notice?  That no matter how hard we work, no matter how far we walk ~ eight miles all over Hyde Park, four miles in Cleveland ~ Josh does not come back. 

 

I do not understand this at all.  Where is he?  I need him to come back, right now.

 

I found myself wondering, off and on all day today: When I die, will he be there?  Will all be resolved?  Will none of this matter?  Or not? 

 

I have said it before and it remains the case: I have no particular kind of idea or sense of anything about life after death.  I guess I probably never will.  Until, you know, after death.

 

. . . I spent some time today talking with a good friend of whom I no longer see nearly enough.  The mother of one of Josh's best friends, her husband was seriously disabled when the boys were nine, I think.  A long time, twenty years.  My God, our lives have been difficult.  I told her that I think that sometime around the age of 50, we seem to break into two populations.  For some of us, as one of my seminary professors posted on FB a year or two ago, "life just gets better and better."  (Yes, I did resent that post.)  For others, not so much.  Deaths of spouses and children, strokes, cancer, unemployment, completely unbloggable trials . . . it would be unbelievable, how dramatically life can be altered in a matter of seconds, if it weren't so pervasively true.

 

. . .  I have been grading college papers this week.  My students are writing about all kinds of things in response to Paul Tillich's concept of "ultimate concern," but two topics stand out.  They are so innocently confident in the possibilities of romantic love.  I don't think that I was ever ever ever as hopeful and naïve as they are.  They are impossibly sweet.

 

At the same time, they are all profoundly aware of and concerned with jobs and material success.  They are all in college to prepare for careers.  (This might explain why I have not a single religion major in my intro class -- the vast majority of them are majoring in either the sciences or in fields like marketing and business and finance.  A class full of Mad Men wannabes.)  I was never ever ever as career focused as they are, either, at least not at their age.  Perhaps I should have been.  Perhaps if I had been I would not be making less money now than I have at any time since before I turned 30. 

 

. . .  Saturday night, Sunday morning worship only 12 hours away.  I should probably be having some profound thoughts about God.

 

This is as close as it gets.

 

 

Pilgrimmage Sunday

Chicago Marathon Week-End!  Who knew?

 

Our primary mission for the week-end involved ashes.  We had planned to be up and out early, as this particular activity requires great discretion, but the marathon schedule moved us even further upward and earlier.  We were probably the only people trying to EXIT downtown at 6:15 a.m. 

 

We spent most of the day in Hyde Park, home to the University of Chicago.  Josh's friend joined us again, and helped us find the apartments in which Josh had lived at various points in his college career.  We visited the Point on the lakefront, the Medici bakery from which I have purchased so many croissant-and-juice breakfasts, the quads and dorms, the Midway and the Masaryk Monument, and the 57th Street Bookstore.

 

I found as we wandered the campus and its environs that I was filled with gratitude that Josh had been able to attend such a beautiful and incredible university.  I loved imagining him walking the same paths and streets that we covered; I even loved remembering his 2:00 a.m. calls from the library as he headed back to the Shoreland, an ancient dorm on the lakefront ~ not the safest walk on campus.  I recalled many of our visits, including my last overnight in one of his apartments when I went to visit McCormick Seminary during his senior year. 

 

 

It was a long day, capped off with an evening downtown and dinner at a fabulous restaurant with RevGal Teri, who is beautiful and brilliant and gracious in every way.

 

 

 

 

And all day and all evening I kept thinking, despite having poured out those ashes early in the morning: If I just keep wishing hard enough, surely he will come walking down the street toward me, smiling and laughing and loving Chicago.





 

Pilgrimmage Saturday

I didn't know what to expect.  My husband and I last went to Chicago five Octobers ago, for the purpose of emptying Josh's apartment and bringing his belongings home.  It was a horrible, horrible day, one on which my feet felt like lead as we surveyed the rooms that had remained untouched since the night he had died and met with the detective who had handled his "case" to extract what details we could.  My husband and a good friend (a VERY good friend) dismantled furniture as Josh's girlfriend and I sat and talked, trying to discern meaning in his belongings and from the events of the previous months.

 

And so I didn't know what to expect as Marissa and I drove west.  Would I make a U-turn as soon as the Chicago skyline came into view?  Would we check into our hotel, the same one in which Josh and his dad had stayed when he came to college (I was in Columbus, delivering his twin brother to Ohio State), and be overwhelmed by sadness at the thought of all the hopes and dreams crushed only five years later?

 

I felt as if I were constantly checking my emotional pulse, but it remained steady and strong.

 

A little last minute investigation had indicated that only one of Josh's close group of friends remains in Chicago, and he agreed to meet us for dinner downtown.  As we all talked, I began to relax and to realize that the week-end might offer the prospect of a small increment of healing.  It was wonderful to hear stories we'd never heard, to fill in some of the blanks of his college life, and to confirm that he had found joy and mischief and friendship in those years.

 

It was especially wonderful to spend time with a young man able to recall the past and to talk easily about it.  We wondered afterward if he had perhaps also been in need of conversation about his friend who had left us all so suddenly and so completely without warning.

 

Very few people mention my son Josh to me.  A couple of months ago, I broke down in the local garden center when I ran into a mom from Montessori middle school days who mentioned that she has a picture of him on her bulletin board and so sees him smiling every day. 

 

If you have occasion to share a memory or a story with a bereaved parent, go ahead and give it a try.  We miss them so much.

Pilgrimmage - Preparation

I did not want Josh to go to the University of Chicago. 

 

I wanted him to go to Carleton, Grinnell, or Davidson.  A small liberal arts college in a bucolic setting, not a huge university in a city.  And he was admitted to all three ~ outstanding schools, every one of them.  I was beside myself with delight as I anticipated his future.

 

But Chicago drew him like a magnet.

 

We went up there for the Admitted Students' Week-end in April, which did not help my cause.  I went to presentations for parents; he stayed in a dorm and hung around campus and went downtown with his hosts. My hopes crumbled further with each hour of his indoctrination into the culture of the College.

 

The Gothic architecture hung heavy and loomed oppressively over the sunny spring days.  He was enthralled.  I noted that there is an island in a little lake at Carleton.  "How could you not go to a college where there's an island?"  He pointed out a pathetic little mess of grass in the middle of a small fountain in one of the quads and said, "Chicago has an island!"  As we wandered the campus on Sunday afternoon, I mentioned that it was empty of students.  "A beautiful day, and no one is outside."  When I met with one of the financial aid officers, she told me that no doubt they were in the libraries.  "I've worked at several schools, and I've never seen anything like the way the students here study."

 

I came to love it, too, of course. We all did.   Sometimes we visited as a family; sometimes I went alone.  Together Josh and I enjoyed the architecture of Hyde Park, the Indiana Dunes, the city at Thanksgiving, Grant Park in the summer.  One year he and I walked the seven miles along the lakefront from Hyde Park to downtown on the day after Thanksgiving.

 

And I'm happy to report that it wasn't all about studying.  Last night as I tried to make arrangements to get together with any of his friends who might still be there, one of them related these episodes from the summer of 2006:

 

"During the summer when we lived together, Josh, his girlfriend, and I would regularly grab lunch on the Midway right next to the Masaryk Statue.  It was conveniently between my job, the museum, and the Press [where Josh worked] .  I remember us all just lying out there in the sun.

-----

Earlier this year my mom asked me whatever happened to this split bunk bed I'd brought from our cabin in MN down to Hyde Park - its story always makes me laugh and think of Josh.  You see, this bed was peculiar in that aside from being half of a bunk bed it was designed with this enormous and heavy wood-composite slab to support the mattress with no box spring or wooden slats.  The rest of it was some kind of heavy walnut.  It was sturdy.

 

Well, it went from me to V, but after he moved out and Josh moved into Madison Park, Josh inherited it.  That was rather a quiet neighborhood and toward the end of the summer it almost seemed a challenge.  I don't recall how we convinced each other, but we decided it'd be a good idea to throw a dance party at 2 AM blasting The Strokes and Regina Spektor.  And by dance party, I mean just the two of us singing at the top of our lungs and jumping around.  Anyway, at one point Josh was jumping up and down on this beast of a bed when the whole thing split apart. Of course no one was hurt, but the whole thing makes me laugh thinking of it.  The rest of the time we lived there, Josh would sleep inside the bed frame on the floor.  Whenever I'd wake him up, I remember he'd pop up from his nest between the frame."

 

I have not been back for five years, almost to the day.  But my daughter and I are headed there this afternoon. 

 

Pilgrimmage.

 

Why Work on Suicide Prevention?

First, a more grammatically correct version of something I just posted on FB:

There's an obituary in today's paper which acknowledges a death by suicide. A friend asked me my feelings about, and here's what I wrote:

I just read it; I think it is very brave of his family to acknowledge the illness that took his life just as they probably would have had it been cancer or some other form of physical disease. I am sure that his family members are completely devastated, but please tell them that I at least think they are also courageous and selfless in telling the true story, which is filled with both light and darkness.

This is how we eradicate stigma, folks, and this is how we get down to the business of creating a world without suicide.

**********

It's no secret that I've spent a lot of time in recent months working on suicide prevention stuff.  As I try to motivate some of my more lethargic friends to join our team or donate money to the October 19 Cleveland Out of the Darkness Walk, I've been imagining talking to Josh about it:

No, sweetie, this is not what I wanted to do with you.  This is not how I wanted to spend one second of my time, ever. 

I wanted to help plan your wedding.  I wanted to visit you in Chicago again.  I wanted to go to France when you were in your French brother's wedding, and I wanted to welcome him to the States to be in yours. 

I wanted you and your beautiful and gifted wife to move here, so that you could come over for dinner all the time and so that I could read to my grandchildren every afternoon ~  those grandchildren who were going to be a blend of blue-eyed, blond Welsh and dark-eyed, dark-haired Vietnamese.  I wanted to cheer them on in their soccer games and visit your Montessori school as a prospective grand-parent. 

I wanted you and I to fulfill that dream of buying a Hasselblad camera and heading to Yosemite. 

But I do this instead.  I do this because maybe if we raise enough money, someday there will be the research needed to solve the conundrum of depression. 

I do this because if we get out there into libraries and schools and colleges and wherever with our books and our films and our talks, maybe a young woman here or a middle aged man there will bump into one of us, and will go home and tell the truth about living with despair to people who can offer support and find help. 

I do this because if we keep pushing our legislators, maybe there will be adequate funding for first responder training so that those called to bridges and tops of buildings and bedrooms and bathrooms will know what to do and be able to save lives.

I do this so that no one will say "He's not serious."  I do this so no one will be ashamed to say, "I need help."  I do this so no one will look back at a family history and ask, "Why didn't we know what we were looking at?"

 

Little things.  A meeting here, a conference there, a walk, an article, a lecture.  Whatever it takes.

But don't think for a minute that I wouldn't prefer one more walk on the beach with you.  I've met and I get to work with some extraordinary and determined people, but really ~ this pretty much sucks.

Surviving Suicide: Recognition Without Cause

In Ignatian spirituality, an experience referred to as "consolation without cause" refers to the sort of moment in which one is flooded with a deep sense of awareness of God's love and a response of unmitigated joy , an experience that seems to come out of nowhere, to be disconnected to that which immediately preceded it.  It was, for centuries I believe, thought to be a rare occurrence, something "granted" to only a few select souls ~ an understanding which has changed as it has become clear that, while not an everyday routine for any one individual, it is not at all an event or episode in the spiritual life limited to a select few. 

The critical denominator in this experience is found in the term "without cause."  Consolation without cause would not, for instance, refer to a sense of God's all-encompassing love found in a long walk at sunrise on the beach, a walk which might indeed be spiritually consoling, but in which the causes of consolation would be evident.  Yesterday a newcomer to church told me that he had been "struck powerfully in the core of his being" and "bowled over" by the way in which one of the scriptural passages had spoken to him ~ I would identify that as consolation "with" cause.  His experience and response were unexpected and a profound surprise to him, but the cause was apparent.

A couple of days ago, driving from here to there, my pondering all over the place, I experienced what I can only term a "recognition without cause."  The thought that suddenly appeared, as clear as if it had been a cartoon bubble, was that "I can live without Josh."  At that particular moment, I had not been thinking about anything at all related to Josh; in fact, an observer of my thoughts might have described them as fairly desolating, as the day was not one to which I was looking forward ~ quite the opposite. Nevertheless, there it was, out of nowhere: "I can live without him."

It was such a surprising thought to me that I can describe it only by saying that it is as if the quality of the very air has changed.  This summer I've occasionally but insistently imagined making a trip to the Madeleine Islands ~ not because I've ever been there, but because they have seemed recently to call as a beacon of light and clarity, a place in which the sun and the sky and the land would be simplified, somehow.  A place in which I would be able to breathe.  A place which would feel much as I have felt for the past two days.

It might sound rather obvious to someone else, this idea that "I can live without Josh."  From the outside, it probably appears that I have been doing so, with a mixture of more and less success.  But in reality, for these five years I have been able to find only one of two alternatives imaginable as a long term possibility.  Either he will come back, or I will die.  Case closed.

I don't think that I will ever believe that he will never come back.  Even the writing of the sentence  . . .  no, I would not survive the bone deep knowledge of such a bleak reality.  But apparently I will live in his absence, and I will live in a clear, blue, and sunny space. 

This is not a conviction that I would want to refer to as consolation without cause.  There is nothing consoling, either spiritually or psychologically, about having to move on without my boy.  It is a terrible, terrible reality.  But doable, and not merely badly doable.  So I will call it recognition without cause and move forward. 

And start planning next summer's journey to the Madeleine Islands.  I think that I probably need to go there.

Northfield Addendum

I was doing a little research after yesterday's post, talking with someone at Northfield Mount Hermon on FB and trying to find a video from a short time ago.  First the someone came up with this one:

 

Lift Thine Eyes.

 

It's a promotional piece for a book, and it gives you a great sense of the campus and of the importance of music to our lives.  In fact, if you make it to about 3:32, there are our 1970 voices singing Once to Every Man and Nation!  Who knew?

 

The next video was produced last Thanksgiving, and is the one I was seeking.  Our "school song" is Jerusalem, and this much shorter piece includes campus scenes set to another Sacred Concert rendition of the music.  As I recall, it was sent to the NMH community as a holiday gift.  I hope it's ok to link to it

 

here.

 

The last time I heard Jerusalem sung "live" was at Josh's graduation from NMH in 2003, in the same D.L. Moody-era auditorium in which I had graduated 38 years previous ~ with the seniors enthusiastically stomping their feet and shouting, "Bring! Me! My! Arrows! of! Desire!" When the video popped up last fall, I thought that I would not be able to bear it.  I have found that it is not so impossible, however, to recollect bits and pieces of the lives we shared there all those decades apart when those memories come in the form of music and New England fall colors.

 

 

So . . . take ten minutes and watch and listen to New England boarding school life!

Where Life and Death Take You

Just about 15 years ago, when Josh was a 13-year-old seventh grader, he and I spent two days in Washington, D.C.,  photographing monuments.  One of his Montessori school's seventh grade assignments was a Peace Project, and he decided to create his by melding his burgeoning love of black and white photography with architecture.  We reveled together in two days of sunshine and achy feet as we tromped all over the Mall and took the train out to the Iwo Jima Memorial.

 

I snapped this shot on the steps of the Supreme Court. (Sorry about the flash; what you see is a photo of a photo.)  As my new friend Emily and I walked passed the courthouse on Thursday, I was, of course, reminded of that joyous time all those years ago.

 

It's bewildering, this life.  Were Josh not my son, I would not have spent those Saturday hours in an Institute of Art darkroom, both of us absorbed in our own projects.   Were Josh not my son, I might not yet have seen the Vietnam or Korean War Memorial.  Were Josh not my son, I would not have celebrated a Christmas in France, or delighted in so many delightful days exploring the city of Chicago. 

 

Were Josh not my son, my feet would not have blisters from a day trudging the halls of Congress, seeking to influence mental health legislation.

 

They say that one gains knowledge and wisdom.  I suppose that one does.  It's all yours, if you want it.  (Which you do not; of that, I can assure you.)  I would prefer a couple of cameras, and a boy, and an afternoon of changing light.

Suicide Prevention Advocacy

Next week I'm off to Washington, D.C. for the Annual Advocacy Summit of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.  We'll be meeting people from all over the country, learning a lot, and spending Thursday on Capitol Hill meeting with our senators and representatives.  (I agreed to co-ordinate the scheduling of that effort.  We have eighteen of  'em, in five different buildings, and six of us from all over the state. Remind me not to do that again.)

 

We were asked to supply "vignettes" for the packets we'll be delivering to the Hill.  Here's mine:

The photo was taken on the morning he graduated from college.  Honors at the University of Chicago.  A beautiful girlfriend and a great circle of friends.  A job and a new apartment lined up.  Nothing could have prepared us for the fact that one and one-half years later he would be gone.

Our son, Josh Williams, was a patient and loving brother to his twin brother and their younger sister.  He had always been ready for adventure – all-day kindergarten;  summer camp in North Carolina, 600 miles from home; his full junior year of high school spent in France; a college road trip to Idaho and back over a holiday week-end.  He enjoyed photography and played soccer; he canoed in Canada with his grandfather and visited Montreal with his French brother and lots of Europe with his twin brother.  His loved his whole extended family and looked forward to creating one of his own.

We saw no signs.  In retrospect they were there, and we were to learn, when it was too late, that he had probably been suffering from a serious and desperate depression for at least the last couple of years of his life.  Unrecognized, unacknowledged, untreated.  Depression is a vicious, deadly illness, and yet is so easily concealed by those determined to do so, by those who do not realize that their lives are in jeopardy. 

I never planned to become a suicide prevention advocate.  How could you prevent something you had no idea was headed your way?  But as the years have passed, I have learned that much might have been done to alert us and our son to the danger he was in, to address his illness, and perhaps to save him to become the husband, father, and multi-gifted contributor to the world whom we had imagined he was becoming.  To continue his life as our beloved and treasured son.

The turning point for me came when I was diagnosed with breast cancer three years after Josh died.  I quickly saw that, whenever I mentioned my diagnosis, other women would step forward with support, encouragement, advice, and every possible kind of help – whereas, if I mention that my son died of suicide, I can clear  room in a matter of seconds.  The topic of suicide, I saw, occupied the position that breast cancer had when I was a girl: stigmatized, unmentioned, poorly researched or understood, little publicized. 

THIS.MUST.STOP.   We cannot continue to allow individuals to suffer such despair that death seems preferable to life.  We cannot continue to allow the lives of families and friends to be altered beyond recognition by unnecessary deaths by suicide.  We must find ways to identify and care for those whose lives are threatened by mental illness and other forms of anguish.  We must fund the research and the treatment and the education programs that will end this terrible scourge.   We must bring this subject out of the darkness and into the light, and end the suffering that leads to suicide and the suffering caused by suicide.

Help Prevent Suicide ~

. . .  photographer . . .  soccer player . . .  funny . . .  brother . . . canoe-er . . . computer programmer . . .  grandson . . .  camp counselor . . .  brilliant . . . writer . . .  kind . . .  nephew . . .  board game enthusiast . . .  fluent in French . . . cousin . . .   well-traveled . . .  beloved son . . .  lost to this world but never to our hearts . . .

 

 

From my FB page:

This September will mark the 5th anniversary of our loss of our Josh. Given that it's one of those significant anniversary years, I've set a higher than usual goal of $3,000 for fundraising for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.  [My daughter] Marissa is on the Walk Committee this year, and I'm on the Board of the soon-to-be chartered Northern Ohio Chapter of AFSP. We are strong and hopeful supporters of AFSP's work in research, advocacy and education. Please join us for the Walk if you're in Cleveland on October 19. And wherever you are, please make a donation. 300 x $10 = $3,000!

 

And, last year, with almost no notice and no "team" beyond ourselves, Ris and I raised over $1,000.  We're trusting all of our friends to help us do better this year.

 

Thanks!

My Fundraising Page.

St. Mary Star of the Sea

 

Christmas, 2008.

 

Stunned, dazed, bereft, the four of us staggered around Key West in a fog.

 

We had opted for the "change everything" holiday advice to the bereaved.

 

Instead of hosting forty friends in our home for the most traditional of Christmas festivities, our tiny family barbecued seafood on the deck in Key West.  (When we called our friends at home, dear Lynda, whose husband had also died that year, and who had chosen the "everything the same" alternative, and I spoke, and we agreed that there was no solace to be had in either case.)

 

Instead of a Christmas Eve service in the Gothic sanctuary in which we had spent almost all of the previous twenty-five Christmas Eves, we went to the Episcopal church on Duval Street, but ended up on the front steps in tears long before the liturgy concluded.  There we were confronted with a band across the street playing music with obscene lyrics, a direct finger-in-your face gesture to those in the candlelit church.  The Worst Christmas Eve Ever.

 

Instead of the wide expanse of the St. Augustine oceanfront, we tracked sand in from the narrow beaches of the Keys.  Florida magic, Florida birds, Florida skies ~ but in a place we had not shared with Josh.

 

One of my discoveries during my many expeditions near Mile 0 was the Basilica of St. Mary Star of the Sea.  My photo of its chancel window appears on Picturing God today!  The website for the basilica is filled with information, including a description of the window ~ scroll down on this page.

 

I was reminded of that Key West day when another Picturing God contributor offered an image of the spires of the church some time ago. I was sure that somewhere in my messy mass of completely disorganized photos was a picture of the window. 

 

2008.  It was to be more than a year before I encountered any sense of God again, and nearly two years before I was to make friends with Mary at Wernersville, and to find a miniscule of a bit more. 

 

But despite the elusive and silent God who was to dominate my seminary experience, I found this window to be beautifully powerful.  I would love to see it again someday, someday now that the warmth of the Florida  sun is perceptible again.


 

Boarding School Years ~ Catholic

Readers here know that I spent six years in girls' boarding schools: three Catholic and three Protestant.  A treasure trove of images of each has popped up on Facebook recently, and I thought I'd share.  The following come mostly from Pavey Photography; I don't know whether Ann Pavey attended the School of the Brown County Ursulines (now closed) as a girl or Chatfield College as an adult, but her photos reveal a genuine love of the campus.

 

My own family history as intertwined with the Ursulines, in a nutshell:

 

The Ursuline sisters ventured from France to southwestern Ohio in 1845 and opened a school for girls about thirty miles north of Cincinnati.   I'm not sure when this main chapel was built ~ maybe someone will add some information in the comments ~ but it was at one time attached to a massive convent building of red brick. 

 

The nuns hired a master carver to teach them to make the intricate carvings that adorned their small chapel in the main building ~ although I think this one is from what we knew as the main chapel:

 

 

In the late 1800s, my great-grandmother wanted to study piano and, so the story goes, sold her egg money to pay for lessons and drove her buggy the eight miles or so to the convent to study with the nuns.

 

In the early 1900s, she and my great-grandfather were married and he established what would become the family grain business, which eventually developed a relationship with the nuns, who ran a farm as well as a school.  I am sure that my grandfather and father, as well as my brother and I, would count the Ursuline sisters as among our dearest of friends.  I don't think I have a photo of those who came to my ordination service, but I do have one of Sister Agatha with my daughter, taken a couple of summers ago.

 

 

 

No daughters in the family until I came along, and off I went to the Ursulines' school when I was a seventh grader.  The chapel was a good deal more ornate pre-Vatican II, but it's still there.   My family was Methodist in a not-so-much kind of way, although I am told that that same piano-lesson great-grandmother as a grown woman used to sail down the street to the Methodist parsonage on Monday mornings to offer the pastor her views on the previous day's sermon.  (Is that where the genes come from?  I'm sure he was just delighted to see her making her way down the block . . .     . )  At any rate, I was not anything in particular, religion-wise.  But I did attend Mass and various other services here regularly for three years, which meant that when I bumped into the Jesuits decades later, I was comfortable with Catholicism.

 

 

 

 

My friends and I spent an awful lot of time climbing around and through various convent locales in which our presence was not exactly sought.  I think that Ann  Pavey has done an incredible job of capturing the sense of beauty and mystery of  the buildings which I'm sure that all the women who lived there as girls still think of as "ours."

 

 

 

The school is long gone now, and so is the building which housed it.  The nuns built themselves a smaller and more user-friendly home, and the small college on the grounds, established to educate young teaching sisters, is now a vital and thriving educational institution, open to all who live near this community on the edge of Appalachia. 

 

And, while I've posted this one before, I'll close with a photo of the plaque on the wall of one of the college buildings, which reflects a gift made by my father in memory of our Josh and a century-plus of wonderful friendship and love.

 

 

 

 

 

Morning

I used to be such a morning person -- up and out for a three-mile walk at 6:00, focused and hard at work by 8:00.  Since Josh's death, no longer the case.  I sleep so poorly and erratically that I have to make new accommodations every morning to compensate for the night before.

 

This morning, as so often happens, I was awake at 4:00, four or five consecutive hours of sleep being the most I can usually manage.  I fell asleep again within a reasonable time period ~ some mornings I don't, at all ~ and awoke and fell asleep and awoke again for good at around 8:00. 

 

I had been having a wonderful dream about Josh, Josh among dozens of teammates marching delightedly through an underground tunnel and onto a soccer field for the state championship soccer game.  We parents were behind a glass window and suddenly Josh broke out from the crowd of boys, dancing and leaping in the air and thoroughly enjoying himself.  Just as suddenly he was no longer a high schooler, but an exuberant fourth or fifth grader, with his bowl-cut of white blond hair flying through the air.  "Look!" he yelled.  "One way glass!  Our parents can see us, but we can't see them!"  And he continued to jump around and then ran back toward his group.

 

I placed my hand on the glass, trying to reach him, to touch him.  "Come back to me, Josh," I whispered.  "Come back, come back, come back . . . ".  Through a glass darkly, that's how we see now.

 

The tunnel, the state finals, the exuberant soccer player from elementary through high school ~ those all happened in real life.  The glass window; that happened, too, in another place, a terrible place.  A crematorium.  The words ~ I say them every day.

 

I lay in bed, realizing I was too awake to go back to my dream.  That occurs sometimes; sometimes he is so alive, so real, in my dreams, that I try desperately to fall asleep again.  Once in awhile I succeed, but it's never the same.

So I stretched out in bed and began to think about the day.  A day inside, at home, with three major projects, each completely different from the others, to occupy me.  I have had to change the way in which I work as well; I have to prepare even short sets of materials over long weeks rather than over a few days at a time.  I remember the first paper I wrote after returning to seminary.  Ten pages; it should have taken a couple of afternoons, at most.  It took ten days, an hour each.  I had lost all powers of concentration.  I'm in much better shape now, but I still can't rely with any assurance on my ability to focus for very long when I'm alone. 

 

I think back to the meetings over the past couple of days at church.  There is so much for me to learn about pastoring a community. This community. Sometimes I am right on the mark; others, not at all.  I said something last night intended to convey enthusiasm and encouragement, which I genuinely felt, and it was immediately deflected into something else.  This morning I see my error, and I wonder at my inability to comprehend the culture of my church.  There were so many other moments during which I felt something quite the opposite of enthusiasm, and I was pleased when I was able to offer compliments and support.  Which didn't work as I intended at all.

 

I consider the rest of the day ahead.  This evening I will be meeting with someone who is making the Spiritual Exercises.  That will be a delight.  We are about half way through, and he is deeply engaged in his blend of prayer and work.  Like a Benedictine, I suppose ~ except not  at all. 

 

Well, I am up, and getting hungry, so I suppose I'd better prepare to engage in mine.  Ora et labora.  Here we go.