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.

Yes, It Gets Easier.

I am just back from a few days in Algonquin Park, in Ontario, a place which my son Josh loved.  I went with my dad, who in the past took my boys and me, and once our entire family, and eventually just the two boys, canoeing in the backcountry up there, several days at a time.  We weren't so ambitious this year ~ we stayed in a lodge where the food was prepared for us and the beds were comfortable, and took day trips across the lake and down the rivers in the canoe ~ the canoe supplied with our cabin and its plumbing and hot water.

I had a lot of time to think about my Josh, about his 24 years, and about the last seven.  And I realized, as I have over the past few months, that the terrible weight of his death has indeed lessened. No more an enormous slab of iron crushing the breath out of my chest, it has become something more like a sheer, gossamer web that envelops me, tangling me up sometimes, but mostly surrounding me in a memory of grace and horror: delicate, shimmering, hopeful and anguished.

In the first couple of years after Josh died, I used to fall asleep crying and wake up crying.  I'm not sure that I ever stopped crying, except when I had to go out in public.  Two, three, fours years later, I would still sometimes look at a full day's schedule lying before me, say "Nope," and curl up in a blanket to wait out the wave of sorrow that threatened to engulf everything in its path.

 

I once read that it takes somewhere between four to seven years for the grief that follows the death of a child to abate.  It seems that I am right on schedule -- from a detached, clinical point-of-view, I would guess that the suicidal death of a child would push a mother right up against and right on past that seven year edge.  Of course, nothing about grief can be genuinely measured or assessed in clinical terms.

 

What helps?  Love and work, I guess Freud would say.  Prayer and work, St. Benedict would have offered, centuries earlier.

 

I'm grateful, so grateful, for the work I plowed through ~ the seminary years  I barely remember, the suicide prevention advocacy which brought out my latent lawyer, the ministry I have been, oddly, able to share with others. I'm grateful for the people who really hung in there with me ~ those amazing Jesuit priests and the spiritual director colleagues who kept on listening and then did it some more, the readers of all these blogs of mine, a couple of fearless professors and a couple of even more fearless friends, and all the people who allowed me to enter their lives as pastor and confidant, preacher and teacher, liturgist and floor scrubber, even as I was crumbling inside.  I'm grateful that I learned how to pray, and not pray, into the cavernous darkness of unfathomable loss.

 

Yes, I look at the world differently now.  I have seen and read and heard and pondered things so distressing and heartbreaking that I cannot help but see the most ordinary facets of life in a slanted light.  I used to think that that light had transformed me into a much worse person than I could ever have imagined being: angry, self-absorbed, brittle ~ suicidal, myself.  And maybe it did, at least for awhile.  Now I think: it provides an angle into a depth of darkness seldom acknowledged, but always there, here, as a persistent backdrop to our lives.  It's a penetrating source of illumination, a kind of darkroom light, the light from a sort of space in which Josh and I used to work intently together.

 

Maybe we still do.

 

 

Image: Lake Between Two Rivers, Algonquin Park

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.

Memorial Homily

Last night our church hosted a memorial service for the daughter of the former pastor, who died of suicide two months ago.  Her service was eight hours away, where she lived, and we wanted to do something for  former parishoners and colleagues here.

It turned out to be a beautiful and powerful service, a  perfect blend of pastoral leadership (including the mom and her husband as well as four others of us) in music, word, and ritual.  So many gifted people in ministry!  My contribution was to host and to preach a short homily.  Here it is:

 

 

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying,

‘See, the home of God is among mortals. God will dwell with them; they will be God’s peoples, and God’s very self will be with them;  God will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.’

~ Revelation 21:1-4

*****

 

 Many, many years ago, I heard the late Unitarian Universalist pastor Forest Church preach at Chautauqua.  “Why do we have religion?” he asked.  The answer? “Because we live and we die.”

We live and we die, and we have to make sense of those twin realities.

 

For those of us whose lives have been marked by the suicides of people we cherish, the entanglement of life and death becomes the question that relentlessly stalks our days and claims our nights.

“Choose life!” the Bible tells us.  And most of us do.  All of us here have seen how joyously people choose life when they are married, when a child is born, when labor work is satisfying and fruitful.  And all of us have seen how tenaciously people cling to life even as they gasp their final breaths, how they long for one more day, or even one more minute.

But the choice for life is not always as easy, or natural, or hope-filled, as it might seem.  For some, illness makes of death a release from pain and trauma.  And those of us left behind are called to delve into that dark place in which we can understand, a bit, where our loved ones found themselves, marooned on islands of despair and longing, no longer able to see even a sliver of light at the end of tunnels that curve and swell and twist and turn and finally narrow.

And then – what becomes of those of us who would have done anything, anything at all, to preserve the lives of those precious to us?

We start looking.  Where are the answers?  A  and T and E, I know that over time, you will find your own ways to live with the loss of S, and your own ways to live with the paradox of the stunning beauty of her flower-filled life entertwined as it was with  the searing pain of her illness.  I myself can offer only one small Biblical interpretation which has helped me.  It comes from Mirslav Wolf’s book The End of Memory, in which he suggests that the new heaven and new earth held out as promises to us, the final fulfillment of the kingdom which has already come among us, this new reality in which every tear will be wiped away and mourning and crying and pain will be no more -- this will be a reality in which even the memory of these hard things will be no more.

It sounds shocking, at first, and kind of horrifying.  Memory no more? We all want to retain our memories, don’t we?  Our memories of all of it, the good and the bad, the joy-filled and the heart-rending -- our memories which remind us of all that has made us who we are today?  We don’t want to lose our them, not even the reminders of tears and mourning.  We cling to our memories as if they are ourselves.  Who we are.  People of compassion because we have suffered, people of determination because we see what might be,

And yet . . .  and yet . . . and yet, what if we are made for more?

What if we are not, as Wolf says, merely “the sum of our past experiences?”  What if we are called to leave our heartaches behind and to receive ourselves as the people we were originally intended to be?  People created for a garden? People created entirely for love?  To remember and to know S, gardener, animal lover, daughter and sister and friend, as most fully and joyously her beloved, precious self?

It’s hard to imagine, tonight, when the loss is so great, that compete transformation lies ahead.    That there will come a time when the heavens and the earth, even the tangible earth on which we live, will be transformed  by the love of God into a mass of extravagant color and growth, into a garden in which brokenness and death will be no more, a garden in which life will flourish without recourse to the past. 

Here, we live and we die.  Sometimes the combination seems harsh beyond comprehension.  But the promise is for life.  Even when our capacity for this existence is crushed by illness and battered by sorrow, the promise remains.  Life for S.  Life for us all.  Amen.

For Bereaved Parents: How Many Children Do You Have?

Such a simple question, here in middle-class America.  Kind of like asking, "Are you cool enough?" in the middle of a midwestern summer.

 

This post was occasioned by a parent asking on the Compassionate Friends' FB page how others respond.  She lost a son a year ago and has just begun a new job, so the question is a frequent one. I think she's outrageously gutsy in taking on a new job at this point in her life, but most people at her work would have no idea about that.

 

The answers vary, of course.  Mine was:

 

"I would say that it depends on the situation. If I can get away with it, I say three and immediately ask about their family. Most people are more interested in talking about themselves anyway! and warm to the change of subject. Sometimes I say that I have a son who lives here and a daughter in a nearby city and don't mention where the other son is. Sometimes I say the exact truth. But after six years, I have become so "comfortable" with the topic of suicide that I am wary of the latter approach, because I have lost my patience for dealing with others' shock and discomfort."

 

It was FB, so I didn't elaborate, but I might have added:

 

As a pastor, I am often in situations which are all about the other person.  Not my time to share my life story, and so I don't.  When I am asked, I try one of the first two alternatives above.  On Mother's Day my answer to a friendly parishoner was admittedly extremely awkward; I had almost made it through the morning and was feeling quite pleased with myself for having done so, and then there it was, that question, on one of the worst days possible.

 

If it's a professional, public situation in which I can offer suicide prevention education, I go for it.

 

If I think it might help someone in a similar situation, I tell the truth, but tread cautiously.  We all grieve so differently, on such different timetables, and find comfort in such different ways.  Personally, I find it a lot more palatable to wonder where exactly God wandered off to when my son needed God most of all than to hear that God needed another angel in heaven ~ a God who gets lost or busy is a lot better than a God who steals children ~ but I have found that many others do not share my viewpoint!  I was honest this past week with the mom who had just lost a son to suicide, but I told truths that I thought might make her path a tiny bit easier.  I did not grab her by the shoulders and scream "This is the F-----G worst thing ever and when the shock starts to wear off you are going to want to DIE!"

 

Yeah. No.

 

I don't know a single person who wants to say a number of children one (or more) less than he or she actually has.  But that question ~ it's a minefield.  How are you doing with it?  And what about when it is your only child who has died?

Sitting Shiva

I realized that the living room had grown silent as I told the newly bereaved mother what little I know about suicidal states of minds. 

 

Mostly I told her that, while scripture tells us to "Choose life," people who die of suicide are not un-choosing it.  They are choosing to end the pain, not to die, and they don't really understand, according to my son's therapist, that they will not be here tomorrow with the people they love so much.  The tunnel vision, the fog created by pain and despair, take over, and they forget how much they are loved and how many people would do anything at all to save their lives.

 

I gave this Orthodox Jewish mom, with whom I used to discuss the academic progress of her children, my card, and told her to call me, not as a pastor, but as another mom.

 

Dad of Best Friend followed me out of the sweltering house to ask more questions.  "These kids," he said, "they're all blaming themselves."

 

Yes. 

 

It's been a long time since I've been at an event at which the men go into the living room to daven (pray) while the women, dressed in long skirts and long sleeves despite the oppressive humidity, stand around in the kitchen and wait.

 

I liked it so much better before, when my expertise was world history and not suicide.

My Jewish Life

After I learned of the death of my former student on Friday, I went to the memorial FB page to post my condolences and to add a portion of a piece I'd blogged some years ago.

 

Those posts garnered me a lot of parent and student "likes" and some new friend requests, from people with names like Hannah and Issac and Noah and Ariel and Yael and Chava and Hadas and Avital and Liat.

 

The circumstances are heartbreaking, but it's a pleasure to see the names of those beautiful young people and recall another life. 

Too Much

Yesterday the Huffington Post published a piece they'd invited me to write in response to a TED talk about suicide.  I decided to write about things I thought might help survivors -- not a religious post, not a post filled with pastoral reflections or exhortations - just a post about some of what I've learned, written by a mom survivor who happens to be a pastor.

Positive responses poured in.

Among them was a repost by a former teaching colleague on a memorial FB page for a former student of ours.  Unbeknownst to me, he had died of suicide two days previous.  Twenty-four years old.  What I remember is his relentless sense of humor as he failed, time and again, to turn in his work.   Jewish funerals take place within 24 hours of a death, so I missed that, but she and I will go over to the house together on Monday.

Another response came from a high school classmate, about a series of suicide-attempt related losses all those years ago.  I did not know about those events, but I recognized the emotional landscape of which she wrote.

Then, today, the wedding of our next-door neighbors' middle daughter.  I tried; I really did.  I do not want to be like the father who wrote the column a year or two ago about not having attended a wedding in the eleven years since his son died.  I want to help my friends celebrate the great events of their lives.  This was our fourth try.  We haven't made it all the way through a single reception.  Tonight's final straw came when the bride's two sisters and brother sang "Here, There, and Everywhere" to her.  Before dinner, I might add. The seven children of our combined families played together for years; both families were filled with joy and laughter.  Theirs still is.

A new friend is doing the Overnight Out of the Darkness Walk in Seattle tonight, in honor of her son who died just a year ago, on the morning of his high school graduation day.  I had toyed with the idea of going to that walk (in one of my favorite cities) - until I broke my ankle.  I wish I were there anyway.

I am completely depleted.  Whatever I wrote about finding hope, whatever courage people saw in that   piece . . .   . Not tonight.  I just want my son back. That's the only thing I ever really want.

I can't imagine how I am going to lead worship tomorrow morning.  One of these days I'm going to have to preach so far ahead of myself that I'm going to fall flat on my face.

Another . . .

 . . .  loss of a young man to suicide among one of my circles of friends.

 

How long, O Lord?


 

When Things Happen

The Director of my Clinical Pastoral Education program (known as CPE ~ that training ground for pastors in which we encounter Real People in Crisis, usually in medical settings, for the purpose not so much of learning to care for them as for learning to know and care for ourselves) ( possibly a dubious enterprise, but that's another post) was fond of raising the issue of the relationship between physical and spiritual ailments, and between life crises and health.

 

I'm not sure what to make of the various theories about body-spirit connections. In some matters, the relationship seems obvious. In others, not so much.  I'm sure the examples are well known to you.

 

That said, as I ponder the book which Michelle sent to me (previous post), I find myself wondering, with ample time this week to wonder, about my own rather dramatic juxtapositions of late.  What's this journey been revealing?  What do I carry?

 

I started seminary nearly seven years ago, brimming with energy and optimism, and a year later my son died of suicide. 

 

I was called to a church after a year's wait and, in catching up on health care so that I could give my undivided attention to our official beginning together, was diagnosed with breast cancer.

 

I was called to a new church two years later and, with a congregation taking a new and positive deep breath of hope for the future, slipped down my front steps onto a fractured ankle.

 

I carry a half-filled urn of ashes (we've been some places), a long and ugly scar, and now a plate and some pins.

 

I'm not depressed at all.  Don't read despair into these words; it's not there.  And it's not as if I could make any big changes in my life; these days I can barely hop to the bathroom.

 

But I am VERY curious.  Mystified.  I have young seminary classmates, and some not so young, who in the three/four years since we were in school have acquired spouses, children, first homes, major trips, and even more confidence in God than they brought with them to school.  And, ok, to be honest, my own life was pretty spectacular at 35.   And I could write a gratitude post for the last few years a mile long.

 

But seriously, why do all these things keep happening?  And what's with the timing?!

International Suicide Survivors' Day ~ This Coming Saturday

 

 

Click here for a program location near you.

 

The 30 Days of Gratitude Debate

There's a FB thing going on: each day in November, post something for which you're grateful.

 

I don't usually bother with those sorts of posts.  Way too much discipline for me, to remember something for 30 days in a row.  Or even to get started on the first day. 

 

But this year, I'm giving it a try.  (Having started on the second day, or maybe the third.  I can't remember.)

 

Some astute writers have criticized this effort.  (Not me personally, but in general.)  Too public.  Too likely to generate social media envy.  Too likely to turn into bragging.

 

I get that; I totally get that.  Often when people post about the triumphs of their children or their own glorious parenting experiences, I metaphorically curl up in sadness.  I think, "Yeah, that used to be me, but no more."  And I am sure that some of my own posts have the same effects on others, including people who have become dear friends due to our losses of beloved children.

 

But when I read the gratefulness posts from many of my friends, what I see is not misplaced triumphalism, but miracles.  I have so many friends now who have in recent years lost parents or spouses or children or homes or jobs or health (and some of them have lost in more than one of those categories), and when I see their expressions of gratitude for the small gifts of life, I think: miracle.

 

There is a woman with whom I am FB friends who lost her son to suicide five months ago.  This evening she posted something that caused me to go back and look at what I had been writing at five months.  It was the beginning of February, and I was back in seminary.  As I told this friend, I recall feeling as if I were underwater all the time.  Here's some of what I blogged:

 

"[I]t is nearly 9:00 am and I am just getting up. I was awake three hours ago but I knew that would make for too many hours in the day and so I went back to sleep. I will be up late into the night because I won't be able to sleep then.

[I] have to pace myself carefully. I am doing things: going to class, studying, writing papers, working with a couple of people, planning for the future. Each takes so much energy and requires so much recovery time. I forget what I've focused on within five minutes of reading or hearing it. I look at notes and say to myself: We had an entire lecture on that? I lose everything, little things and really important things. I stumble across them later and can't imagine how they landed in the place they did. I write papers and have no idea whether they bear any resemblance to what is expected. I make schedules for accomplishing things and then I stare into space.

I am still writing thank-you notes. The cost of each one is so high. Only a few lines, but each reminds me of something else ~ a relationship, an occasion in the past, someone else entirely whose claim on my time is perhaps more urgent. I did not know, Before, that when I received an acknowledgment from someone for flowers or words offered in a time of sorrow, that the note itself might represent a morning's work. Or a week's."

 

I could not at that time have come up with a single thing for which to be grateful.  And I have plenty of moments, five years later, when the grief washes over me with such intensity that I wonder whether I will still be able to breathe when it recedes.  But I also have much for which I feel genuine gratitude.

 

I am doing 30 days, more or less, of gratitude because I can.  And that seems kind of huge to me.

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.

 

 

I Kept Waiting . . .

for myself to have something to say.  Not usually a problem for me.  But I find, as Year Six without my beautiful son begins, that I have nothing.

There's a link up there, On Suicide Loss,  that contains some stuff I wrote about surviving a child's suicide.  What was I thinking? 

Here's some of what I know so far:

Do the next thing.  Whatever the next thing is.  Write a paper.  Bake some brownies.  Mow the lawn.  Get ordained.  Pack a suitcase.  Call a friend.  Preach a sermon.  Walk on the beach.  Listen to someone's story.  Go back to bed for the day.  Believe in something.  Believe in nothing.

The next thing.  Just do it.  That about covers what works. 

News! Article Published!

I'm so excited to be able to announce that my article has been published in the September 2013 of Presence, the journal published by Spiritual Directors International!

 

It's called "Ignatian Spirituality: Companionship in Loss" and it's a blend of personal story and practical reflection for spiritual directors.

 

(As far as I know, it's not available online.)


 

"Suicidal Trance"

This appeared on the Alliance for Hope site today.

I share it because I am spending some time with new suicide survivors these days and because I have been reminded repeatedly recently via comments of others that they have NO IDEA what it is we live with; that they don't know that we know the following about people we loved more than life itself, that we have had to absorb this knowledge about their lonely suffering into our beings and into our lives, and that we know this, all the time.

And no -- the reality of my child's suicide does not control my life -- but only because I have learned how to carry this around along with everything else.

From AFH:

"Richard Heckler on 'The Suicidal Trance'

 

Richard A. Heckler, Ph.D. made a fascinating study of individuals who survived suicide attempts.  In his book, Waking up, Alive, he has described the decline toward suicide.

'As these stories unfold, we can identify critical components of the decline toward suicide.  The stages of the descent are these:  Pain and suffering remain unaddressed ….  The person then withdraws behind a façade designed to protect himself or herself from further hurt and to cloak the suffering underneath.  However, the façade only intensifies the slide toward a suicidal trance.  Ultimately the trance narrows the person’s perspective until the only inner voices that can be heard are those that enjoin him or her to die.

… Early in the withdrawal phase, people still make some effort to stay in touch with the world and hope for at lease some promise of better things.  But when hope finally dies, people no longer see or hear anything outside their own minds --- the tight spiral of thought that tells them to die.  While this shift may occur just moments before a suicide attempt, it can be months or years in the making.  A colleague of mine from Louisiana, an experienced therapist for many years, contemplated suicide for over a decade.  She describes this mental state as 'an almost totally separate reality, in which your world may not look or feel so limited and painful to anyone else, but it does to you.  You enter a very powerful trance.'

During the latter stages of the descent, people lose faith that their predicament will ever change.  Their strength is depleted and they are deeply stressed.  Some people are never able to leave their chronically destructive surroundings.  In other cases, there is just no one able or willing to push past their facades.  In yet other instances, people are no longer able to recognize support when it is in fact available.

… The trance is a state of mind and body that receives only the kind of input that reinforces the pain and corroborates the person’s conviction that the only way out is through death.  The trance marks the moment at which the world becomes devoid of all possibilities except one: suicide.

…Despite differences in detail, everyone who attempts suicide enters the suicidal trance.  …

Suicidal trances can be identified by certain common characteristics.

• They appear extremely logical, with a premise and a rational series of arguments that encourage suicide as a reasonable response to pain.  These arguments are powerful, especially when created by someone who has become emotionally deadened --- whose reservoirs of faith, trust, and hope have run dry.

• Suicidal trances appear as resignation, in which a person stops caring at all about the state of his or her life.  They are frustrating and frightening to family and friends:  it seems as if there is no force strong enough to persuade the person to act on his or her own behalf.

• Suicidal trances 'beckon.'  As the trance intensifies, it becomes more insistent that the person finally complete the act.  These urgings most often take the form of voices entreating him or her to take the final step, or of images presenting a picture of the final act.

• Finally, this type of trance includes a particular vision of the future:  an illusion of eternity in which the future is projected as an endless repetition of the present pain and disappointment, never-ending and hopeless.'  "

Richard A. Heckler, Ph.D. is the Director of the Hakomi Institute of San Francisco, and a trainer for the institute throughout the U.S. He is an Associate Professor of Counseling Psychology at JFK University (Orinda, CA) and is on faculty at CIIS (SF, CA) and the Union Graduate School. Richard is the author of Waking Up, Alive! and Crossings: A New Psychology of the Unexpected.

 

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.

60 and Wistful

My 37th birthday cake and its creators at 5, 5, and 2.

Wistful.  I guess that would be the word.

 

It could have all been so different.

 

I think I subconsciously imagined that, after blogging self-indulgently for ten days, I would have some insight into where I've  been and where I'm going. 

 

But, alas, I do not.

 

I guess sixty is no different from any other day ~ LOL!  Some unbloggable stuff going on, which is clarifying, but hardly at a stage of resolution.  And the resolution will not necessarily be to my liking.  A wedding Saturday night ~ the daughter of friends ~ our first attempt in four years ~ in which the pain of all-that-will-never-be bored its relentless hole right through my fairly well-honed capacity for dissociation. (Just pretend this isn't happening and you aren't here.)  I'm still feeling the after-effects. 

 

On the plus side: My Lovely Daughter took me to see The Lion King on Friday night ~ such an incredibly creative show! ~ and my church celebrated after worship yesterday with a potluck.  More cakes at dinner last night and then at a gathering of friends. 

 

On the down side:  Having paid no attention to the combination of day and date, I am spending the evening with a family connected to a church in my Presbytery who lost a husband and father to suicide ten days ago. 

 

Here's what I wrote on our Day 10.  How well I remember those weeks and then months, curled up in bed with my dog and my computer, hoping that I would die soon.  That's why I'm going to see them tonight, even though I goofed on the date.

 

I looked up ~ of course! the etymology of wistful.  It seems to have something to do with silence and wishing. 

 

Umm~hmm.

 

Wistful it is.


 

Loss to Suicide: Time, Time, Time

Last month, a man whose sister had just lost a young adult child to suicide asked me, "How long?  How long will she be like this?  When will she be ok?"

 

"A long time, " I said.

 

"But how long until she's kind of normal?"

 

"Umm, I don't know," I said.   "Everyone is so different. For me, maybe three years until I could get through most days in some kind of fashion resembling normal."

 

"Oh my God," he said.

 

Silence.

 

"She's going back to work," he said.

 

"Well, yes, you go back to work.  People don't necessarily know.  That you've stopped sleeping and that you cry in bathroom stalls.  Or that you don't.  Whatever."

 

It changes, doesn't it?  In the last year, I have realized that I often sleep through the night now.  I laugh for real.  I roll my eyes again.  I no longer feel murderous toward people who are living the lives we all expected to live.  I am finding genuine joy in the triumphs of my surviving children.

 

I've "met" a woman on FB who lost her son only a few weeks ago.  She is a marvel and I am in awe of her resiliency, her capacity for faith.  I myself still wonder where God went.  A couple of years ago, my friend Michelle sent me a book of Kilian McDonnell's poetry entitled God Drops and Loses Things.  Umm-hmm.

 

A few days ago, a friend sent me this essay.  The young woman who died of suicide was a twin, like my son.  I always wonder that, too;  why  wasn't it enough?  How could it not be enough that there was someone with whom you shared a womb?  It's been ten years and her father writes that "it's getting better now."

 

Time is a strange thing.  Not, I would say, a healing balm to all wounds.  But it creates space.  You take all of your pieces and lay them out, like shells laid out on a battered bench after a day on the beach, and you re-arrange them. 

 

Into new patterns.  That's all you can do, really.