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.

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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.

 

Josh, Grown Up and Ambushed by Depression

There's a strip of green running east-west near the southern border of the campus of The University of Chicago, between East 59th and East 60th Streets, called the Midway Plaisance.  That's where I first saw Josh as a college student, frolicking in the grass with a group of his friends, playing pick-up soccer.

I didn't get to go to his college orientation.  He and his brother started college on the same day in late September,  and I was teaching, so his dad took him to Chicago,  and I made the much shorter one-day trip to Columbus.  As soon as I had some time off (Jewish school -- long Sukkot break in October), I drove to Chicago, and went looking for Josh where he had said he'd probably be on a late Friday afternoon.

They looked like puppies, those kids.  They were freshmen at one of the finest universities in the world and had emerged victorious after many years of arduous academics to get there, but they looked like a big pack of relaxed and adorable puppies as they played soccer in the waning light.

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I knew, actually, quite a bit about depression and other forms of mental illness.  I knew, for instance, that many of the more serious forms of mental illness manifest themselves in a person's young adulthood, when he or she is between the ages of 18-24.  I also knew that one of the most insidious aspects of depression lies in the tendency of those who suffer its hardships to deny that they are facing serious affective problems -- or even to know that they have begun to observe and experience the world differently than they did before, or than their friends do.

What I did not know was that sometime during his college years, Josh began to suffer from serious bouts of clinical depression, an illness that would kill him less than two years after he graduated.  He was radiant that graduation day -- a degree with honors, an excellent job in the wings, a beautiful girl in his life.  But he was already struggling, and he had never breathed a word of it to us.  

I know it now only because of old journals he left behind, because of conversations with his girlfriend after he died, and because of many other clues that I have been able to put together only in painful retrospect.  Josh and his lovely girlfriend had both achieved many successes, and had managed to overcome all the challenges life had tossed their way.  They were both bright and resourceful and determined young people.  Neither of them had the slightest idea that they were up against an illness that, when untreated, is every bit as deadly as cancer.  

Some of the horrific statistics:

In 2007, the year before Josh died, suicide was the third leading cause of death for young people ages 15-24.

Ninety percent of people who die of suicide have treatable depression and/or substance abuse problems.

Suicidal people often leave clues which become apparent in retrospect, but many people who die by suicide do not communicate their thoughts to anyone else. 

Depression and suicide have a face for me now, a face of someone I love with a fierceness that is reserved for the love of mothers for their children.   

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I wonder, often, whether I would have known how serious things had become even if he had laid them out for me in minute detail.  I wonder whether I would have known to look if my family had been forthcoming about my great-grandmother's bipolar disorder ~ was there a gene silently making its way through four generations, only to emerge in full and explosive expression in my son?  I wonder whether we would have been able to find effective help ~ God knows I have met many people in the last two years whose beloved family members were in therapy . . . had been hospitalized . . .  are nevertheless dead.

Death from suicide leaves behind a host of unanswered questions, a trail of guilt and regret so wide and deep that you think that you will never find its limits, and the destruction of relationships that once seemed designed to last into eternity. Depression is surely one of the most effective tools of evil I have ever encountered.

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When he was a college freshman, Josh lived in a dorm of alternating male and female suites.  One day he and his friends returned from Chinatown with a large, whole, entire, fish ~ a fish large enough, for instance, to fill a porcelain bowl.  They deposited said fish in the toilet in one of the girls' suites and settled down in the hallway to await its discovery.  It still makes me smile to think about the shrieks coming from the bathroom, and the low-pitched male laughter beyond the door.