Mothers' Day: Join Mothers Holding Hands

OK, here's my thought and here's my idea:

The thought:

I figure we ~ all of us who have lost children ~ are all looking forward to Mothers' Day ( and I'm using the plural possessive intentionally) with trepidation. Probably an understatement. Without wanting to diminish our gratitude for our surviving children, if we have them, or our mothers and grandmothers, if we have them, many of us are apprehensive at best about the thought of an entire day devoted to celebrating motherhood when we have so much to mourn.

The idea:

Let's hold hands on Sunday and care for one another, across however much cyber-distance we can. Let's try to take care of ourselves by caring for each other.

The invitation:

Send a note ~ in the comments is probably the easiest, but you can also write to gannetgirlatsbcdotglobalnetdotcom ~ with whatever you want to say, for yourself and to all of us ~ and I will put them all together in one post on Sunday. And, of course, you are welcome to copy and paste the whole thing into your own blog as well.

Let's remember our joy and our sorrow as mothers all together.

(Cross-posting at Search the Sea.)

Five Things: Language

I use it myself. "He killed himself." "She committed suicide."

There is an intentionality implied in the language we use that is, to my way of thinking, completely inaccurate, and makes a significant contribution to the anguish of surviving family and friends.

For weeks after our son died, one of my most oft-repeated questions was, "How could he do this? And its variations: "How could he do this to me? To us?"

It took me a long time to understand that he didn't.

A friend whose son also died by suicide at age 24 told me, over and over again, about the "tunnel vision" that immediately precedes such a death, in which the person who is, literally, a victim himself, loses sight of everything in his life except the need to eradicate the intense pain in which he is submerged.

Ron Rolheiser helps us to understand with this:

". . . the propensity for suicide is, in most cases, an illness. We are made up of body and soul. Either can snap. We can die of cancer, high blood pressure, heart attacks, aneurysms. These are physical sicknesses. But we can suffer these as well in the soul. There are malignancies and aneurysms too of the heart, deadly wounds from which the soul cannot recover. In most cases, suicide, like any terminal illness, takes a person out of life against his or her will. The death is not freely chosen, but is an illness, far from an act of free will. In most instances, suicide is a desperate attempt to end unendurable pain, much like a man who throws himself through a window because his clothing is on fire. That's a tragedy, not an act of despair.

and with this, from the author William Styron, who contemplated suicide but was saved by a last-minute sense of the pain he would inflict on his loved ones:

"The pain of severe depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it, and it kills in many instances because its anguish can no longer be borne. The prevention of many suicides will continue to be hindered until there is a general awareness of the nature of this pain. . . . and for the tragic legion who are compelled to destroy themselves there should be no more reproof attached than to the victims of terminal cancer. . . .

What I had begun to discover is that, mysteriously and in ways that are totally remote from normal experience, the gray drizzle of horror induced by depression takes on the quality of physical pain. But it is not an immediately identifiable pain, like that of a broken limb. It may be more accurate to say that despair, owing to some evil trick played upon the sick brain by the inhabiting psyche, comes to resemble the diabolical discomfort of being imprisoned in a fiercely overheated room. And because no breeze stirs this caldron, because there is no escape from the smothering confinement, it is entirely natural that the victim begins to think ceaselessly of oblivion."

Most of us will never endure such pain, although I think that many left behind come close enough, at one point or another, to grasp something of its horrific depth and breadth and to understand that it can lead to a point in which the will, as we usually understand it, is overtaken in the same way that the body can be overwhelmed by cancer cells or physical trauma.

In the first weeks after our son's death, I likened it to his having been run over by a train. It seemed that sudden, that out of nowhere. As we have learned more, it appears that the train was a good deal slower, but just as inexorably powerful.

And so: I try to use the phrase "died by suicide." At the survivors support group I sometimes attend, the leader, a social worker who lost someone beloved to her by suicide, and many of the "old-timers," use the word as a verb: "He suicided." That sounds particularly ugly to me, although I can't articulate a reason. Maybe because it is the only instance in which I have heard the verb expressed. I've never heard patricide, or matricide, or deicide, used as a verb. I guess it implies, to me, anyway, an intentionality that I believe is absent from the act.

There is no, or little, at any rate, judgment addressed in this post to anyone who finds themselves struggling with the language. We struggle with the language because we struggle with comprehending the reality.

Drowning or Not

I'm taking a course on the Gospel of Matthew, which is not a requirement, and writing an exegesis paper for it, which is about the last thing in the world I need to be doing right now.

The passage I chose as my topic is the one in which Jesus walks on the water toward the disciples who are cowering in their storm-tossed boat, and Peter decides to jump out and walk toward Jesus. The reality of walking on turbulent water (or, I suppose, any water at all) freaks him out and he starts to sink. Jesus, of course, rescues him.

I chose it because it's one of those passages that both sides in the Biblical debate seize upon:

"Look - he can walk on water! Isn't it obvious that he is the Son of God?"

"Look - they are trying to convince us that he walked on water. Isn't it obvious that the Bible is one gigantic and elaborate fairy tale?"

So ~ I figured it would be a good story to know something about. It would be good to read commentaries written hundreds of years ago and to look at the Greek (OK, just the tiniest bit of the Greek) and to think a little about the Dead Sea Scrolls and Buddhist and Greek stories about divine beings who walk on water. It would be fun in an I-love-textual-criticism kind of way.

But you know, in the end, it really isn't much about water or walking thereon. It's more about this, as one of the more recent commentaries (that would be Luz) says:

"[A]lone and unsupported in the water, [Peter] grows beyond himself and thus experiences both his own failure and the Lord’s support. It deals with the possibility of exceeding one’s own human limitations in faith in the midst of deep despair, fear, misfortune, suffering, and guilt."

And therefore ~ as it turns out ~ this is exactly the course and exactly the paper and exactly the passage I need to be working on right now.

Five Things: Violence

There is no getting around it: suicide is an act of violence.

A mystifying act.

It doesn't matter whether the means involves a gun, a tall building, a car crash, a bottle of pills. A suicide is an act of violence against the human body, against the human person, against the universe. An act of opposition to the goodness of all creation.

How does one absorb the reality, an act of violence in and against a life characterized by peacefulness and gentleness, and its relentless invasion into the lives of all who knew him?

As a little boy, my son collapsed, sobbing, into my arms when his beloved box turtle died. His earliest letters reflected his delight in creation ~ the letter to us describing the skunk family crossing the green on which his entire summer camp community was gathered for 4th of July fireworks, the card to his grandfather reflecting his and my pursuit via canoe of a loon haplessly looking for peace on an Adirondack lake.

As far as I know, the most aggressive thing he ever did in his life was to kick a soccer ball more than halfway down the field into a winning goal his senior year of high school.

It hasn't been more than a year since I commented in an email to a friend on what a joy it was to observe his gentle and graceful consideration for his girlfriend, his generous appreciation of her gifts.

A few nights ago, I went to a Survivors of Suicide meeting, which I do on occasion, and the conversation turned to this issue of violence. All of the people there were gentle, loving, and had clearly contributed compassion and kindness to the lives of those now gone. We were grieving deaths ranging from two days to three years old, and every one of us was struck by the sudden incursion of violence into our lives at the hand of a beloved sister, son, or boyfriend.

You think that you would not survive if someone you loved killed someone else ~ shot or pushed someone else off a building, ran over them, whatever. You know that the ripple effect of such an act would alter your entire existence. There are simply no words for describing the effect when somene's victim is him or herself.

The book No Time to Say Good-bye, linked in my sidebar, includes the following quote from one Edward Dunne:

"The death of a significant other by suicide is a stressor of unparalled magnitude in most people's lives, and even the most psychologically mature individual may encounter difficulty in responding to it."

Ay-yep to that rather stunning understatement.. And the violence is part of the reason.

Five Things: Shock

I can talk only about what it has been like for me. My husband, my son, my daughter -- perhaps they would see things differently, perhaps they would be able to order them in some way. Perception , response -- no doubt even those earliest cave paintings in France tell us something about the variety of human perception and response. I have only my own story to share.

The shock. The suddenness of a loss that blots out your entire universe. I read a couple of weeks ago that only 20% of deaths in the United States today are completely unanticipated. I was surprised, since my personal experience has been so different. My 28-year-old mother and year-old brother killed in a car accident. My 48-year-old stepmother killed in a fall. My 49-year-old aunt dead almost instantly of a stroke or heart attack. My 24-year-old son, dead by suicide.

There is, of course, a sense of shock even when the death has been expected, even when its imminence has been the focus of life. That reality first became apparent to me when I was in law school and my husband's uncle died of cancer. He was at home, where his family had cared for him during the last weeks of his life, and his wife's response was one of such overwhelming anguish and agitation that I realized that even when you know what is going to happen, you can't quite accommodate it until it does. I saw the same thing over and over again during my CPE experience at Giant Famous Hospital last summer. Probably close to 75, maybe many more, of my patients died while I was actually there on the campus, usually with them. I can't think of a single survivor who wasn't visibly shaken, heartbroken, devastated ~ and it made no difference whether their loved ones had been in the hospital a matter of hours or a matter of months. The completeness of death startles and undoes us no matter the circumstances.

But a completely unexpected death brings its own set of horrors. The ground has shifted, the sky has turned dark, and the requirements of your life have been altered, all in a single second. You have to absorb information that you cannot find acceptable, you have to make telephone calls you will not remember making, you have to make decisions no one wants to make.

As far as I can piece together, in the first hour or so after learning of my son's death, which had happened the night before while while I was four hours from home at a retreat center, I talked by telephone to my husband who was at home and called to tell me, to my daughter's college advisor and then to my daughter in Oregon, to my brother and son en route to our house from the southern part of the state, to a detective in Chicago, to my spiritual director who was at home, to my son's girlfriend in Chicago, to our pastors who were at church, and to a good friend at home. Some of those calls I can remember, some I only know must have taken place because of information I seem to have acquired in the first hours. The only person I knew at the retreat center, where I had been for a little more than a day, was the Jesuit who was my director for the week I had planned there, and so I talked to him off and on through the late afternoon and early evening, as I waited for friends to come for me. He offered his office and computer, and so I sent a few emails to others to whom I am close, knowing that within another few hours I would be unable to manage anything of the sort.

I felt encased in some kind of impermeable shell, into which the faintest knowledge of an ominous reality had somehow seeped, a reality that was gathering the steam that would enable it to crash its way into every corner of our lives and explode that shell into thousands of pieces.

It feels as if that explosion is still reverberating. I guess it will always feel that way.

Suicide is Not Painless

For the first few days, this SONG kept running through my head. I couldn't seem to get it right, and I couldn't figure out where it came from, and I couldn't figure out what it meant. As I've written before, my perception of all things was fragmented and skewed. It seemed that reality as I had known it was only a small fraction of the universe I had accidentally stumbled into, and those lyrics, bits and pieces of them, were among the confusing bits of jagged glass flying around.

Eventually, obsessive M*A*S*H aficiondao that I had been been at one time, I was able to recall their origin, understand their senselessness in our new context, and put them to rest. But when I think of that first week of September, I remember the words and tune whirring through my head. "Suicide is painless; it brings on many changes . . .".

As most people have no doubt realized by now, if they didn't already know, our most beloved Chicago Son died by suicide, late on the night of last September 2. Although that fact is a constant companion in my life and although I talk about it freely, I have not blogged about it because I couldn't quite figure out how to do that. Or maybe I couldn't quite figure out whether I would be able to stand the reaction. I don't think that any of us in our family have received anything but loving support from family, friends, colleagues, acquaintances ~ and I include in that group people I know "only" from the internet, which in some cases includes people I now consider to be wonderful friends ~ but we all know that the online world is a place in which speedy and thoughtless comment often predominates, and that it's a place in which some people feel free to zap remarks in your direction which they would never (one hopes) say to anyone face-to-face. So I've been reluctant to expose myself and my family to the potential for even more pain, just in case that might even be possible.

But it seems that the time to be more forthcoming is upon me. I gave a little talk about it last week at seminary, which offered me the opportunity to organize my thoughts a bit. Only a few people showed up, but it was a beginning. I don't see my life becoming centered on suicide prevention, but I know a whole lot of stuff now that I didn't know eight months ago, and I am willing to share it if it is of any use to anyone. I'm going to add a few things to the sidebar, some resources and books that have been helpful. And I'm going to speak more freely, unless someone makes that impossible.

Our son was a wonderful young man. Creative, witty, kind, brilliant, generous. And concealing a murderous depression which destroyed him and shoved the rest of us into the alternate universe we now inhabit. How do we map this desolate and skewed territory? I guess we are learning, moment by moment.

Gardening Blind

Some days ago, Stratoz posted an entry in which he reflected, in response to a story he had just read, on what it would be like to garden without eyesight. He teaches horticulture at a school for kids who have been challenged beyond the usual, and from what I can tell, he is both a gifted gardener and an insightful teacher. So when he muses about what would be missing if one who could not see were to plant a garden, I pay attention. Here's part of his entry:

"Blind gardening, can you imagine? I try. I imagine the difficulties. The struggle. How much of gardening for me is a visual joy? With that gone...

I end up pondering the state of my spirit if I was to lose my vision. Would I become deflated and bitter? What would happen to those things for which I have a passion?"

I thought about this quite a bit after I read it. I'm not much of a gardener, and the tactile aspect has no impact on me. I don't have a sense of smell (really ~ I have never smelled anything), so it's not as if I could plant a garden and enjoy its scents wafting through the air. I don't actually have any concept of scent.

Michelle responded with an entry about her mother, another lover of gardens who lost her sight:

"She continued to garden . . . . Though she had a marvelous sense of color -- she could match colors by memory -- she drifted toward more heavily scented garden choices as her sight dimmed. I remember driving her on an expedition to find new plants for a garden outside her bedroom, holding up various specimens for her to smell."

As I suspected: the sense of smell can substitute, at least to some extent. If one has a sense of smell, that is.

Grief, I have concluded, is like gardening blind. It requires that you reassemble your life with pieces missing and in the absence of the vision needed to accomplish the task. I could plant a tulip garden next fall without bulbs for yellow tulips, but that's because I can imagine the space in question with red and pink and white and black tulips. I can imagine the differing colors and heights and blooming dates, and I can create a garden with that information.

Can I recreate a life? With one of the main pieces missing? You've perhaps noticed I've switched from the word sight to the word vision. It isn't just the piece, the person, missing. It's the entire vision. The entire understanding of what life is.

This is more akin to gardening having never seen anything at all, having no concept of color, no concept of shape or size beyond what can be discovered with the hands.

Because when a child is gone, you are starting all over. In some other universe, some universe in which that child does not exist. It's as if I were suddenly blinded and went out to my garden only to discover that the soil had been transformed into kernels of corn, the hose gushed forth jelly, the seeds and bulbs had the consistency of oatmeal ~ and I was advised that the catalog showed flowers in silver and gold and gray. How would I ever put all that together?

Think about it. Think about trying to plant oatmeal in corn kernels and spraying it with jelly in the hope that an arrangement of gray and gold and silver would emerge in a way that would somehow be pleasing to the eye.

That's sort of what it's like, to reconstruct a life in another universe. Blind gardening with no sense of smell.