Let me be clear. I am not suicidal. One of the things that keeps me most awake at night, thinking about my beloved dead father and sister is the deep sadness I have—on their behalf—to not be living in the world. I feel that I owe it to them to hang on to this gorgeous place, the thousand small pleasures of any day, the unspeakable comfort of being among those I love…all that it is to be alive, and stay really alive, for as long as I possibly can. As long as I am alive, so is some part of them.
And that’s just the rooting debt I feel to the departed. I cannot fathom suicide because of the further canyons of grief that it would cause the living—my mother, my remaining sister, our family, my friends.
And then there is the simple fact that, despite my sister being nine months gone and my spending a lot of sad slow hours sitting alone and being unaware of time passing, I hugely enjoy being on planet Earth. It is delightful to move my relatively healthy body through time and space, to think thoughts and come up with new jokes, to feel heat and cold and snowflakes and sunshine, and to touch my loved ones in person and through technology.
So, no. I’m nowhere near, in my grief, a suicide concern. Life is far too marvelous.
But, all the same, I can somewhat understand the absolute horrors of recent suicides by those who lost their people to gun violence.
Grief is terrible. I told my therapist that my grief over Hannah is just going to be an amorphous gray pet that moves with me for the rest of my life. It’ll change shape and disposition, but it’s a chronic condition to be accepted and managed, not an illness to be treated. Because a cure would be an erasure of her, in some way, and that feels unacceptable.
Which means that six years, one year, any number of years after a loved one is gone in a sudden snap instance, that pain and loss can surely spark up as fresh and terrible as the first moment.
For over two years after my father died, the first thing I saw when I shut my eyes was his body, lying in the hospital bed, when I’d come to say goodbye. I only regret, and I will always regret, that I only kissed my fingers and pressed them to his familiar forehead, but I couldn’t bring myself to put my live lips to his dead forehead. I will never have a second chance to do that.
Now, though, the constant refrain when I shut my eyes, is that I hear my mother’s breaking voice on the telephone—from New Hampshire to the northern tip of the Shetland Islands—telling me at 3 in the morning that my sister has died. Any sound that wakes me in the night is that terrible knock on my door at the wildlife sanctuary.
It’s a lot.
But this, if you are curious and if you are a stranger to the feeling, is some of what it is to live with grief. Day in, day out, for years, forever in some form. And time passes and life does move on and condolence flowers get composted and there is structure in returning to regular routines. And then people think you’re fine enough or you fool them into thinking what they want to see because it hurts to see people you love in the depths of grief, and so they hesitate to mention your loved one’s name around you, possibly out of politeness to not say the wrong thing. And I’ve certainly tried to fool people that I’m better than I am because I can see how much my being so sad hurts those who would do anything to prevent me from having so much as a paper cut and can do nothing in the face of this. We’re a culture that is pretty fantastic in crisis and at "fixing" things, but less good at stewardship and accepting damage. It’s just easier and more pleasant to leave the names unsaid because it’s uncomfortable to talk about stirred emotions.
And I’m lucky. I have a job with remarkable health insurance, which includes being able to find a therapist. My job pays well enough that I can afford a $20 copay for each visit. Of all the necessary miracles for mental healthcare in this country, I found a local, convenient in-network therapist who was taking new patients when I needed her, who meshes with me perfectly, and regularly assures me that—despite all the snotty tears I cry in her office, despite the gray pet of grief that I now have, despite everything I tell her—I’m pretty healthy, almost unnaturally resilient, and that I’m dealing with everything very well, all things considered.
“Jesus,” I say, tears and mucus dripping from my hankie, “that’s terrible! Because if how bad I feel is ‘well’, then how wretched it must be for those who aren’t coping with grief this well.”
“Some people try cocaine,” my therapist suggests, brightly. “Or a lot sex with random strangers. Or overeating or anorexia or bulimia or completely withdrawing from the world. There’s lots of unhealthy ways to cope.”
We agree none of these sound quite like my speed, particularly anything involving an addiction.
I get less and less crabby at the world regarding my father’s death every time I learn another good thing about what is being done to help those who are afflicted with addictive disorders. I don’t know that with my dad’s personality, his particular addiction, and what information about coping with alcoholism was available to him, that his death was particularly preventable. There are a thousand “ifs” behind that, and it breaks my heart to wonder.
What is good is that addiction, even in the nearly four years since my dad’s passing, does seem to come more and more to be understood as a disease and a disorder, not as a failure of moral character or a constitutional weakness. If we can accept that, if we can get ahead of the deadly shame, then there is more hope for all those who have this particularly hideous chemical gremlin in their bodies, holding their best selves hostage. We are not good about the disease yet, but we are improving. Imagine if we told people with cancer that a twelve-step program and stronger will power would cure their disease. That’d just be cruel, but that seems to be the options for those with addiction until very recently.
Let’s not be cruel anymore.
On that note of diminishing cruelty, if my father or sister had died from something as preventable as rampant gun violence in schools, and if time was passing and nothing was happening to prevent others from losing their families to the same violence despite all the promises when my grief was fresh, and if I wasn’t able to access a good therapist, a bolstering support system of family and friends, and if the more time passed, the more the world moves on and I was still broken hearted and grieving and feeling utterly alone and longing for my person, my people, on some other side of life…well, if I believed in an afterlife, I would probably consider jumping ship to be again with the people who I feel robbed of.
The students in Parkland, the father in Newtown…these are explicable deaths, to me. Horrible, but if it's a feeling of helplessness that overwhelmed them, that seems like a completely rational feeling given all that has happened in their lives. Their particular trauma, whatever it has been that flashes before their eyes before sleep, if sleep, it cannot have been helped by any of the news of the world. I don’t watch movies or news about rock climbing because the horror of seeing a person fall would be too much to handle. If I lost a loved one of random gun violence, to see the white supremist terror on New Zealand mosques would surely bring on new waves of grief. Sometimes, I find, that when I’ve been “okay” with my grief for a bit, to have a sudden “attack of the sads” is so aggressively painful that I almost wish I hadn’t ever felt even that small bit better. To have the global news return you to the worst moment of your life is horrific.
The world can be a hard place. There is rampant random unfairness—my incredible sister rested her hand on a rock that came loose. Hannah’s hand, centimeters differently placed, and I’d probably never have heard much about that particular hike and we’d be chatting on the phone right now about Minions or pirates or sheep or her dog’s poop or something else important.
We, achingly, are not.
The randomness of horrible things makes it all the more vital that we DO what can be done to prevent what can be prevented. We need better gun laws. We need better universal affordable stigma-free access to mental health care. We need to be unafraid of talking about grief and emotional trauma. We need to recognize the wide nets that hold us all, and the eternal ripples of a traumatic event. I just learned that a car accident I was in half my life ago knocked my right hip a little out of joint—explaining some back and knee pain that have suddenly arrived. It is something to be so broken so deep inside and simply not know. Pain can have distant roots.
A deep and shocking grief is a similar trauma to the soul, so of course there are collateral victims to mass shootings.
Reinhold Neibuhr’s words— “grant me the strength to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change what the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference”—have been adopted by AA as The Serenity Prayer.
They are good words. Gun violence, mental health access, addiction and better understandings for the chronic ache of grief…these are things we can change as individuals and as a society. And we must. It is a disservice to the beauty of the earth and to the legacy of those who have gone too soon to do anything else.
