Category: Losing a Child

One of the first things a psychologist said to me, was that we are only one of many influences on our children and that they come pretty much with their temperament and personality in place. Also, that their peers are far more important influences on them than we are once they reach about ten. This is hard to grasp at first when so much is laid at the feet of parents. We are led to believe that anything that goes wrong with our children is our fault. This gives society a false sense of control. The fact is, very little is within our control and that is scary. 

Parents are expected to fix everything, be aware of everything, know everything, and work, keep our marriages together and monitor our children’s use of screens. Well, how do you do all those complex jobs successfully? You can’t, not when you have a zillion responsibilities. As parents we can give love and security, we can nurture, we can guide (or try to) and we can pass on our values, both consciously and unconsciously. But we are not given a blank slate when our kids are born. 

I loved my daughter and was her biggest cheerleader. So how come she felt so worthless she wanted to die? Wasn’t my love and pride enough? Nope. It was important, very important, but it wasn’t enough to immunize her against mental illness, nor was it enough to immunize her against what society tells us is failure and success.

If it takes a village to raise a child, it sure as eggs takes a village to kill one. I have often thought that if my girl had been born into a simpler, rural society with no Internet technology and clear-cut social roles, she would have flourished. But she was born at a very confusing, stressful time for young people. It overwhelms them. How can they be a ‘success’ when that goal post is always shifting and getting harder and harder for them? Jobs, housing, work-life security, dating apps, and hook-up culture, impossible body images to live up to, and much more. All of it weighs on them. 

This is not a problem to be defined by failed parenting. It is a society thing. We are failing our young people, our elderly, our disabled, our lonely, marginalized, broken people, our grieving people. We worship success and yet we have very little chance of achieving ‘success’ as our neurotic society defines it.

Dear Mourning Mom:

I know you. I was you in the first year or two and sometimes still in bursts of remorse today. I hear your cries of all you should-have, could-have done for your lost child. This is how we often feel as survivors, especially parent survivors

We think we failed our child, and we need to shout out our unworthiness, beat our breast. On top of the general stigma of suicide, we may be afflicted by the special shame of being a bad mother—one who couldn’t foresee or prevent her child’s self-destruction. Instinctively, we reject assurances that we did everything we could because, of course, there’s always more we could have done. Even when people add “you did everything you could–given what you knew at the time,” we just can’t accept that we were unable to save our child. That the momentum of our mothering only goes so far with our kids once they reach a certain age. And that, unlike other parents, we don’t get a second chance.

Having missed that chance, we cling desperately to remorse as a last parental act. It keeps us connected to our dead children. It shows our love and loyalty and belated understanding of what they needed and what we failed to provide. It’s a desperate plea for their forgiveness. Except that now, only we can forgive ourselves. And that could be a long time coming.

You have a total right to feel whatever you’re feeling. By all means, let it out! At the same time, please feed your battered soul. Treat yourself with the same compassion you would offer a dear friend in your position. Make a list of all the great things you did for and with your child over the years. Remember that no one is a perfect parent; no one is all seeing or all powerful.

“Just as no one can erase the grief that you feel right now, there were limits to what anyone could have done to fix your loved one’s pain,” according to Jordan and Baugher in After the Suicide: Coping with your Grief. “Living through the suicide of a loved one confronts all survivors with a profound sense of their own limitations.” You may feel like putting yourself on trial for failing your child, they write, but at least let someone like a therapist ensure that it’s a “fair trial” that reviews all the evidence!

I know you can’t fully take in what I’m saying right now. Please tuck it away in the back of your mind to ease some future moment, along with these words from psychotherapist Stacey Freedenthal’s blog, Speaking of Suicide (2014):

“Feelings of self-blame can distract you from grieving and, in the process, from healing. . ..What lies beneath your self-blame are the terrible facts that you cannot control: Suicidal forces overtook your loved one. You have suffered an unfathomable loss. You cannot turn back time, do it over, do it differently. Each of these is a loss. Mourning these losses is the essence of grief. Your grief deserves your compassion.”

I was in a bookstore when I got the call on my cell. I knew it had to be bad news if the doctor was calling me herself after the breast biopsy. I stepped outside and sat down. I heard “definitely malignant” and “I’m sorry” before the call ended. I teared up but didn’t break down. What do I do now? Call my husband. Go back in the store and get a book on breast cancer.

The dreaded C-word. The word that older relatives, even some doctors, wouldn’t say 40 or 50 years ago when my mother, aunt, and grandparents had it. In my family, that was how you died.

“It’s a sock in the gut, isn’t it?” a friend wrote, recalling the shock of her own diagnosis.

Yes, but my shock absorbers have changed. The worst thing that can happen has already happened to me. My child’s suicide is a nightmare that will always be with me. Cancer, at least at this point, is an unwelcome guest—a condition to be managed. We each have our own private calculus. My instinct on hearing the diagnosis was to take charge, stay calm. I would not catastrophize, I told myself, unless or until there was reason to do so. I would try not to act out of fear.

The first few weeks after the diagnosis, I felt some of the same vulnerability and reached for some of the same solace as I did after Noah’s suicide. I was tired and slept a lot, while also having trouble sleeping. I took one day at a time. I craved comfort food, like big bowls of Japanese ramen. I prayed for healing. I felt the concern of friends and family who fretted: “You shouldn’t have to deal with this right now.” I told my son, Ben, that I wanted him home for Thanksgiving and for my lumpectomy the following day. He came, as he came so often to visit us in the year after Noah’s death. Much of this felt familiar.

Unlike after Noah’s suicide, after the diagnosis I welcomed distraction and positive thinking rather than crying fits. I didn’t feel the need to find a support group or talk a lot with other breast cancer survivors. I knew that everyone handles the diagnosis differently, just as everyone handles grief differently. In 2013, I wanted it known that Noah died by suicide and that we welcomed support. In 2016, I wanted to keep the cancer news more private because I didn’t feel like a cancer patient and didn’t want to have to deal with a lot of well-wishers eager to help. With the suicide, many people said there were no words, but with a breast cancer diagnosis, people seem to know the drill. After all, one in nine American women get breast cancer while only 13.4 of every 100,000 Americans die by suicide. The C-word is a familiar visitor, no longer so fearful, but the S-word remains laden with stigma, ignorance, and horror.

I’d never had surgery or general anesthesia before. In preparation, I listened to a guided meditation on visualizing successful surgery that suggested imagining everyone who loves you, living or dead, as a “band of angels” watching over you in the operating room. Thinking of my dead son and parents wishing me well made me cry so I decided that the living were enough to protect me.

I’ve been lucky with this cancer, considering. It’s small, early, treatable. I have good insurance and encouraging, competent doctors. I don’t need chemo—the other dreaded C-word, reminding me of my mother’s shrunken face at 47, cheekbones protruding, gray tufts sprouting on her head like a baby bird. If I’d had to have chemo or my prognosis was worse, I’d more likely feel like a cancer patient, more afraid and sorry for myself–at which point, maybe I would seek a support group.

In the desert two days before surgery, I saw the biggest rainbow I’ve ever seen. Its perfect arc spanned the sky with thick bands of primary colors, like a child’s drawing. While meditating by the beach on the day before my chemo consultation, I sensed an unfamiliar deep, teal-colored light behind my eyes. I’ll take both of these signs as Noah’s blessing: You can do this, Mom.

I was surprised at the level of support we received in the first six months after my 19-year-old daughter’s suicide. Wonderful friends, thoughtful and always open to talk. Then slowly it became more uncomfortable talking about it, people started to shut down the conversation, not ask and so on. One or two precious friends understand how it is for me, but everyone else wants us to keep it to ourselves now. It’s not that they lack compassion for us, I think it’s because they don’t know what to say and they want to see us ‘getting over it’.

I was angry at first but I’ve thought about it a lot. So many relationships are run on habit, on surface exchanges about various subjects – kids, jobs, careers, holidays, and so on. The real deep stuff is kept for more intimate relationships (if you are lucky) like spouses or very close friends. We don’t really know each other. We don’t know the other’s inner world. We don’t know if they are planning to kill themselves or if their husband hit them that morning or if they battle with private phobias or a myriad of private personal stuff. We don’t really know. We can’t know. And so often we don’t actually want to know because we have more than enough stuff to deal with in our own lives.

I was surprised by those who rose to the occasion and those who couldn’t. I’ve surprised myself. I didn’t know what was inside me. I don’t know what’s inside them. We don’t know until we are tested. What has shocked me is the level of ignorance and prejudiced thinking that I’ve encountered regarding mental health. And it worries me, because if as a society we can’t even cope with grief – a natural phenomenon-how can we cope with the depression and anxiety that led our loved ones to their deaths and left us floundering?

Humans are problematic creatures. We’re real status animals, and we don’t like to show weakness and we don’t like to see it in others. We don’t want to be around sadness. We don’t want to be infected by it. We don’t want to take it on board unless it overwhelms us. Thus, those who suffer, like ourselves are left to turn to each other. It’s all we can do.