Her World Dumped Upside Down

Photo by Edwin Andrade on Unsplash

Yesterday, a friend who’s lived near us for more years than I can count had her world dumped upside down. She’d gone to check on a close friend of hers who hadn’t been returning her phone messages. Found him hanging three weeks dead by suicide; she found his dog dead beside him. Death came like a specter.

I heard the sad news from another neighbor from up the hill. Layla and I met him on our evening walk; eyes wide with surprise, he relayed just an outline of what had happened. The man who’d killed himself was someone our neighbor–I’ll call her Sarah–cared for a great deal; they’d gone back years. He was Sarah’s child’s godfather. So the sad soul has a name, I’ll call him Jack. 

What was hard was thinking of how the poor dog died, though I really don’t want to know. I don’t think the dog had a say in the matter. I know Sarah loves dogs. 

We heard third hand Jack had been despondent and more withdrawn over the months–possibly another victim of the quarantine we’re living under. One more middle age male who chose to quit, like that’s some kind of relief. It may have brought him oblivion, but it also brought our neighbor and her daughter untold grief. And it has brought her neighbors around her, sad but wanting to comfort her the best they can.

Men follow through with suicide at a higher rate than women.[1] And it seems men in their later years are doing it more frequently of late. With job losses starting in the 2008-2009 Great Recession, even before that with jobs lost to the US factory closings, it’s easy to see how that is a powerful influence.[2] Lose your job and lose your identity–it’s easy. I can attest. For men who’ve been raised since babies that their work is how they are measured, how can they–we–face going forward? Drugs and alcohol–self medication–is gasoline to a person already burning with depression. It’s said depression runs in families. I say suicide swallows families whole. 

Life’s a bitch, no argument, but oblivion is better? It hurts even to think about it. I want to say something to Sarah, though there’s nothing to comfort this kind of loss. No ‘he’s in a better place’ bullshit, because he’s not. He’s nowhere, and the sorrow he left Sarah with is cruel and hard. 

Nobody gets out alive–that’s what we creatures hold in common, yet suicide makes a mockery of the life we are given.  

I was a runty, cross-eyed four-year-old when my father died, and growing up, his death haunted me like a specter. As an adult, we lost our mother’s brilliant mind to Parkinson’s and our sister to a feverish, undiagnosed autoimmune disease, my father-in-law to kidney failure and his wife to old age. Though their lives were stolen by diseases, had any chosen euthanasia, would they have been justified? If so, what about the crippling pain of depression–does it give someone like Jack permission? I can’t answer that; I have too much still at stake.  

My son, Ryan, we lost to suicide when he was eighteen, and losing him sent me into a close-to-the-same depression. I recall drinking until I couldn’t stand in the evenings and still wanting more, a thirst I couldn’t quench. Before we lost Ryan, I had naively seen suicide as a distant abstraction, removed from any close reality. After Ryan, it was a far clearer possibility. His suicide sent his brother right to the edge. Cast his mother into a wilderness it seems she’s still wandering. Badly bent my marriage–which had been the most powerful bond to another person I’ve had beyond my children. It has to be tough living with someone who’s fogged by depression, which for years was how I lived–you can ask D. 

I recall a psychologist’s article advising that the period of grief can even last for months–and laughed like a crazy man–the author hadn’t a fucking clue.

Would Ryan have killed himself had he known how he’d drag his family behind him? He was too sensitive not to have anticipated it. The single note I found in his dorm room said as much. Yet his pain must have been far, far worse. His pain broke my heart, broke his family.

If I might be able to write off Sarah’s friend, it would only be because I don’t know him. I could never condemn Ryan. From back when I was still howling in grief, the verse from one poem returns:

“The image of his fall

I cannot turn it off

how he was alone, Lord

were there angels?” 

from Attend in Southern Son

In the Aftermath

Suicide is something I am too familiar with. Yet there’s nothing I can say to Sarah that will help her, help her daughter, other than to stand with them both, head bowed. And write honestly as I can.

In the aftermath following Ryan’s death, my solace, if it could be called that, was the slow realization that life is all we get. And life is precious. All life, from insects to birds and animals to people–to that which we have yet to discover. Though blink and it’s gone. So heartbreak is the price of living. The price is finding the will to endure despite the outcome, the patient hope for a morning sun.  

My father’s absence, his life as a cipher, drew me to reading history and biography, pursuing clues, following crumbs. Reading another’s experiences yielded connections I’d never have known otherwise. I designed buildings to leave physical monuments behind–until that was closed to me. 

So the writing becomes an attempt–a compulsion–at projecting one’s existence a few years further out. 

Nihilism, like suicide, surrounds us. And going on at times means it must be turned away from as the cliff edge that it is.  As much as the air we breathe and the sun on our skin, we need to reject it to continue. Easy to say and a bitch to follow through on when you’re caught in grief, such as I expect Sarah is.  

I grew up tremulously alone, fearful. Even though I knew my mother loved me, I felt undefended. It took me into my twenties to stand up to the fear. I don’t claim to be a strong person–in the face of losing Ryan, I was the furthest from strength. For several years after his death, it seemed I’d never get off my knees again. Ten thousand words and still writing–that’s all I can show now as justifying myself to myself. D has told me over and over that it’s not a good enough reason, but it’s the one I’ve found, even as much as I love her, love Sean, my sister–and all those close whose lives have intersected mine.  Writing is just the only way I’ve been ever able to express it. 

Would it help if I told Sarah any of this? Doesn’t seem like it would. So I’m writing this instead. 

[1] The Guardian article Why are men more likely than women to take their own lives?  

[2] Forbes article Job Loss, Suicide And Substance Abuse: A Watershed Moment