“Whatever you’re selling,” I said to the stranger on my front porch, “I don’t need it.” Arms across my chest, I stood in the narrow space between partially open door and its frame.
A man in a dark brown cashmere sweater and deep brown wool slacks insisted on talking to me, but I was not in the mood. Our nineteen-year-old, Brandon, had run off eighteen days earlier. Anxiety fluttered in my stomach. My partner, Kim, and I had a list of errands to run before we picked up our thirteen-year old from middle school. I raised a hand to shoo the man away.
“Ma’am,” he persisted, “I’m here about your son.”
“Oh!”
My voice brightened. Beside me, Kim pulled the door open wide. Since Brandon had stalked off with his full backpack, he hadn’t responded to calls or texts. He’s an adult, a police officer had told me, he can go if he wants. He’d gone before, to live for a while with his birth mom, but he’d returned home, and I assumed he would again. Before, we knew where he was. This time, birth mom also had no idea; he’d run away from us all.
“Is he …?” I leaned forward, craned my neck to see if Brandon was behind the man, perhaps in a car in the driveway.
The stranger on the porch held up a golden oval badge on a lanyard I hadn’t noticed hanging around his neck. He pushed it toward me so I could read the words Portland Police and Chaplain around the edges. “No, ma’am.”
I stared at him without speaking.
The chaplain dropped his chin to his chest then raised his face to mine again. Goosebumps crept up my neck. I couldn’t meet his eyes, and noticed instead how the gold badge bounced lightly against his sweater when he set it down on his chest.
“Ma’am,” he repeated, and waited until my gaze drifted up to where I could read the grisly news in his dark brown eyes. “I’m sorry. Your son took his life.”
The chaplain’s words smacked my face with a flood of icy cold; froze me with my mouth open but no air coming or going. Like the time I jumped into a mountain lake in June, heart-stopping, breath-stealing, so suddenly frigid I thought I’d die. On the front porch, I gasped for breath, searched for a word, felt my lips flap closed then open. Closed, then open.
A scream pierced the air to my left where Kim stood. I turned as her ruddy face disappeared into her hands. Standing beside the sofa, she began to sob then fell into a heap of salt-and-pepper hair, cotton yellow sleeves, and blue sweater vest crumpled over the back of the couch. I gaped at her raw emotion. I needed her to stand up, grab my hand, keep me from drowning.
“Pull yourself together.” I hissed.
“May I …uh … come in?” The chaplain’s voice was soft yet firm. Gentle but pushing. I stood in the doorway, blocking his entry. I stared at Kim who pulled herself to stand, then turned back to the chaplain. His sweater looked so soft, fuzzy with tiny brown fibers sticking out. I wanted to reach out and touch it.
Finally, I stepped aside.
The chaplain didn’t have any details but he stood in our living room with us while we made calls to the sheriff’s department trying to figure out what the hell happened. If it happened. It couldn’t have happened, could it? In between calls, I tapped out a flurry of text messages: Not coming to swim practice, Brandon killed himself. Call me, Brandon dead. Oh my god, Brandon killed himself, please come. Even tapping out the words in text didn’t make it seem real.
The chaplain stayed until I’d made an appointment to meet with the sheriff who’d found Brandon’s body; he stayed until our first friends arrived to wrap us in their arms. He offered to come back again two hours later, when our younger son got home from school. The chaplain attempted to talk to our blue-eyed, red-cheeked middle-schooler, but the shocked boy simply walked away and the chaplain turned to me again.
“You,” he said, his index finger pointed at my face as I stood amidst a gathering crowd, phone in hand, “you,” his finger wagged at me, “are going to need some help.” Then he wrapped me in a warm, cashmere hug.
∞
In the United States, about 129 people kill themselves each day. That’s a suicide every 12 minutes, about the time it takes to bake a perfect batch of homemade chocolate chip cookies. In Oregon, someone dies by their own hand every 11 hours; more of us in Oregon die from suicide than from homicide.
It used to be that people over the age of 85 took their lives more than any other age group. Now it’s the sandwich generation, my age, the people between 45 and 64. Finally the young people, ages 15 to 24, for whom suicide is the second leading cause of death. Since 2008, the rate of teen suicide has doubled. More boys and men kill themselves than girls and women by a ratio of about four to one, in every age group. Foster care alumni, like my kids, kill themselves between two and five times more often than those who’ve never been in foster care. The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention found that historically, 90% of all suicide victims have suffered a diagnosable mental health condition.
∞
The clock on the bedroom wall tick-tocked 11 p.m. I stared through inky blackness at the ceiling, told myself again to go to sleep, felt the futility ache across my back, churn inside my stomach, race through my brain. More than a year had passed since the man in warm brown knocked on the front door with news of Brandon’s death. How many nights can a person go without sleep before they actually die, I wondered. Again.
I rolled out of bed, tip-toed down the hardwood hall, careful not to creak the boards. Peered around the door frame into my living son’s room.
“For heaven’s sake, Mom,” he chirped, before he flipped off a flashlight and slammed shut a book, his now fourteen-year old face still smooth, round, and red-cheeked. “I’m not gonna die you know.”
“That obvious, huh?”
I gave him a quick squeeze then tip-toed back down the hall, crawled between the sheets and pulled the comforter over my shoulders.
3 a.m.
When I’d turned off the television and logged out of Facebook, when there was no work, or reading or writing to do, when the laundry was folded and the lights were off, and after I’d set my I’m fine smile on the nightstand; when Kim huddled under the comforter able to sleep through almost any duress, when even the dogs curled into balls and snored, when I was alone with myself; every destructive thought in a ten-mile radius sucked itself into the big black hole of my brain. In daylight, I went to work, wrote checks to the power and gas companies, walked the dogs, mopped the floor, bought groceries. At night, I sunk to the depths of the ocean.
A mile or more under water, sunlight can’t penetrate. Everything is total blackness. Oxygen is at a minimum. In this lightless abyss, you can’t tell up from down, top from bottom. Your lungs go nuts, rib cage expands with a gasp. Your eyes strain for light, muscles tense, forehead pinches. Then you see it: a tiny blob of luminescence bobbing in the distant murk. Is it up or down? Surface or bottom? You don’t know, but swim toward that little glimmer. You can’t see the wide crescent mouth full of sharp, translucent teeth behind the chemical light created with the sole purpose of luring you to your death.
I drank wine, swallowed herbal supplements, took prescription sleeping pills. I ran up and down public staircases around Portland, rode my bike, lifted weights. All that effort only gave me denser bones and more defined muscles when I slipped into blackness, listened to the wall clock tick-tick-tick, and slithered down to sunless depths.
∞
Every person who takes their life leaves behind, on average, six survivors – mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, sons, daughters, grandmas and grandpas, teachers, counselors, lovers, friends. These survivors are 3 to 4 times more likely to attempt suicide than the non-exposed. Loss of a child for any reason increases the risk to parents; if that child died by suicide, the risk climbs even higher. People in the field refer to this as suicide contagion, the fact that the experience of a loved one killing themselves can create suicidal thoughts or actions in people where there were few or none before.
I worried about my surviving son’s contamination. Meanwhile an odorless, tasteless poison spread through my own veins. Like antifreeze, it was killing me slowly and I didn’t even know it.
In the inky water of nighttime I made sketchy plans – stop taking my thyroid medication and die a slow, tedious death of gradual overweight, thinning hair, and brittle nails. Take all the dregs of prescription pain and sleeping meds I had around the house in various hiding places, most of it dramatically out of date, some from my cancer surgery twenty years earlier. The whole bunch would probably just make me puke. The most dramatic plan, the one that both seduced and scared me: tuck myself into the cottonwood trees and blackberry bushes out by the Sandy and Columbia rivers where I found daily rejuvenation walking my dogs, slit my wrists and let the blood drain out of me. My soul thrived in that lush riparian area, why not set it free there? It would be peaceful and no one who knew me would have had to find my pale, cold body.
∞
I leaned back in an inflatable yellow kayak, stretched legs and dropped my paddle to rest across my lap. I dipped my fingers into the cool dark water of the Salmon River in Idaho, then reached up to unfasten the straps of my helmet, slid it off, and shook my hair loose. When the center in Portland where our family of three attended grief groups offered participants a week-long river trip, I jumped at the chance.
My boat caught a riffle of current and twirled around, bumped the kayak of another paddler. I took hold of his boat and he grabbed hold of mine. Holding on to each other, we could float and chat for a bit on the calm stretch of river.
“Those were some big waves,” my river companion exhaled. He plopped his helmet onto the floor of his boat and leaned to relax against its backrest.
We’d just come through Snow Hole, a Class IV rapid, with big boulders and crashing waves. The International Scale of River Difficulty grades whitewater rapids from easy to life-threatening, Class I – Class V. The Lower Salmon River that August week consisted of Class II – Class IV rapids. For our group, many never having kayaked at all or, like myself, not in years, the classification could be considered heart-pounding-fun to downright terrifying. I kayaked a lot in my twenties and thirties, lost two skilled friends to the river’s power. I knew the perils more than most. The risk of death was mitigated by our experienced guides and their ability to quickly grab us out of the water when we capsized. But even with their expertise, our risk of death wasn’t zero.
“Big waves, indeed.” My left shoulder ached, an old injury to a tendon. I stretched the shoulder over-head then grabbed my upper arm and pulled it across my body to relieve the tension.
My kayak buddy’s eyes widened. “I wish we were already through China.”
“Me too.”
I don’t know how the rapids earned their names, some obvious, others not at all. The different sets of crashing waves had monikers like Snow Hole, China, and Half and Half, then Demon’s Drop, Bodacious Bounce, Eye of the Needle. The Gobbler.
China Rapids had become mythical in our group psyche over the past few days. Another Class IV rapid, our guides told us it would be harder and more technical than any rapids we’d come through so far, though we’d not yet reached The Gobbler. My boat bounced again as another rubber-ducky kayak floated into our tête-á-tête.
All the participants in our group of kayakers had lost an immediate family member. We all had children under age eighteen who also experienced that loss – for them it was mom or dad, brother or sister. The three of us bobbing in a little yellow island didn’t name our commonality, but we knew it in our bones, our tired muscles, our aching hearts. We kept bumping into each other – literally – or paddling slowly together along these quiet stretches of wild river.
We were parents who lost children: one by miscarriage, two by suicide.
∞
Earlier that day, I had stood in a swimsuit and shorts, sun already bright and warm on my shoulders, reminding me I’d need to slather myself with sunscreen. My gear packed, my kayak fully inflated and resting near the water’s edge, I cupped a plastic coffee mug between my palms and gazed downriver. The first rapids bucked and jumped right offshore, whitecaps tumbling away from our camp spot. While not as huge and heart-thumping as some, these rapids would afford no easy start to our day.
I drained the last of my coffee, set my cup on a folding camp-table, and moved toward my kayak when the other mother whose son died by suicide appeared in front of me. She grabbed my hands. Her face scrunched and her eyes rimmed with red. My feet sunk into the sand, hot on my toes and arches. The nearby rapids rumbled.
“How do I know,” she stammered, “that it wasn’t my fault? I’m sure it was my fault.” Her voice cracked with grief.
This soft-spoken woman lost her nineteen-year old son one month before I lost mine. My son: exposed to methamphetamines in utero, abused, neglected, picked up during a drug raid, bounced through multiple foster homes. Adopted by me and my partner, he struggled with attachment and PTSD; seven different counselors and two or three psychiatrists offered little help. He finally developed delusions and paranoia. Still, I combed through every day and every hour, searched every twist and turn of every burrow in my own enormous rabbit hole. I studied every interaction, searching for the one thing I might have done differently to change the outcome.
Her son: biological boy with a loving family had been well-cared for, lived in an upscale neighborhood with excellent schools. He earned soccer trophies and science awards, attendance certificates, straight A’s, and the honor roll. He had friends, attended college where he was on the Dean’s list.
His mother didn’t see it coming. I didn’t either, though you might think I should have. My son put a noose around his neck and jumped off a tree limb; her son put a bag over his head and filled it with helium. March. April. Nineteen years old each.
The fear that my son’s death was my fault clenched my throat. I stared straight into this other mother’s blue irises surrounded by white. Her slender face pinched, her straight blonde hair askew, her eyes childless-mother wild.
“I don’t know why he died,” I whispered and squeezed her hands. “I don’t know anything at all, except this: it wasn’t your fault.”
The truth of words I couldn’t whisper to myself, didn’t dare think, would hear from others and nod politely but not believe, cracked the dam wedged beneath my breastbone and with a sip of breath, tears snuck their way up, bubbled over lower eyelids, trickled down sun-pinked cheeks. The two of us stood, hands clasped, feet burning in the sand, shoulders burning in the sun, the crashing river hinting of the challenges ahead.
∞
In the afternoon, past many – but not all – of the day’s rapids, three of us floated along together.
“I’m just not sure anymore,” the blonde mother said quietly. “What’s the point?”
“The point of what?” The not-yet-dad asked back.
“The point of going on.” I replied. The other mom nodded.
I had no idea what the point of life was anymore, had asked myself the same question a thousand times. But as I floated downriver under a wide blue sky, the logjam in my chest rumbled as if it might do more than crack, as if it might break all the way open.
Brandon would have loved this trip. The outdoors – backpacking, river-rafting, camping – was his haven. Why would I not savor every drop of every minute of a river adventure I was alive for and he was not? I sat up straighter in my boat.
“We’re here?” I offered. “We can paddle and they can’t?”
She nodded. Without another word, we each picked up our paddles and drove the blades into the water.
Soon, the canyon narrowed. The rocky walls pushed the water into a narrower and narrower space. The river deepened beneath us as our whole group gathered. Soon we heard a low growling that became a rumble, then a grizzly bear roar.
Our trip leaders in blue kayaks waved us to the river’s edge. We tucked in against canyon walls, a dozen boats gently bouncing. Just downriver we could see a large gray raft overturned and wrapped around a boulder. People stood on the rocky shore waving and shouting. One of our guides headed down river to investigate. When she returned, she used both hands, palms out, to urge us against shore, keep our boats tucked into the calm eddy above the crashing and churning.
“Okay!” She shouted. “It’s gonna be really important to follow your leader. You want to hug the left shore without getting pulled into the sharp rocks along the edge. And, you’ll want to avoid the big hole that capsized the raft.”
My heart thumped away in my chest.
The young man still waiting to become a dad waved his hand, shouted out his question.
“What’s a hole?”
Already knowing the answer, I wished he hadn’t asked.
Our young guide launched into an explanation. A hole is where fast flowing water careens over a submerged boulder, dives down to the bottom of the river like a waterfall, deceptively smooth over the boulder’s surface. The water smacks against the riverbed and the force of the collision drives the water up again where it rolls back on itself and creates a continuous rolling wave.
“If you get caught there, the force of the water can trap you.”
“So … what do we do?” My friend asked, his face drained of color.
Our guide was twenty-two, strong, and all-summer-on-the-river tan. Whitewater experienced. Tone and expression matter of fact.
“Don’t fight for the surface. Swim to the bottom. That’s where water’s shooting forward.”
Someone let their breath out through clenched teeth, fear audible in the hiss of air.
“The power of that churning wave can keep you stuck, whirling you around like you’re in a washing machine,” our straw-haired guide went on. “You have to dive down. All the way to the bottom. That’s the way out.”
“What if …” the guy who asked inquired, “… we can’t tell which way is up and which way is down?”
“That happens. Feel for it? Down is the way out.”
Adrenalin slithered under my skin, made me twitchy and restless. I fiddled with my paddle, braced my feet against the sides of my inflated boat, heartbeat fast and thready. Race-horse ready.
“Best to avoid it,” the guide said, yellow hair and golden tan chipper. “If anybody wants to take a ride on our raft, now would be the time.”
Another group’s raft lay crumpled upside down and smashed against a boulder, making a big raft no guarantee of getting through. And something else, something to do with I’m here and my son isn’t, I can paddle and he can’t, I’m alive dammit and I’m gonna do this, compelled me.
We lined our yellow kayaks up behind our designated leaders in blue. I pushed off from the rocky wall, plunged my paddle blade into fast-moving water, steered my little boat into a smooth downriver-V and paddled like hell.
Mary lives in Portland, Oregon with her wife, one son, and two rescued dogs. She’s published essays in Brain,Child, Fugue, Pithead Chapel, Nailed, Hip Mama and elsewhere. Her essays have won literary contests and two have earned Pushcart nominations. Mary is working on a full-length memoir.