1993. A WARM EVENING, LATE IN SPRING. A man and a woman, casually dressed, in their thirties, sit across from each other in a small, shabby-chic Latin American restaurant on Queen Street West in Toronto, the kind with rough, painted walls where the work of local starving artists is always on display. Their table is at the front of the narrow, candle-lit place, surrounded by the current selection of abstract murals, near the big full-length windows, now de rigueur in the city’s bars and restaurants, swung open to take in the balmy air and offer the framed Saturday-night scene of the restaurant’s inviting interior to any curious passersby.
When they order, the young man reaches across the table and touches her hand lightly. “You can have a drink, you know. It doesn’t bother me.” It’s thoughtful of him. She had been wondering about the etiquette of consuming alcohol in the company of someone who has had to give it up; in the company of an alcoholic, that is. Assured that it is acceptable, she orders a glass of wine, he a diet soft drink. They share a plate of fresh mussels in a spicy tomato sauce.
The city is experiencing its first taste of summer—the suddenly, unequivocally warm weather that, in northern climates, seems to raise an entire population’s basic happiness level a notch or two. After months of hunkering down indoors, making only reluctant forays outside, bundled in cumbersome coats, hats, gloves, and boots, trudging through a dreary urban landscape eternally clad in shades of grey, black, and brown, people are out in exuberant droves as they renounce their winter clothing with sweet relief. There’s a heavy, sensual mugginess in the air this night, and an almost festive energy along the café-lined streets of the downtown’s west end as people whiz by on bikes and in-line skates, or stroll along the sidewalks looking for somewhere to sit for a meal or a drink, preferably outdoors or by an open window. Bits of conversation and laughter float into the little restaurant, mingling with the low buzz of the people at various tables and hunched on stools around the curved bar.
The man and woman sit talking and watching the passing scene long after their plates have been cleared away. The restaurant is less crowded now, approaching midnight, and the street too. The moist air has entered that electrically charged state of stillness that precedes thunderous downpours. A rolling grey cover of clouds has taken over the sky. The breeze is gathering force, bringing with it ominously spaced drops, and soon, slow splashes of rain through the restaurant’s windows. A waiter asks the man and woman if they would like him to close the windows, but they say, no, it’s okay. They’re just enjoying the warm wind blowing in on them, thunder sounding in the distance. The rain splashes onto the woman’s hand as it rests on the table. The coolness of it feels fine, she doesn’t brush it away. The back of the man’s shirt is speckled wet, that seems fine too. He says he could make them iced coffees back at his place, and she says, great. As they leave, the clouds release their rain and finally it pounds down on the city, a welcome deluge after a long, dry spell.
As they emerge onto the street the man opens an umbrella, putting his arm around the woman’s shoulders. Together they run, west and north through Bellwoods Park. It’s the first time they’ve been this physically close. The woman is keenly aware of it; they have been hovering tentatively on the brink of intimacy for some time now. When they first met for coffee months earlier, he was ending a marriage he said had been going bad for years. Now he is separated, and she is not sure what she wants. The last couple of times they’ve been out, she has thought that he might have expected her to invite him in when he walks her to her door, but she doesn’t. The last time, she was all too conscious of her growing nervousness over what might happen next, and her anxious blathering to cover it, as they approached the street where she lived. But he seems sensitive to her diffidence, with no intention of pushing his luck, and they say an awkward, shuffling Um, well, guess I’ll see you then, well, uh, should I call you, uh sure, I guess so, okay, ha ha, well, see you then, bye. The man would later tease her about her obvious skittishness. “You were running,” he tells her, insisting she had turned on her heels and loped away from him that evening, though she thinks this is an exaggeration. By his account, he continued on up the street, feeling sure she’d never go out with him again, lamenting what he presumed was his lack of finesse with women.
She’s not sure what prompted her to keep her distance, apart from the psychotherapeutically correct notion that people just out of relationships are more vulnerable than they know, more likely to make hasty romantic choices clouded by wounded loneliness. Maybe she has been waiting for him to blow it, in some hopeless, bad-date cliché: rant about his ex; attempt to sell her Amway products; tell her in detail about his corkscrew collection; allude to his Hefneresque sexual prowess; dismiss any opinion of hers with which he disagrees; confess to, or unconsciously exhibit, some sickening habit; tell her fifteen minutes into their first coffee together that he is really a loner who doesn’t like commitment and has never had a relationship that lasted longer than three weeks.
He does none of these things. No, to her, it all looks better, not worse, the more time they spend together. Of course, there are all the obvious common interests, the writing and editing and reading, plenty of easy shop talk. But it’s more than that. It’s the good feeling she has with him, that he understands things, without her having to explain. They’ve both been through dark times, they are quite open about their pasts; they both want to leave the painful things behind, get on with better lives.
Now they’re in the park. The downpour has stopped, but the man still gallantly holds the umbrella over their heads. They trot along, their new physical closeness making them politely reserved once again, mindlessly chattering. The woman begins to wonder if he is ever going to notice the umbrella is no longer necessary. Then it strikes her as terribly funny, and she can’t help it, she breaks away and runs on a little, laughing the way people do when they have been holding it in, when their laughter may be a distracting cover for some deeper emotion. “Daniel, it’s not raining anymore!” she calls back. “Oh,” he says, looking befuddled, “you’re right.” He catches up with her, and somehow, in all the dithering over closing the umbrella, he manages to lean down and kiss her. It is a rather shy, perhaps-we-should-get-this-out-of-the-way-so-we-can-both-relax kind of kiss. Not since high school can she remember feeling such awkwardness, and she is not sure how to account for it. Still, it seems now they can relax, and they walk on, in the damp night air, a fine mist visibly suspended in the light pooling around the streetlamps.
At his place, she kicks off her new clogs, and looks down to see with dismay that the dye from their dark leather tops has run in the rain, staining her feet a bruisy black and blue, as though she’s been stomping through a vat of grapes. She sits at the kitchen table while he makes the coffee, curling her feet self-consciously underneath the chair, as the talk flows easily between them. Finally, she makes what she knows must sound like a strange request: “Would you mind if I washed my feet?” An obliging and gracious host, he replies, “Of course not.” She thanks him, enters the tiny bathroom, runs some water in the scarred old tub, sits on its edge, and dips her feet in.
Soon he is behind her with a towel, but instead of giving it to her, he sits down and drapes it over the tub beside him. He has also brought soap. He puts his hand in the water to test its temperature, then gently takes one of her feet and begins, silently, with great care and concentration, to wash away the stain. “Oh,” is all she can think to say.
Something extraordinary seems to happen between them. She can hardly express its quality. Perhaps it’s rare to be able to trace the precise moment when a relationship changes from one thing into another, from casual to serious, from unattached to bonded. For her, this tender ritual marks one such moment. It sets a pattern, for this man and woman; their silences, she finds, are as rich, vital, and connected as their conversations.
What she starts to feel is a magnificent sense of calm. She cannot remember the last time she experienced such intense intimacy. Maybe she has never felt it, not like this. She rests her head on his shoulder, immensely filled with a sense of arrival, after a long and painful journey; how amazing to have arrived at each other, hardly knowing before they got here that it was a possible destination. She feels safe, welcome, cherished. Home. Healing already. She feels she could stay like this, accepted, comforted, loved by this man forever.
A beautiful memory, now juxtaposed with so many terrible ones. The summer dream that veered so abruptly and disastrously into the nightmare of the following winter. Sitting side by side with him that evening as he—Daniel—gently washed her feet, it would have been impossible to imagine how quickly she would become the one administering the care, inconceivable that he would be capable of destroying himself, hurting her so badly, leaving her—that is, me, for this is a true story, my story—so soon, so tragically.
Now, I sometimes wonder, as I run that exquisite evening through my memory—the indelible image of Daniel, strong and peaceful beside me—how it is that a man capable of such a sweetly inspired gesture could also contain within himself such overpowering shame and rage and self-loathing. I wonder, looking back, to whom, and for what, he was in some way always unconsciously atoning.
He cannot tell me. I am left to wonder that for the rest of my life.
On February 13, 1994, Daniel Jones, the man I loved, killed himself, employing a method outlined in the bestselling manual of “self deliverance,” Final Exit. He was one month short of his thirty-fifth birthday; a recovered alcoholic who had not had a drink in eight years; a man who had struggled for a long time to keep his deeply rooted depression and agoraphobia at bay; a gifted writer, editor, collector of books; a generous friend; a demanding and self-chastising perfectionist; a withering critic of pretense, hypocrisy, and mediocrity; a fine, loving companion.
I use the term “killed himself” to describe what Daniel did, as opposed to “committed suicide,” “took his own life,” “died by his own hand,” or other such distanced phrasings, because for me it most aptly expresses the particular violence that it takes for a young man nowhere near the end of his natural life to cause his own death—especially a young man who also possessed such rare tenderness of spirit. If ever there was a man who contained his opposites, it was Daniel. The day he died, it was as though the tectonic plates of my entire existence shifted, causing all my assumptions and understanding of what it means to know someone, my sense of life’s meaning and purpose, to fall to the rumbling ground. I’ve spent the five years since shaking off the initial daze of that cataclysm, learning how to navigate the strange, new coordinates of my altered world.
I could, and do occasionally, refer to the act in conventional terms—the act in general, for Daniel is only one of many who have chosen to die this way—as “committing suicide.” Unless quoting someone, or distinguishing between attempted and successful suicides, I will avoid referring to it as “completing suicide,” a relatively new term that I find stilted, though I respect the efforts of those in the field of suicide prevention who wish to steer our language and cultural understanding away from the criminality implied by the word “commit.” Suicide is no longer a felony in most countries, including Canada—though I do know of at least one clergyman who was called upon as recently as the early seventies to visit a man sent to Toronto’s Don Jail for slashing his wrists.
No, I most often conceive of what Daniel did as killing himself, because saying it that way best evokes the full horror of the act and hearkens back to why our ancestors, motivated by primal fears, fashioned fierce social taboos around suicide, and called it “self-murder.” This I understand. I believe there was as much rage as there was despair in Daniel’s suicidal drive, a will to die that required energy and force to execute successfully; ironic, given the depressive’s characteristic listlessness and outright emotional paralysis, and Daniel was nothing if not depressive for a good part of his short life.
“Commiting” or “completing” suicide strikes me as altogether too tidy a way of describing something that can be—before, during, and after—an outrageous mess. Yes, some planning and rationality, not to mention rationalization, are often involved in carrying out the act, aside from cases in which extreme derangement, psychosis, or schizophrenic delusion drives a person to self-inflicted death. Suicidal people may knowingly mask from others the degree of their pain and the extent of their self-destructive plans, or they may act impulsively. Yet, at the heart of suicide is most often a chaos of distorted perception and emotion that leads the afflicted person on a doomed chase down a dark, lonely, and mistaken path. By that point of isolation, there’s usually no one who can stop it from happening; no one who fully understands that there is something that needs to be stopped from happening.
In ending his own life, Daniel brought immeasurable grief and sorrow into the lives of many people. If he was desperately seeking the peace of oblivion, he did so at the expense of the living. Still, I do not judge him. He was sensitive enough to know how much he would hurt others, and apologized in his suicide note for the pain and suffering his death would cause. He is forgiven, by me anyway, and I believe by most who knew and loved him.
Since I am a writer, it is, I suppose, not surprising that I would write about such a profound and traumatic experience as the suicide of a lover. Yet my own loss has not been the sole impetus for my writing this book, though it is, without question, at the heart of it. No, it was more a combination of events and circumstances in the wake of Daniel’s suicide that made me feel I was somehow called upon—in the right or wrong place at the right or wrong time, I think—to begin seeing the world in a different light. I knew I could never go back to the old way of seeing, or not seeing. To do so would have been cheating myself and possibly others experiencing their own suicide tragedies.
Shortly after Daniel’s death, I learned that a former classmate of mine from journalism school had also killed himself—only days before Daniel, as it happened—though others kept the news from me for many weeks, assuming correctly that I would have been unable to take it in. The news rattled me anyway, when it did come one day in early April 1994. For me, it was a chilling time, the height of the media frenzy over the suicide of grunge-rock icon Kurt Cobain. I felt as if I had entered some dangerous and inescapable echo chamber, where my own thoughts and concerns were painfully amplified no matter which way I turned. Then, in June, I learned that another close friend had lost a good friend to suicide; picking up the phone and getting this news, I felt as though the wind were being kicked out of me. What was going on? Why did so many of us have to grieve so painfully and profoundly these untimely deaths? What could end these cycles of misery?
I found these questions maddeningly difficult to answer. As I sought to bring some sense and order to it all, I could not help noting that Daniel, my old schoolmate, and my friend’s friend were all thirty-four years old, male, introspective, creative types who had long suffered varying combinations and degrees of depression, substance abuse, and family dysfunction. Cobain fit this mold too, though dying somewhat younger, at twenty-seven. Discerning this characteristic destructive pattern was one of the first steps I took to place my own experience in a larger perspective; it was the beginning of the healing search that became this book.
If all I sought to do here was to enact some personal therapy (and I don’t deny that a project such as this includes that kind of catharsis), I would keep my reflections in the pages of a diary, and there would not be much point in sharing them with anyone. But suicide seems to bring out a literary urge in many who experience it. Memoirs by suicide survivors* have been written, chiefly by mothers mourning dead sons, though other kinds of loss experiences are now emerging too, and I was grateful to have such enlightening and compassionate company as I traversed my own grief. In Canada alone, a retired judge has written a moving book of poetry since the suicide of his wife (Silver Mercies, by James Clarke), and so has a woman whose severely schizophrenic son killed himself in a terrible and violent episode of delusion (The Unhinging of Wings, by Margo Button). The American actor Spalding Gray based his famous monologue Monster in a Box on his experience of surviving the suicide of his mother. The monster of the title is the massive, unfinishable novel about this suicide in Gray’s young adulthood that tyrannizes his emotional life. Many suicide survivors will nod and smile in recognition at Gray’s self-portrait of a man who, years after failing (in his own neurotic view) to prevent the suicide of a loved one, volunteers to work the distress—phone lines on Christmas Day, expiating his guilt in some poignant and unconscious hope that he can redeem his own loss by saving someone else. Gray is ultimately wise enough to understand that it doesn’t quite work that way.
I also found specialized literature on suicide and bereavement among survivors helpful as I tried to come to terms with the event in my own life. (See the end of this book for a list of suggested reading.) But it disturbed me, as I read, that most people likely to read or even to be aware of these works would be those who had a personal or professional reason to do so. Others without such a close connection to suicide gain their impressions and understanding of the subject mainly from media coverage that is often distorted by clichés, misconceptions, and simplistic analyses that do not begin to encompass the complexities of each instance of suicide. Leftover fears stemming from old-style religious attitudes, and deeply rooted urges to stigmatize and silence in some families and communities, combine to fuel a collective ignorance that actually endangers our health.
I became aware that my own obsession with the subject—my burning need to know, in intricate and complete detail, why this suicide had happened—represented a common grief reaction among people who have survived a traumatic loss, and in particular, a suicide. I suppose I eventually rationalized, through some deep-seated Presbyterian impulse, that if I must have an obsession, I would at least be putting it to good use in writing a book, transforming chaos into reason and purpose. I wrestled with the unavoidable: To get beyond such a devastating experience paradoxically I had to immerse myself in it; to find a new reason for hope and optimism in my life, I had to steel myself, stand up, and stare down this monstrous thing called suicide. In a culture that doesn’t want to understand it, but likes to titillate itself with little media samplings and fictitious or cinematic smatterings of it, I would be exposed to it anyway, whether I liked it or not. Despite setbacks and dark times I would not have thought I had the strength to get through, what began as a typical mourner’s quest to understand why people kill themselves eventually became an exploration of why I, and countless others, do not.
This would be a good place to dispel an unfortunate and limiting notion: that to think, talk, or write about suicide is inherently depressing and therefore best avoided. When some suggested that I must be crazy to willingly expose myself to the world of suicide in researching and writing such a book, they seemed to suggest that it would be healthier to bury the grief (I tried, unsuccessfully), scurry away from all mention of this tragic reality, and skip off into the sunset without looking back.
It’s that cut-and-run approach I now find more depressing. It leads nowhere honest, cannot enhance understanding, or allow forgiveness and resolution. The attitude plays into an inadequate and well-entrenched style of coping and grieving. Those in the growing field of bereavement counselling and support are only beginning to effectively dismantle the attitude that says the best way to deal with a painful experience is to erase it from your mind as quickly as possible, as though it had never occurred at all, as though you should reject the task of mourning altogether. Anyone dealing with trauma faces the temptation of going this route. It sometimes happens without the afflicted individual even recognizing it: Delayed grief over a major loss is fairly common. Certainly, there are enough social forces at large that would have us smile though our hearts are breaking, putting on a show for the benefit of others, long before grief is truly resolved—a process that can take years. Yet facing the enormity of our losses fully and openly, and never failing to appreciate them, means we are in fact less likely to get stuck in our grief, and more likely to integrate it into our lives, avoiding either extreme of denial or obsession. Only in acknowledging the presence of loss do we gain control over the reality of tragic absence.
With this book, I hope to contribute to a larger discussion and understanding of suicide and the mourning that it necessitates, one that includes not only professionals and survivors, but also people who are likely to experience it at least indirectly—for suicide, after all, is as old and as widespread as humanity itself. References to it and expressions of despair go back to the beginnings of history; one of the classic texts of our own century is Albert Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus, in which the philosopher explores the age-old question “To be, or not to be?” judging it the question that every seeker of truth must ask in order to start pushing against the meaning of life. Camus concludes that while life is essentially absurd, the moral person chooses to live it anyway, and rejects suicide as a rational or meaningful response to life’s cosmic absurdity.
While the vast majority of human souls do choose to live, many will contemplate suicide at some point, whether as part of some fundamental philosophical questioning, or out of a more deeply felt sense of personal anguish. Even Freud expressed suicidal feelings as a young man, in a distraught letter to his wife-to-be during their courtship, when he suggested that he would kill himself if she rejected him. The conditions, circumstances, and triggers for suicide and suicidal feelings may be ever in flux across times and cultures, but the urge toward self-destruction, and its attendant feelings of despair, are timeless and universal.
There are many fascinating facts about suicide at the disposal of anyone who wants to look at them, and for a time I did, looking for connections and explanations. I learned many things: That the highest suicide rate in the world is in Siberia, which recently edged out Hungary, the longstanding holder of that dubious accolade. The lowest rate is in Greece; no one seems to know why, though speculation is entertaining. The only place in the world where women kill themselves in greater numbers than men is China. Everywhere else, roughly two-thirds of suicides are men; firearms are the most common means they employ. Women attempt suicide more often than men, but succeed less frequently because they tend to opt for less lethal means, such as pills.
Right now, in Canada, the highest rates of suicide are found among the country’s most marginalized population, the aboriginal community. In fact, in 1996, statistics showed that aboriginal men in Canada had the highest suicide rate of any demographically defined group in the world. Coincidence? I think not. It doesn’t require a genius, let alone a psychiatrist, to realize that a problem of this magnitude, with such deep historical and cultural roots, will not be solved solely by regulating the flow of the chemical serotonin through individually treated brains. To imagine so is an affront to the humanity of many suffering souls: “Let them take Prozac” is not an adequate response to this scale of tragedy.
Antidepressants may be a useful tool in a person’s fighting arsenal against depression, and the suicidal feelings that can attend it, but they cannot vanquish such feelings altogether. Daniel had been taking such medications faithfully for years at the time of his death. Despite the advent of these drugs and public prevention and education programs, suicide rates are not going down, and in some countries and communities, they are even going up. Given global suicide statistics showing that roughly 2,000 people kill themselves every day, not many of us will go through our lives without being exposed in some way to at least one such death.
Those who deal with people traumatized by suicide are also beginning to acknowledge that you don’t have to be closely related to the deceased to experience feelings of confusion and loss. It’s less unusual now for a variety of people beyond family and friends to seek counselling after witnessing or being in some proximity to a suicide: the colleagues of the business executive who hangs himself in his office; the taxi driver who drives a passenger to a requested spot, then watches in horror as the man leaves the cab and shoots himself in the head; the random passerby who happens upon someone jumping to her death from a high bridge; the person driving beneath whose car narrowly misses the falling body; the school janitor who finds the boy hanging in a dark supply room; the credit counsellor who in the course of a seven-year practice has twelve clients commit suicide and many others attempt it. All true stories.
As I struggled through my own grief, reflected, read, witnessed, I became more acutely aware that as a society, we often give lip service to the notion that human life is precious, yet everywhere and every day, new evidence arises that we don’t really value it as highly as we claim. “We live in a culture that encourages us not to take our own suffering seriously,” writes the wise Alice Miller in her groundbreaking book The Drama of the Gifted Child. The taboo around suicide in particular still exerts its force. Ironically, that is perhaps why I had no trouble finding people willing to share their own experiences with me; it was as though many had had little opportunity to discuss the event and their feelings surrounding it. Mostly, it was through word of mouth that I met the people I interviewed: friends of friends, colleagues, someone who knew someone who. The more I heard their stories, the more I was convinced that such profound experiences should not remain invisible.
It was astonishing, and very moving, to observe and be on the receiving end of this brimming need to talk. Strangers revealed to me the most extraordinary and painful things: families that had endured multiple suicides; grief unexperienced for years, bursting out with great force when least expected; years of lies and silence over deaths never acknowledged as suicides. It would be tough, and a disservice, to generalize about the deceased people who haunted these heartfelt conversations, except in one sense: All emerged as damaged, in one way or another, as people who had for some reason—many reasons—not developed, or had lost for a crucial time the skills to cope with adversity, or just the challenges of everyday existence.
Without people coming forward and telling their stories, it would have been difficult for me to make the necessary connections, and for all of us to build the knowledge required to help prevent future tragedies. Only now are the roots of what is termed “suicidality” becoming more widely understood; only now is understanding the experience of surviving suicide recognized as a crucial part of understanding the nature of suicide itself.
In the initial chapters of this book, I describe how it was for me in the first moments, days, and months after discovering Daniel had killed himself I do this because often when suicide is depicted, we see and experience only the shock of the suicidal moment, a little hit of horror, and then the curtain falls and we hustle along, preferring not to see what happens next. Perhaps if we lingered awhile and witnessed the effects of these suicides on the people who must now live with the aftershocks—those who, statistically, are themselves at higher risk for suicide after having experienced one—we would place more value on prevention and be more serious about coming to terms with such problems as undiagnosed or poorly treated mental illness, addictions of every kind, family dysfunction, the emotional and physical abuse of children, economic and social dislocation, and the wide proliferation of guns.
We need to enhance our overall cultural literacy in all matters regarding the damaged souls society can’t seem to stop producing, and the ways in which it is made easier for them to solve their problems through self-imposed death. After thirty years of serious research in the field now known as “suicidology,” much knowledge does exist about what causes, and what could prevent, suicide. But more people need to know of it, and to know the importance of knowing it. Like most Canadians, I was totally unaware that our country boasts the largest archive of literature about suicide in the world, the Suicide Information and Education Centre in Calgary, Alberta, until I began work on this book.
In the course of my own recovery and research, I became a volunteer counsellor to other survivors, read extensively, saved clippings, noted my own reactions to various suicides, attended conferences, met with inmates at the Drumheller Institution in Alberta, the first group to run a wholly inmate-directed suicide-prevention program in Canada. I also visited a crisis-intervention worker on a reserve with one of the highest suicide rates in the country, spoke with a rabbi in a midtown Toronto synagogue, and attended a Blackfoot sweat ceremony in the foothills of the Rockies southwest of Calgary. I interviewed the parents of three teenage boys who had killed themselves in police custody. During a conference of the American Association of Suicidology, in Memphis, Tennessee, I toured Graceland with a vanload of shrinks, psychologists, and social workers. In Toronto, I attended a weird lecture event featuring two journalists and the father of Courtney Love, all of whom believe Kurt Cobain was murdered. I visited the office of the Samaritans in London, England, the people who invented telephone distress counselling. In August 1997, I attended a funeral held by the daughter of a man who never got one after he committed suicide in 1956. I cruised the Net, regrettably and unwittingly witnessing a suicide in progress.
I seemed compelled to cover the waterfront, to ensure that suicide would never sneak up on me again, or that if it ever tried to, I would be better prepared. I made wonderful new friendships and became reacquainted with parts of myself that I had shut down long ago. I guess it’s called playing the hand you are dealt. I would have infinitely preferred another, but as this was the one I got, I tried to enrich, rather than squander, the time I had to spend with it. Ignorance, I realized, is not bliss—it’s only ignorance. I would far rather seek to know, even though that is at times painful.
Suicide may be as old as humanity, but so is storytelling, its role in restoring balance to a disrupted life long intuitively understood. “Tell the story. Bear witness. That’s part of the healing,” native elder Bea Shawanda of Sault Ste. Marie urged her audience in a powerfully eloquent speech delivered at a conference of the Canadian Association for Suicide Prevention in Toronto in 1996. In telling these painful stories, we pierce through individual isolation and acknowledge the people we loved and lost and continue to honour in our lives. In doing so, we strengthen ourselves and further our capacity to love, even when we have been massively wounded. As philosopher Sam Keen writes in his recent book, To Love and Be Loved:
The vigil that love keeps in the perennial darkness of human history does not give a vision of triumph or a promise of perfection. The great clarity it offers is the certain knowledge that we are sundered, dismembered, alienated from the totality to which we belong (“sinners,” in old religious language)—and the hope … that what has been dismembered can be remembered…. To love … is to wager that communion rather than isolation is the ultimate fact that governs human destiny….
The state of grief, especially after a traumatic loss such as suicide, has often been described metaphorically. I have seen it referred to as a “dark country” or a “private wilderness.” After all my wandering, I found it to be a dark country in which there was eventually some light; a private wilderness that I stumbled through to a place of communion and remembering—a place as safe, and yet no doubt as precarious, as the place I fleetingly found sitting peacefully side by side with Daniel, one gentle evening a long time ago. I can live with that. I had faith then, a faith now restored, in the possibilities of life and love. I hope that in sharing this story, I can add to the dark country’s light, help clear a path through the private wilderness for another weary traveller. I hope.
That is why I continue to live, and to write.
* The term now commonly used to describe those who have lost loved ones to suicide, though technically, it could apply to those who have survived suicide attempts. Unless specifically noted, I will from here on use the term in reference to the former group.