The Gift of Grief

Miscarriage Muffins

One of the best explanations of the grieving process I've ever heard is that each time we experience grief, we dip into our grief reservoir, and that each time we dip into the grief reservoir, we dip back into all of our past grief. I happen to know that in my reservoir live tenderness, vulnerability, feelings of uncertainty, and a habitual fear of change. When I dip down into my reservoir, I often come back to the surface surprised, gasping for air.

Some months ago I dipped into my grief reservoir. It was the five-year anniversary of my ex, Bryce's, suicide. I knew a thing or two about anniversaries from the previous four years, but I had made the assumption that five years had been enough time for me to get through this particular anniversary without falling apart. Surprise. When I dipped into my reservoir and watched the emotions surface, it occurred to me that this was a pretty significant anniversary and added to it was a cup of awareness, a quart of sadness, and a half cup of growth. So much had transpired and healed in my life since Bryce’s suicide that I assumed the event had just turned into a sad memory from my past. But it hadn’t. It had become the most significant event that had integrated into my life, so much so that it had directed me onto an entirely different path.

After Bryce's suicide, I started 12-Step recovery in Al-Anon and investigated a family tree weighing heavy with the fruits of addiction. I attended suicide conferences to research PTSD on suicide survivors and completed suicide support group training to help others who had been struck by the same trauma. I wrote multiple articles on grief and continued to help others through their own grief, particularly those struggling with a loved one’s suicide or those who had attempted suicide themselves. And I gratefully started to serve my community by doing suicide prevention with teens when I found out that Bryce's suicidal thoughts started at the same age. But most poignantly, I used my grief and all of its gifts to train to sit at the bedside of those dying through Zen Hospice Project. Looking back on this list of new commitments, life was both rich and full. It also offered me more meaning ever since the suicide had occurred; yet somehow I still found myself grieving five years to the day.

What I didn't realize on that day was that my grief was laden with new life. Two days later I learned that I was pregnant. I had never been pregnant before and it was a miracle to me that at the age of 38 I was able to become pregnant so quickly. My husband and I were happily whisked into a new take on our future just days after I felt myself drowning in my grief reservoir. So here they were again—happiness and suffering—all in a week’s work, just as life likes to do it - whip it up and bake it.

This recent news was also sprinkled with curiosity, a dash of anxiety, and a debilitating bout of constant morning sickness. I was miserable. I was depressed. I was excited and I was scared. But wasn’t I also supposed to be enjoying this little life growing inside of me? Surprise. I threw up everyday. I could barely leave the house in fear of puking in public. I had to trade in my healthy diet of leafy greens and vegetarian dishes for turkey sandwiches, chicken tortilla soup, banana-vanilla ice cream milkshakes, and peanut butter & jelly sandwiches each night before bed. Saltines and ginger ale became my staple bedside snack. This growing life inside me was a bitch.

Nine weeks into my pregnancy, I went in for my first ultrasound and came out with an empty amniotic sac. The egg had attached, my body had flooded itself with pregnancy hormones, but the baby had never grown into much of anything. It was merely a yolk. Two nights before that ultrasound, and a day free from puking, I had just noticed my tummy poking out above my pants. And I smiled with joy while making my husband photograph my baby bump from the side.

After opting for a D&C five days after that photo session, I lay on my aunt’s living room couch. My aunt comforted me with warm tea and cookies and sent me home after many hugs and tears with a bag of Meyer lemons. So what if my uterus had only produced a blighted ovum? Life—once again—was handing me lemons. 

I went home and searched recipes for something to bake my heart out that would take a bag of lemons off my hands. I shared the miscarriage news with my new neighbor who shared her miscarriage story with me over dinner. She told me to take my time—reminding me that sometimes the healing takes longer than we think—and that for her it took a full year. I listened as she opened her heart and then decided to spend the next two days alone baking. During those two days I learned something: that two batches of muffins are much better than one. And because my new neighbor had just switched over to a gluten-free diet, I made her a special batch, then I swaddled them in an old sarong and placed them at her door.

In the evening she sent me a text. “Very yummy and not too sweet,” she thumbed. “Slightly bitter, like the experience. ;-)”

That's how I came to dip into my grief reservoir to remember that grief bakes slowly over time. I recalled that women have grace to share from their experiences. And that when life gives you lemons, make miscarriage muffins, and bake them as fast as you can.

Miscarriage Muffins

Total time: 40 minutes
Servings: Makes 18 muffins

2 cups flour (substitute with gluten-free flour for gluten-free friends)
1 cup plus 2 tablespoons sugar, divided
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
3 Meyer lemons, divided
2 eggs
1 cup milk
1/2 cup butter, melted
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

1. Heat the oven to 400 degrees. Combine the flour, 1 cup sugar, the baking soda and salt in a large mixing bowl. Set aside.

2. Cut two lemons into 1-inch pieces. Put them in a blender and pulse until the lemon is finely chopped. In a small bowl, lightly beat the eggs. Add the milk, butter and chopped lemon. Stir.

3. Make a well in the center of the dry ingredients and pour in the lemon mixture. Stir just until all ingredients are moistened.

4. Spoon the batter into well-buttered cups of muffin pans, filling each half full.

5. Combine the remaining 2 tablespoons sugar and the cinnamon. Sprinkle about one-fourth teaspoon over each muffin. Cut the remaining lemon into 9 paper-thin slices; cut each slice in half. Top each muffin with half a slice of lemon.

6. Bake about 20 minutes, until golden brown. Run a small spatula or knife around each of the muffins to loosen, remove from the pan and cool on a wire rack. Serve warm.

Gratefully stolen from The LA Times Food section.

Litquake, NHK Japan News, & Me

Each year in October, my blessed role on the Litquake Executive Commitee arrives with the chilling winds. During our culminating event, the Lit Crawl, I curate a little reading series in the beautifully muraled Clarion Alley here in the Mission District of San Francisco. Muralists grace the walls expressing their hearts and minds and I bring writers and authors into the Alley to fill the space between. We set up a precarious stage made of four milk crates bolted to a wooden pallet, bring in a professional sound system and lights, and watch neighbors climb onto their roofs to sip beer as the city communes for the written words of their comrades. It's a magical evening. I feel moved that I came up with the idea four years ago, and my heart swells that San Francisco has come to enjoy it just as much.

This year a news team from NHK Japan decided to cover the Lit Crawl. They also decided that they alley was a cool place to shoot some B-roll. What I didn't learn until after the festival was that they wanted to use my story-how I came into Litquake and why I read in the alley-as the second half of their coverage. So here it is, the finished piece and all of its literary glory. The second half that covers my story and Clarion Alley comes in at the 6:00 mark, but the whole piece gives a solid glimpse into our beloved week of literary love. Beneath that, I have also included a longer mini-documentary that my good KiwiAussie friend, Adam, shot as his gift to our cause.

 

 

Lit Crawl - Litquake 2011 Mini Doco by Adam Griffiths

 

 

Hummingbird as Gift

 

Yesterday I finally started my writing group here in my beautiful home. It's been a long time coming. I was in a writing group back in '03-'05 and I have missed it something awful. There is something magical about a writing group, as if ideas flow through the group into the collective pens and onto each person's page. Like a channeling of sorts <insert new age California fruits 'n nuts hippy quip here>.

It was unseasonably warm yesterday for January. We should have rain by now. That worries me, but on the flip-side, it's days like those that have kept me warm here for 16 years and why I can't leave. One of among many other Cali delights. So I had the balcony door wide open to highlight the sprawling sunlit view of the giant roach clip in the west. 

I was just about to share my live writing from the prompt I had given our group... "The last time I kissed him/her..." as I had once again taken a stab at a scene I've been writing over and over for five years now about the last time I saw my ex, Bryce, alive before his suicide. It's a painfully sweet scene. More painful than sweet. Quite telling of my muse for this next book: the degradation of a renaissance man.

Just as I was about to read, something flew through the open balcony door. A bird? A big bee? So fast, what is that?

A hummingbird.

He was a big one. With a pointy beak and wings that could cut a fly in two. I thought and said, "Wow. It must be tiring flopping one's wings like that. I hope the little guy rests?"

"This is auspicious," Jenny from Denmark said.

We were all nervous, yet calm. I could tell that while we each sit with dying people every week, we couldn't stand the idea of that little hummingbird dying in my living room. Not as we were in the midst of writing about death, loss, spirituality, and meaning. Now really, what a cruel joke that would be?

Ben, the guy and tallest of our group, said, "I think I'll move over here so he doesn't see me as an imposing obstacle."

I couldn't look at first and kept turning away when he'd flop into the high window...his wings hitting the glass...over...and over...again, thinking it was an exit to the outside world.

Then Ben had a thought. "Can those high windows open?" he said.

I kept wishing we had a butterfly net. How DOES one safely catch a hummingbird?

We have a long pole that opens those high windows, so Ben fetched it.

And just as I was about to hand off the responsibility to "the man of the group" (something we Daddy-Girls tend to default to in stressful moments when men are around), I pulled up all the calm from all the meditation I've done, and the 15 minutes we had just done together before we started writing, stood on a step ladder, and slowly raised the pole toward the high window and the bird, and I effortlessly opened the window. 

The hummingbird landed on the ledge as if happy to rest for a bit. In no rush to leave.

"Go on, guy. Fly away. Move left. There now. Through the window. Freedom is near," were just some of the phrases whispered by the three meditating writers.

And off he flew, eventually, through the crack on the underside of the window.

We all breathed a collective sigh of relief.

This morning I looked up the significance of hummingbirds and this was my favorite find of the lot:

"...The first time is more of an awakening, the second is the opportunity to open your heart and accept the healing. The bird came not just to your house, but inside. You faced with experience with a gentle approach in catching and releasing the bird without harming it. This reflects your own personal healing journey, to face your own experiences with grace. You remind me of my own experience in my teen years when I rescued many a hummingbird as they frantically tried to escape through the boathouse windows, catching them in a fishing net and carrying them outside. This hummingbird was willing to risk its own precious life to help you in your journey, but there was no other option, we do what we must do without thought of our own wellbeing. The first hummingbird came to awaken and heal you so you could drive home safely. The second came to give you opportunity to give back. ..."

 

Collaborative Grieving: Many Voices Building Hope in The Spoken Coast Project

One of the gifts that has come out of my grief is the concept I've called collaborative grieving. I think of collaborative grieving as the opposite of isolation in our grief process. While the unspoken message in our society is that grief is something to process in private, outside of work hours, and as quickly as possible to return to someone's version of normal, I chose the opposite. I grieved out loud, in public, in workshops, with strangers, and now I feel free of my suffering because I had to do so.

In the rest of the world, collaborative grieving is ingrained in ritual and in culture. When I traveled alone through Asia for two years in 2000, I discovered grief was a part of daily life. There grief is not something to fear, or quieted to exist merely in life's shadows. Death and grief happen in community - and it is shared and processed out in the open among its members. In Indonesia on the island of Bali, processing death even has its own month - August - where villagers have their teeth filed, the dead body wrapped in a white sheet is placed on an altar to be carried by its community, and the body burns while its ashes float over loved ones into the tropical air. When I stumbled on this ritual during the month my parents visited me on the road, my father became uncomfortable - frustrated even - while I had to remind myself not to stick out my tongue, as if catching flakes of snow. I like to think that moment was my personal foreshadowing, as to how I might arrive at my personal place of comfort with death.

But being in Asia didn't bring me to collaborative grieving, or to sit on my comfortable cushion with death. It just gave me a glimpse into the concept. I had to struggle and grieve myself - and bring what I was experiencing after my boyfriend's suicide into my community - in order to find solace.

Insert The Spoken Coast Project.

I met Marissa Krupa, the creator of The Spoken Coast Project, shortly after Bryce's suicide. She most likely knew me as the girl in a heap of emotions who cried out my sorrow to strangers. Fortunately, I was able to return that gift of listening when she learned that her mother, and her brother, were both diagnosed with late stage cancers. Marissa went through her own grieving process - and continues to do so - through her project. Her brother, Mickey, unfortunately died early this year. But the way her community failed her in her grieving process prompted Marissa to look at her own life, and to make the necessary changes in order to honor Mickey's life as well as her own. She was laid off from her job, but she chose to leave the corporate sector that abandoned her to properly grieve her brother and find her own hope. How is she doing that? By climbing every peak Mickey climbed - from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego. She is feeling all of her feelings, as well as interviewing people about their own grieving process between each climb.

Marissa interviewed me this summer, and what arose from the ashes in my interview - and in all of the people she has interviewed in her path - was this trailer to introduce her project. It's about a fifteen minute film. And it's about death. But most importantly, it's about how we think we are grieving as individuals, but it's our collaborative grieving that creates the healing we have worked so hard to live with today. Please watch and enjoy. And if you are so inspired, please donate some dollars or some airline miles to her project so that Marissa can continue this very important work. She needs it. I needed it. America certainly needs it. And I imagine - that one day - you will need it too.

 

The Real Prescription for Healing Your Loss

How in the hell do I survive my loved one's suicide?

I'm often emailed and asked this question by friends, friends of friends, and just last week, from a woman in South America who lost her boyfriend and found my story in The Courage Companion: How to Live Life With True Power. Near and far, we are all reaching out for someone to help us navigate this traumatic loss.

I decided that the research, grief work, and learnings from my boyfriend's suicide five years ago is necessary for me to share with all of you. Not only because doing this all cleaned my slate to start anew, but because my grief allowed me to seek out diverse methods for healing fully in all areas of my life, and to come up with a real prescription for what I believe might just work for many of us left in the wake of suicide. To be honest, there is also a selfish incentive to sharing what I've learned with other survivors. Each time I share what I've learned, I get to watch myself heal and grow even further. It allows me to chart my progress and then take what I've learned to support others along this trecherous path.

Before I launch into what a magazine would probably title, Top Eight Ways to Heal Your Loved One's Suicide, I want to say that I am so sorry for your loss. I truly mean that. If you are here, this may be the first time that one person can say to you, "I know exactly how you feel," and really mean it. It is the first time in my life when I've felt 100% aligned with others (survivors, that is) and the first time in my life when I've felt I truly belonged (even when I didn't want to). No one should have to experience the level of guilt, shame, anger, confusion, and trauma that comes with the messy package that is suicide. But what I have learned in just five years is that if you take the time to process your grief fully, go into the trauma instead of treating it as just another aversion, and care for your heart as if it's the sweetest guest in your house, then the possibility to grow and expand and become more compassionate in this lifetime is more available to you.

What I've learned for myself after Bryce's suicide is that suicide is incrementally painful for three reasons:

1) it is shocking and often unexpected, even if we happen to later see that the signs were possibly there;

2) often our peers don't have the tools to talk about it with us because our society doesn't;

3) it's a stigma death, one that's unnecessarily loaded with shame and guilt in our world culture.

I have had to work very hard to move through all of the above. But the only way out is through, and through has now become a purpose in my life, to help others navigate suicide as I did. This way, we can rid ourselves of the shame and the stigma, and then educate ourselves so that no one has to suffer beyond the loved one we lost who suffered too much already. We may only have one life, so let's save ourselves while we're living it.

Here is my prescription for how to survive after a loved one's suicide:

1) Join a Suicide Support Group - it doesn't matter how far or close you were to the person who took their life, suicide has a profound ripple effect. Suicide Support Groups (which I trained to lead and will begin next year) can be found through AFSP (American Foundation for Suicide Prevention) here and through the American Association on Suicidology here. They both have incredible resource pages, as well. I did my suicide support group with San Francisco Suicide Prevention, and they list their groups here. Being in a suicide support group or grief group gives you a community of people who are going what you are going through, so they understand your pain and they are the people you can talk to about all that you are feeling. They are the only people I can go to to talk about suicide, fully, even today. They are the only ones I feel comfortable sharing the intimate details of my loss, of the trauma, of the secrets that died in the shame. In fact, I had brunch with four people from my suicide group last month and it continues to help process our grief today. A suicide support group is grounding, it is safe, and it is necessary. Studies prove this fact.

2) Process your grief fully - I also did a grief group that had a meditation focus because the eight week suicide support group had not been enough. I feel grateful that I had seven years of meditation practice under my belt when Bryce took his life. And as I was comfortable with the topic of death from my meditation practice, the Zen Center where I live in San Francisco offered exactly what I needed. The Zen Hospice Project —where I now serve as a volunteer caregiver one day a week—offers grief groups and drop-in groups. They also provide this incredible packet with some helpful quotes and a reading list on grief. 

I learned by watching others that when we don't fully process our grief, it shows up in our bodies, in our minds, in how we relate to our loved ones, and to others in our current day-to-day life. Help yourself by giving yourself the time to process the grief, no matter how long it takes. Many people will expect it *should* take you less time than it actually does. I have learned that often that is because they may be uncomfortable with their own ideas around death, or because your grief is too much for them. Let that stay with them, you have enough to deal with at this time.

During my loss, I had to teach myself and educate my peers by pulling back, hunkering down, saying no to outings, and to the needs of others upon me. Saying "No" taught me my limitations during my grief, and by doing so, I magically taught them that grief is personal and grief takes time. When I was soft with myself, others were softer towards me. It also taught my friends and family how to be with me during the grief years.

3) After you've helped yourself, help others - Early on in my meditation practice I realized that doing service always deepened my compassion. But I have found this to be particularly true with suicide prevention. This came much later down the road, after a few years, when I had worked through my grief quite a bit. How I did that is the following: 

-Overnight Walk & Community Walks with AFSP - these are healing opportunities to gather with other survivors and honor your loved one.

-I joined the Northern California AFSP Board of Trustees until I realized that being a Board member wasn't the best place for me. I'm much prefer "being in the field" if you will, by connecting to fellow suicide survivors one-on-one.

-AFSP's Suicide Support Group Facilitator Training - trains survivors to lead a suicide support group. I am interested in possibly focusing on those who have lost their partners. I took the training in May of this year and will begin my support group next year.

-Volunteering as an adult facilitator with Challenge Day - I was drawn to this work when I saw it on Oprah just after Bryce's suicide. As a volunteer adult facilitator, I join the organization when they go into middle schools and high schools and teach teens how to break down the barriers, the bullying, and talk to us about anything. Often they talk to us about their pain, their cutting, and their suicidal thoughts. For teens, these actions are often an extension of what is going on at home, on top of the pressure & bullying they now have in schools. It allowed me to learn how to be with teens and heal what Bryce first experienced as a teen himself.

4) Therapy and 12-Step family groups - I realized after my two grief groups (the suicide support group and the Zen Center's grief group), that wasn't enough. I still needed to talk out the trauma and the pain. I asked for recommendations in the field and sought out a suicidologist. The therapist I found taught suicidology to graduate students and had worked with survivors for years. She knew exactly the level of pain I had suffered and was a wealth of information. This one-on-one relationship was invaluable. When I finished my time with her (she had come out of retirement to work with me), I leaned heavily on Al-Anon, a 12-Step program for family members of alcoholics. People often assume that Bryce suffered from addiction when I am in "the rooms" (a term they use in 12-step regarding meetings), but this was not the case. But what I did learn, through the opportunity of tracing the lineage of my desire to be with him while at a 12-Step based rehab treatment facility for a family member the summer after Bryce died, was that I had done enough of my life on my own. Now I needed to learn to live my life again, but this time with the support of others.

5) Grief workshops - One day I mistyped my blog address and magically landed on Nancee Sobonya's website for her documentary, The Gifts of Grief. Nancee and I both came to the conclusion that there are gifts in grief if we allow ourselves to process our grief in order to find them. I highly recommend the film and her subsequent workshops.

6) Create a ritual - Ritual around death is severely lacking in our culture. I feel fortunate enough to live in the Mission district of San Francisco where the Latin culture celebrates Dia de Los Muertos. Bryce's birthday is November 1st, and every year on his birthday or the day after Dia de Los Muertos arrives in my neighborhood. I join other mourners and walk the city by candlelight in a procession that leads us to altars that people in the community have created to honor their loved ones they have lost. It is an incredibly healing night for me. If you don't have access to such celebrations, lighting a candle to honor your loved one on their birthday-or doing something kind for yourself to honor your loved one on their death day-is incredibly healing. This year on the anniversary of Bryce's suicide, I took a bit of his ashes out to the beach and sprinkled him out there. How I received his ashes four years ago was a surreal experience, but I have vowed that since Bryce and I loved to travel the world together, I will take a little bit of his ashes whenever I go to places where he never went. Next stop: Machu Picchu this September. 

7) Trim the Fat - One thing I learned very early on was who I could and could not spend time with after the suicide. Some of my friends were very angry at what Bryce "did to me" and voiced their opinions, sometimes too honestly. Other friends had an ingrained sense in them to just listen, as much as possible, whevever I needed it. Guess which friends I ended up spending more time with after the suicide? Bingo. There are some friends that require more than we have to give on any given day. These were the friends that I knew I couldn't spend much time with, if only because all of my extra energy (of which I had little) was spent tending to my grief. I made sure to let people know how I was feeling at all times and made no promises that I couldn't keep.

8) Read, read, and then read some more - Some of my best understanding as to why people die by suicide was by reading books on those who have researched the topic, and by those who have survived a loss themselves. Below are the most helpful books I read on grief, death, & suicide. And there is a whole stack on my bed stand that I have the rest of my life to read. I often feel that homicide and suicide are so similar because they are the most unexpected ways to die, leaving survivors behind to pick up their pieces.

Books on death: 

The Year of Magical Thinking - Joan Didion is an articulate writer and this won the National Book Award. It's a stunning portrait into losing your partner and what you have to face. 

Angel Catcher: A Journal of Loss and Remembrance - this journal written by a mother-daughter team who lost their son doing aid work for the UN in Africa is perfectly scripted to help you journal your loss and remember the details your loved one left behind for you. Fill it out so you don't forget. Read it later to chart your progress.

Tear Soup - this book is simple, kind, and it's perfect for kids. Or it's perfect for you when the heavy reading is just too much. I wrote an article for a magazine where I was staff writer entitled, "Serve Them Tear Soup, Kids Can Handle It", about how I discovered this sweet book and how deep inside me I somehow just knew how to talk to kids about suicide and death. Keep it simple. Kids do.

Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death - this was helpful regarding the trauma we face as humans when looking death squarely in the face. 

On Death & Dying - the bible on death by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

Half a Life - Darin Strauss' memoir about a tragic accident describes perfectly what life can be like while living it with unanswerable questions.

Books specifically on suicide:

Touched by Suicide: Hope and Healing After Loss

and

No Time To Say Goodbye: Surviving the Suicide of a Loved One - Carla Fine does a *fine* job navigating the intricacies of losing your partner to suicide.

Why People Die By Suicide - a son who's father killed himself, so he became a suicidologist and wrote the best book that explained suicide in concrete terms for me.

Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide 

and

An Unquiet Mind both by Kay Redfield Jamison - she stuggles with depression herself, is on staff at Johns Hopkins Medical School, and is also on the AFSP Board in NYC. She knows her subject matter deeply and lives with it everyday.

I Don't Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression - this book put the pieces together for me regarding men and suicide and insight to untreated early childhood trauma and how it can lead to depression later in life.

Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness by William Styron - he was a master in his time to write about his depression.

Go into your grief,
for there your soul will grow.
                                            - Carl Jung

 

The Courage to Prevent

One of the things you try to do as a writer while pounding away solo at the keyboard for days (or waking up grateful for jet lag that book themes, stories, and ideas are racing through your head), is get yourself some press. I'm lucky to have lived in San Francisco long enough to make nicey-nice with fellow writers, that once in awhile, press happens. As I wrote a few months back, a fellow Litquake committee member published her recent book, The Courage Companion: How to Live Life with True Power. which profiled my story of courage as one of the chapters. Insert The Voice of America, which broadcasts to 125 million people around the world and decided to do a story on the book and interview three of its contributors. I was happily one of them. You can read the story while listening to its broadcast on The Voice of America website here. And if you're so inspired, leave a comment on my blog about your own act of courage, comments are what I look forward to after sharing a story or two.

Discovering Choices in Wake of Tragedy

In memoriam for our friend, LSD, listen here to Through The Dark, by KT Tunstall

(photo from left to right, K, LSD, & me, circa 1980-something)

I received an email late Wednesday night from my mother. She didn't add to her own note, just "Sad News" in the subject line with a forwarded email from her friend from the town near Chicago where we had lived. Halfway down the forwarded email, my mother's friend wrote that my high school friend, LSD, had accidently overdosed at his parents' home and died. My mother's friend wrote,

"I think the last time I saw him was about 20 years ago. He was standing on the corner of Illinois Road and Bank Lane, right near your apartment, talking with Amanda. I remember how gorgeous he was and what a worry to all the mothers."  

After the sadness hit, and grief's familiar relatives made their way through my body (sluggishness & a headache from a mind that begins to drown in thoughts & memories), I realized that when I hear of a death close to me now, it bears double the weight because of Bryce, my former partner's, suicide. The visual that comes to mind is when teenage kids (the same age when LSD above and I were friends) run and do a "pile up" on one other kid's back, and the laughing faces and flailing limbs roll all over the back of the one sitting on the ground until they all topple on top of him. This is how the grief feels when I hear of someone I once loved and their premature death. Perhaps this is how LSD felt before he died.

When I re-read the email from my mother's friend, I remember LSD during that time when we were fourteen (and he was fifteen - the first one to drive, no doubt). I remember his killer smile. Driving around in the back seat of his dad's Cadillac convertible. Then driving around the next summer in the back of his own Jeep. I remember always feeling included around him, that I could come over to his house, play in his pool, flirt with the boys, listen to Steve Miller, and joke around. But what else do I remember, as it pops up so clearly from my mother's friend's email, and I think more about now that I'm closer to age fifty (the age those mothers were during that time) than sixteen? Her words, " I remember how gorgeous he was and what a worry to all the mothers." What a worry to all the mothers, she remembers.

I remember that to.

Her words made me think how lucky I was to get out alive and mostly unscathed. Not in the sense that I was a troubled teen (though in my own quiet way I most definitely was), but that the antics that we got away with during those years makes me shudder at what I could be up against raising a child these days. In the scheme of teenage antics, was what played out back then quite minor? Mostly, yes. At 10:00 p.m. as a handful of giggling 16 year-olds falling all over 18 year-old jocks, while 16 year-old boys yanked out the screen in the kitchen faucet to smoke out. But it made me think about the same scene that replayed itself every weekend until, I wondered, it led straight to what happened to LSD three nights ago. From 1989 at 10:00 p.m. on a Saturday to a fateful Tuesday night this past week in 2010.

LSD reached out to me some months ago and emailed me to tell me how happy he was that I had found love again. He had hope in his voice in that message. I've spent this week grieving how hard it was for him to keep that hope going. The same way hope had its way of failing Bryce.

I woke up this morning and read that in lieu of flowers to LSD's family, who always welcomed us into their home as much as LSD did, donations should be made to Hazelden. I thought about the obituary that read "age 38" and "Hazelden". Then I thought about my own family. About the thousands of dollars spent on trying to help family members through their addictions. I thought about my two weeks in rehab for family week for a family member's addiction, and how it led my own family to finally recount the addictions of our elders that were still living, now sober, or not. And then I thought about all of our family members who had passed. My great grandfather who took his own life in the bathtub. Or my grandmother passed out at the bottom of my mother's childhood stairs. And how the effects of those memories trickled down...and trickled down...until my loved ones, like Bryce, took their own lives. Then I paused and thought about the Al-Anon "Promises", and how I wished that all of my elders, and Bryce, and our smiling, handsome, friendly, welcoming, LSD, could have lived long enough to discover these promises for themselves.

"...We will discover that we are worthy of loving...We will love others without losing ourselves, and will learn to accept love in return...Our sight, once clouded and confused, will clear and we will be able to perceive reality and recognize truth...Courage and fellowship will replace fear...We will be able to risk failure to develop new, hidden talents...Our lives, no matter how battered and degraded, will yield hope to share with others...We will begin to feel and will come to know the vastness of our emotions, but we will not be slaves to them...Our secrets will no longer bind us in shame...As we gain the ability to forgive ourselves, our families and the world, our choices will expand...Serenity and peace will have meaning for us as we allow our lives and the lives of those we love to flow day by day...with (God's) ease, balance, and grace...No longer terrified, we will discover we are free to delight in life's paradox, mystery, and awe...We will laugh more...Fear will be replaced by faith, and gratitude will come naturally as we realize that our (Higher Power) is doing for us what we cannot do for ourselves..."

~From Survival to Recovery, pp. 269-270.

 

Coming Out Courageous

Earlier this year, fellow Litquake committee member, author and friend, Nina Lesowitz, called me one morning. As our fundraiser extraordinaire, I thought she was calling me for that donation back to Litquake since I shared with her weeks before about the surprise inheritance I had just received two years after Bryce's suicide. Instead, she called that morning to ask me a few questions about courage to include in her new book, The Courage Companion, and how one goes about finding it after the current love in your life chooses to take his own life over your love.

Two of my favorite quotes speak to what courage is truly about, the first, by my beloved Anaïs Nin, "Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage". The other, by one wise Eleanor Roosevelt,"You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience by which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, 'I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along."

I often say to friends, family, and other survivors, that Bryce's suicide made me more aware of what now in life is truly horrific. It taught me how I need to live my life now, how I now take more risks (like the need to speak openly about suicide, rather than whisper it as a secret like many learned to do), how much further it opened my heart, and how I go further into the causes, like how was it that I got there, meaning, how did I come to be in relationship with a man who took his life? It also taught me that the best relief comes from giving back my honesty to those who are on this path just behind me. Whether it be a woman in an emotionally abusive relationship, highly codependent, who doesn't know how to shut that door calmly behind her before she slams it in frustration one last time, or the friend who keeps letting her relationships turn into the top-bottom variety, where her partner calls the shots through silence, doubt, neglect, and she obliges by letting that neglect take over her own needs. 

Bryce's suicide was hopefully my life's only horror. The one event that arrived as a necessity for me to use as my launching point to look at future horrible events and say, "Well, this just doesn't trump suicide."

This came up surprisingly on my wedding day just one month ago. Two girlfriends scurried around my hotel room asking for things to do to busy themselves. "You're so calm," they said, "Why are we so nervous?"

I laughed.

"Actually, I think I have the suicide to thank for this one," a response they were all too familiar with by now. I think any life event that is supposed to make me nervous now fails in comparison to the nervousness, shame, fear that event had over me. Nothing really stacks up. "Plus, I'm marrying the right man," I said. "I should be calm." In a way, courage came simply, but only after the arduous task of gathering tools to turn me towards the courageous.

Please join by reading Nina & Mary Beth's chapter on me (p. 135, to be exact) and the full book on courage & inspiration. Nina asked the probing questions and I gave the honest answers. There are sparks of clarity, and realizations of what could have been, but most importantly, there is solace in having learned that it took the tools I gathered since that fateful January day to get me to the place where courage carried me through so I could quietly shut the door.

 

 

A Letter To Grams With Shades of Hope

(If the video isn't playing, please click here: A Letter To Grams With Shades of Hope to view on Vimeo.)

At Lit Crawl 2008 in Clarion Alley during Litquake, San Francisco's Literary Festival.

 

Dear Grams,

It’s been five years since you died and I had an itch to write you an update, much like the one I would have given you in your pale yellow kitchen once you waved me in from the window. I’ve been theorizing about the dead for a while anyway, particularly whether or not you all look down to see what remains to terrorize the rest of us.

I envision you dressed in pink cashmere and pearls, your hair perfectly coifed, while gay men, like your best friends Ernie and Alan, flank you on either side. Did you hear their 30-year business and relationship went bankrupt? What a shame. And were you able to catch a hazy glimpse of that garish arrangement Ernie delivered the day you left us? I imagine if you had been there, you would have pursed your Lancome lips around your half-glass of bubbly, and asked Dad to turn up “Unforgettable” on the stereo. Wherever you are, I’m certain you’re still smiling, and I wanted you to know that after two years of hell, I’m finally smiling myself.

I use that bit of wisdom you wrote me on the back of a lined note card as my life’s mantra now, the one from your Christian Science reader that said, “Always do the nearest right thing.” It stuck so that we went ahead and etched it on your gravestone (next to Ernie’s arrangement, which we agreed would be best if it just went with you.)

A lifetime has happened to me since you passed. I finally turned those emails I sent during my two years in Asia into a book, became a writer with an agent, and met the man you always said I would meet. Yes, he took care of me as you had hoped he would, even supported me while I wrote that first book. Bryce was his name, and he could have graced any cover of a Patagonia catalog by kayaking a Class 5 river or skiing off a thirty-foot cliff. He grew a five o’clock shadow after one night sleeping under the Idaho stars, fixed anything that required his keen brain and two hands, and slipped a Gerber knife into his pants pocket with his change every morning. You would have loved him for completing household projects you’d assign him ten minutes after you met. I loved him because of his sensitive heart and the fact that he was a perfect 50/50 mother-father blend, because Bryce favored a brooding dark side. His pupils grew black, taking his green eyes hostage whenever he decided I was in the wrong. And while he loved to cuddle to make amends, he ended up spending more time curled up on the Thai green silk triangular cushion I brought back from Bangkok than he did spooning me. He’d sit on it at the window, for hours silent for days, until the green in the Thai silk worked its way back into his eyes and a smile might just get him standing. When the green returned, that meant his heart might soon follow, and “might” was always good enough for me.

If I knew now what I knew then, I may not have spent weeks, months, or four years trying to get him off that cushion and back into the realistic ebbs and flows of life. Or sulked whenever he got on Craigslist to search the Men Seeking Women once he hit his dark spot, which led him to question his love for me. You see, I never could understand how he couldn’t love me. I was your granddaughter for Christ’s sake and my name even meant “worthy of love.” I also would have refused my role as Bryce’s lifesaver had I known that I came from such a long line of lifesavers. Grams, you always expected me to wait for the man that would adore me, but I lay my excuse at your feet and admit here that I merely followed suit. No man ever adored a woman in my family. My male role model was a loving father who I saw for three days twice a month and the occasional Hush Puppy salesman whose move to win over my mom was to lure me into his catalog of white sandals. And even I knew at age nine that white sandals were tacky.

So at thirty, with a live-in boyfriend, I used my childish antics to survive.

Once Bryce’s moods and attitudes stopped becoming easy targets to pin my blame, I took a two-week trip to rehab this summer, and learned that I could let go of being his lifesaver if I let the love in for me for a change. But don’t worry, Grams, I didn’t just go to rehab this summer, the whole family did.

Sure, most families reunited over cattle on a dude ranch in the Rocky Mountains in order to get that Christmas card photo while wearing matching Polo shirts. The one that makes me puke and others feel envy. Well, Mom, Dad, Laura, Dave, their three kids and I decided to take the dysfunctional family vacation. We traveled deep into the heart of Texas, where the cattle herd only to become slaughtered on a platter as a Porterhouse steak and the families only reunite in order to get their shit together.

And Grams, we had five, 8-hour days to get our shit together.

But let me bring you up to speed as to what exactly brought us there.

After four years of living and loving my moody man, and then cutting the line to finally save myself, Bryce took his own life. I left two years ago this week, and two weeks later Bryce drove his father and our Volvo down a rural Idaho road at a 90 mph clip. He paralyzed his father that day, and spent the next three months bouncing from mental institution to halfway house most likely plotting his own demise until his plan worked. Later that next year, Laura’s husband, Dave, popped every ADD medication prescribed to my nephews, and whatever other pills he could scrounge from their cabinets, and lay himself on the cold cement of their laundry room floor. As I moved through my days dazed in grief, Laura tried to manage, while her family ran itself into the ground. Laura and I had stopped supporting each other, and I ignored her plea at the German bakery in Idaho that summer before when she whispered, “Amanda, get out now.” It wasn’t until we landed in the overly air-conditioned room at Shades of Hope, the best little rehab in Texas, that we realized these problems didn’t start with Laura or with me.

It took Laurie, Ms. Pat, and Ms. Tennie, the Texas therapists who kept us seated in straight back chairs, to help us weed through generations of secrets, withheld confrontations, and a box coined Pandora, which overflowed with codependency.

But Grams, you would have been proud.

On Day 1, I asked the therapists, “I just want to know where this all started?” And on Day 2, Dave, Laura’s husband, read us a letter admitting his thirty-year addiction with bulimia. Laura then read her own, explaining how she dealt with Dave’s disease by shutting down and spending herself into oblivion. On Day 3, it finally came out that Mom didn’t move to Chicago after the divorce so that we could live closer to Dad, but that she left Massachusetts due to the proverbial gun to her head, the one held by the wife of the husband that Mom was in love with. On Day 4, Dad had most of his balls back from that minor shock and happily participated in the group. He took his morning claim and our issues on the floor seriously and introduced himself saying, “Hi I’m Skip. I’m a co-dependent.” I’m certain he was the first white male Republican in Texas to do so. And finally, by Day 5, Mom stopped making jokes to cover up her pitfalls. I think it helped that she had spent the whole night before puking up her emotions (though she blamed it on the Porterhouse steak) and that I vowed to myself that I’d take care of her for the last time. You see, Grams, I found my answers in that air conditioned room, and as I took care of Mom lying on the bathroom floor. None of this started with Bryce, or with Dave, it never does. It started with Mom, and with her Mom, and with your first husband, Dad’s dad, and with his dad before that. Then it trickles down until the secrets become suicide.

It turns out Dad married Mom so that he wouldn’t have to admit to his college buddies that he didn’t think their cement hulled boat would sail them around the world, and Mom married Dad so that she could have babies that would finally bring her happiness. And I sat as a vegetarian in a catfish restaurant laughing out loud at both of them, saying, “Now those are good reasons to get married.”

It took just five days, Grams, all at Shades of Hope. There were shades of darkness and moments of light, but it took remembering your “nearest right thing,” to know that no matter what had happened in the past, there was hope to be had in my future.

My Boyfriend ’s Ashes

I met my boyfriend’s brother for coffee and walked away with my boyfriend’s ashes. As I stood waiting for my name to be called, hoping for distraction from the silence, I took a deep breath. In the last fifteen minutes, I hadn’t heard his brother once say my boyfriend’s name. You might think that made it easy for us to meet on a sunny day to talk in a crowded coffee shop, but it wasn’t. Because now that my boyfriend was gone, his brother and I had a lot less to say to one another.

I expected to talk about his suicide notes or how incredibly scary it was in those final summer months living with my boyfriend, and how I had cried myself to sleep in the second bedroom out of fear. I wanted to tell him that his parents and I had mistakenly believed the cuts on his brother’s wrists had come from a slip of his chisel. I wanted to know if he had also counted five suicide attempts from his brother’s final two-week journal entry, and how his brother could hide anything. As I sat waiting to hear my boyfriend’s name cross his brother’s lips, I wondered if his lack of questions for me meant he had known something that I hadn’t, and had known it so intimately that it would never be shared.

We put our empty mugs on the counter and drove to his house to retrieve the remaining items that I was meant to have. He asked, “What else is going on?” which had been his most probing question of the morning. Did he want to hear about any romance, or was he thinking that if I shared something then he wouldn’t have to share himself? But therapy, support groups, helpful programs, and new friends had taught me that I only had to share what was best for me. “Not much,” I said dodging a car that tried to cut me off.

He walked me through my old house, the one I had shared with him, his (and my boyfriend’s) sister, and her husband and daughter. He spoke about the new back porch that would include a handicap ramp for his father, who my boyfriend had paralyzed in a car accident just two months before taking his own life. The ramp would be removable because my boyfriend’s father wouldn’t have his oldest son’s legacy be that he had put his own father in a chair. His father knew he would move his own legs again some day, as did I, because we were both optimists, one of the very qualities that my boyfriend had envied in both of us.

We stepped into the kitchen and he handed me a rock I had given to him that I had stored in my boyfriend’s tool shed. My boyfriend had collected large rocks to build into a fireplace, a fireplace that he fantasized about with me as we lay under a tarp on sand watching moose dunk their heads into the Salmon River on our first Idaho river trip. His fantasies of the future had included me, so I spent our lazy afternoons on rock islands in the river looking for my own rock to contribute. I found a light gray rock with a solid dark gray stripe around the center, outlined on either side with two thin white stripes. An unbelievable rock that had only seen nature, but was found by a city girl. He smiled, throwing it into his handmade dory that we floated. Now I held the rock in my arms, just as I had held him that last time we were together, when we sat in spider position on the carpet facing one another. His tears soaked his neck while he questioned, “What is happening to me?” All I could muster after a year of hell was, “I don’t know,” through my own tears.

As I stood in the kitchen with the rock, I thought back to my attempts to find a container for his ashes last summer while visiting his parents. His mother had found four ceramic jars with corks to distribute a handful of my boyfriend’s ashes to his four siblings, but said that she couldn’t find a container for me. I had mistaken it as a form of silent punishment until she told me the shop where she had bought them so I could see if they had one more. I stood in the kitchen wanting to tell his brother how humorous that day had been, and how grieving sometimes did that to us, gave us laughter as a respite from our pain.

The town where my boyfriend and I had lived for the last two summers only had a handful of shops. I stood in the grocery store aisle with a strange smile, wondering who would ever go to a grocery store looking for containers for their dead loved ones. So I went next door to the shoe/outdoor wear/clothing/houseware store and crept around set tables hoping a perfect container might call me over to its shelf.

“Can I help you find something?” A blonde saleswoman asked while I tipped a container upside down to look inside.

“I’m looking for a small container with a top on it to hold something.” I figured my ambiguity might encourage her to bring options over without me having to whisper “urn” or “ashes.”

She walked me over to a fancy set of salt and pepper shakers, the kind with the glass bottoms and stainless steel tops that twisted right, exposing large enough holes for the salt to seep into boiling water or a pot of bubbling sauce.

“That’s not exactly what I’m looking for. It needs to be unbreakable, and have a top, like a cork, so whatever’s inside can’t escape.”

I wanted to be more helpful for her, until I realized that wasn’t my job. Not now, no more. My chest sunk until I smiled politely at her, “Thank you,” as I turned to leave the store. She smiled confused since she had shown me five containers that would never work. How could she know that the containers weren’t meant for dead boyfriends?

“Here, you can have my container of ashes,” his brother said, pulling me out of my daze. His mother had eventually found an empty jam jar for my ashes, but his brother was apt to keep the jar and give the other container to me. He stood at the junk drawer pulling out rubber bands and tape to wrap around his container that was now mine, the handmade piece of pottery with the cork stuck deep inside so none of his brother could ever come out. He pushed the cork in further with his thumb, wound the rubber band around the cork, and then taped over the cork four times with scotch tape.

“This is so surreal,” I said as he secured his brother’s ashes, reminding me of his brother himself.

“Oh, being here in your old house?” he said deadpan.

“No, you giving me Bryce’s ashes.” I finally said his name as if to jog his memory. “Sometimes I still can’t believe that he’s really dead. I would never have foreseen this years ago.”

“Yeah,” was all he gave in return.

I walked out to the car with the flawlessly lined rock in my arms and Bryce’s container of ashes between my fingers.

“What are you going to do with them?” he asked.

“I don’t know. I remember Bryce and I talked about flying his plane over Africa. Then he had this dream about me and a place I would build for travelers in the Serengeti, so I think having these ashes will give me more of a reason to get there someday.”

I explained to him that a part of me knew that the contents of this small container were no longer Bryce, but then another part of me felt he should go to a place where he had always wanted to go.

“But he’s just going to ride in the van with me for now,” and I smiled, climbing into my van.

I looked down at the small compartment in the console, just behind the gearshift, an ideal place for my boyfriend’s ashes in his small container. I nudged him in there securely, knowing that he would never spill out, and then I drove him home.