Today is the thirty-fifth birthday of my daughter Mary who died in 1995 by suicide at the age of seventeen. So I drove out through the Manassas National Battlefield Park which surrounds the Stonewall Memory Gardens containing my daughter’s grave. On this morning of sleet and sunshine, I thought it mattered that I be with Mary on her birthday; and I thought somehow she might know I was praying over her grave.
The Mary of 1977 was mostly on my mind this morning–her pinched red countenance bringing forth not only relief for a normal delivery but also gratitude for the unrepeatable gift I knew her to be. Poet William Blake describes the transcendence of the newborn this way, “Sweet babe, in thy face / Holy image I can trace” (William Blake, “A Cradle Song,” Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Franklin Center, Pennslyvania: The Franklin Library, 1980).
Losing Mary is also on my mind today. But to try to understand the eventual suicide of a newborn, my newborn, is to “try to comprehend the ungraspable phantom of life,” writes Jill Bialosky: “the power of darkness, fear, and weakness within the human mind, a force as mysterious, turbulent, complex, and uncontrollable as the sea, a force so powerful it may not be capable of withstanding its own destructive power” (History of a Suicide: my sister’s unfinished life. New York: Washington Square Press, 2011).
The holy image in Mary’s face has not faded. I regard her as an innocent overcome by mysterious darkness and fear, defeated by inner turbulence and psychological complexities. I celebrate the day she was born just as I honor innocent victims of suicide who bear holy image. And they all do.
Mary's Shortcut: About Suicide Bereavement 
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