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Trying to Make Sense of That Which Makes No Sense (part 3)

June 30, 2014 by Marjorie Antus

While no one argues that suicide can ever really make sense for those left behind, clinical researchers John Jordan and John McIntosh report that the incomprehensibility of suicide, its blind spot, can be worked with in life-giving ways. “The blind spot refers to the inherent inability of the survivor ever to fully comprehend the mind and motivation of the deceased, and therefore the reasons for the suicide,” write Jordan and McIntosh. “Finding a way through the blind spot is not about making meanings that are profoundly comprehensive so much as getting to a place of meaning that allows the bereaved to reinvest energy in themselves and re-engage in daily life” (Grief After Suicide: Understanding the Consequences and Caring for the Survivors, New York: Routledge, 2011, 268).

The authors also describe a three-part healing process that accompanies those who are able both to navigate the blind spot and to strive for relationship with the person who died. Two previous posts dealt with the first and second relationship tasks as I experienced them: “trying on the shoes” of my daughter Mary in an attempt to understand our broken relationship and “walking in her shoes” in an attempt to reconstruct our relationship along positive lines. The third relationship task that I faced was “taking off Mary’s shoes:” making a new position for her in my life so that I could go on.

For me, all of the bereavement tasks came together in one decade-long endeavor after Mary died by overdose in 1995: writing a book titled My Daughter, Her Suicide, and God: A Memoir of Hope. Although it deals with Mary’s death and its prolonged effect on me and my family, the memoir mostly concerns itself with meaning and relationship.

In short, it’s a narrative meditation upon the meaning of my daughter’s life, her suicide, and God’s place in her life and suicide. The story is not “profoundly comprehensive” for all people but describes, instead, my navigation of the blind spot.

However, there was an aspect of the writing even more urgent than getting through the blind spot: my ardent desire to re-establish a relationship with Mary. Getting her back in my life in a good way was what I wanted above all, and writing through the pain was the only way to achieve that. My Daughter, Her Suicide, and God will be published in the early fall. 

 

 

Posted in healing, Hope, making sense of that which makes no sense, searching for an answer to "Why?" | Leave a Comment »

Trying to Make Sense of That Which Makes No Sense (part 2)

June 10, 2014 by Marjorie Antus

One thing for which I’m most thankful in the long aftermath of my daughter ‘s suicide is this: she left in her bedroom quite a few school notebooks containing her accounts of daily life from the time she was a young teen until two days before she died. Over a period of weeks, I placed the notebooks in chronological order and began reading.

Some people cautioned me not to read the journals, that they had likely served only as a vent, a place of “guilt-free whining” as Mary remarked in one of them. But I was drawn to her writings. Not only did they put Mary’s voice back in my life, they revealed much about her days in high school, her friends, and her likes and dislikes that I had not known before. They revealed her dark mood in the days before she overdosed.

While they did not answer the “why” question (nothing, I’ve found, ever answers that question), Mary’s journals enabled me to walk in her shoes; and that was a critical healing moment.

Clinical researchers John Jordan and John McIntosh explain “walking in the shoes” as the second task of suicide bereavement that begins with “trying on the shoes” of the deceased and ends with “taking off the shoes.” This second task leads to a reconstructed relationship with self and others, but especially with the person who died.

So reading Mary’s journals was not the futile exercise that it sometimes seemed to be. It allowed me to “take on the mindset” of my daughter and begin a new relationship with her, although one born of pain. There were days when I told myself, “Mary and I are sisters in pain. Her pain and mine aren’t the same, but now I know a little better how she felt, and there’s still a closeness.” It was a step toward making sense of that which made no sense.

Walking in my daughter’s shoes was intensely demanding and required inwardness and silence, so opposite the socialization and wider involvement with life that are often-advised antidotes to suicide bereavement. Jordan and McIntosh point out that this second bereavement task is characterized by difficulties in articulating the intensity of grief and withdrawal in relationships. Those features were present and I now know, normal, in my time of shoe-wearing. (Grief After Suicide: Understanding the Consequences and Caring for the Survivors, New York: Routledge, 2011, 263). 

I no longer read my daughter’s journals and haven’t read them for years. They rest in a box at the back of my closet. I’d like to think that Mary left them behind so I could stay in touch with her and build a new relationship, however daunting that task proved to be.

Posted in An Insight About How, healing, searching for an answer to "Why?", silence in suicide bereavement | Tagged , | Leave a Comment »

Trying to Make Sense of That Which Makes No Sense

May 13, 2014 by Marjorie Antus

An earlier blog post, “Weathering the Seismic Event of Suicide,” briefly addressed the relationships we take for granted that tend to shatter when suicide occurs. Specifically, these are our relationships with the person who died, with ourselves, and with significant others.  “Suicide . . . can rock the foundations of a survivor’s personal world of meaning” and compel a person to try to make sense of that which makes no sense, write clinical researchers John Jordan and John McIntosh.

However, the researchers also point out the healing and new meaning that await a grieving person who can develop an “ongoing relationship with the deceased” by engaging in a three-part grief process. First is the “trying on the shoes (of the deceased),” or understanding our relationship with them; then comes “walking in the shoes,” or reconstructing our relationship; and finally there is “taking off the shoes,” or repositioning our relationship.

Though this three-part grief process does not necessarily follow a straight timeline, I was mostly trying on my daughter Mary’s shoes right after she overdosed on her antidepressants in 1995. In the early trying-on phase, that is, I attempted to decode whatever message I thought Mary’s suicide must have been sending. I also felt she’d betrayed me and that I’d never known her at all. Furthermore, I felt that she’d erased good memories of herself and our lives together. According to Jordan and McIntosh, those are all normal aspects of the grief process of trying on the shoes of the deceased and coming to a new understanding of who they were.

But there is more to the trying-on: a bereaved person must also deal with relationship to him or herself. In my experience it was certainly true, as Jordan and McIntosh state, that someone grieving a suicide focuses on “why” questions, agonizes about personal responsibility for the death, and experiences guilt and shame among several other negative features of raw grief.  Yet, Jordan and McIntosh maintain that wading through those difficulties ultimately contributes to a more accurate understanding of self.

Trying on the shoes of the deceased also leads to fresh understanding about relationships with significant others. To get to that place of enlightenment, however, a suicide survivor must first wade through the fear that suicide could recur with someone he or she loves; and a survivor must contend with the realities that stigma (real or imagined) is intruding, that other people could be blameworthy, and that talking about the suicide has been disallowed. I experienced most of those antagonisms, but only in early grief (Grief After Suicide: Understanding the Consequences and Caring for the Survivors, New York: Routledge, 2011, 252, 249, 262, 263).

That’s the good news about trying on the shoes of the deceased and thus coming to improved understanding about relationships: a suicide survivor may have to wear the shoes for a while, but they lead somewhere and they can eventually be taken off. Future posts will explore the wearing and the taking off.

Posted in guilt, healing, questioning in suicide bereavement, searching for an answer to "Why?", shock and disbelief after suicide, social uncertainty | 2 Comments »

“Tears Are a River that Take You Somewhere”

April 19, 2014 by Marjorie Antus

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Roxy, our family cat of thirteen years, died on Palm Sunday. After eating nothing for a day or two, after being examined by the veterinarian and placed on steroids for possible asthma, after being wept and prayed for, Roxy was let outside on a warm, beautiful Palm Sunday night and disappeared from our lives.

Having witnessed the natural death of pets over the years, I’ve come to regard myself as seasoned in the ways of mourning for them: a solemn burial, a few reminiscences, a prayer of gratitude, an attempt to salve bruised hearts with the promise of new pets.

But Roxy’s death was different. On her last night, she remained affectionate even as mysterious cat logic took over, urging her to walk slowly away from those she loved who loved her.

“Tears are a river that take you somewhere,” writes Clarissa Pinkola Estes in her classic work, Women Who Run with The Wolves. Tears for Roxy took me to a place of grief that remains secure eighteen years after the suicide of daughter Mary.

It’s just that Mary had also been sicker than I realized. She had also used her own mysterious logic on the night she overdosed to leave those she loved who loved her; and like Roxy, she was incapable of saying goodbye. Tears that were shed for Roxy this week were also being shed for Mary, and they took me somewhere real.

“For years, classical psychology of all types erroneously thought that grief was a process that you did once, preferably over a year’s period of time, and then it was done with, and anyone who was unable or unwilling to complete this over the proscribed time period had something rather wrong with them. But we know now what humans have known instinctively for centuries: that certain hurts and harms . . . can never be done being grieved; the loss of a child through death . . . being one of the most, if not the most, enduring” (New York: Ballantine Books, 1995, 374, 385).

I’m grateful for the life of a small cat, and I’m oddly beholden to her. Roxy took me to where some of the Mary-grief lies. Now I can pay attention to it from time to time and honor it as part of me.

Posted in abandonment, healing, suicide bereavement | Leave a Comment »

Weathering the Seismic Event of Suicide

March 22, 2014 by Marjorie Antus

My teenage daughter’s suicide in 1995 was a seismic event that sent shock waves through my world of meaning. To say the least, Mary’s death shook my belief in the sweetness and predictability of life and rattled my identity as a knowing mother-protector.

“Suicide appears to be particularly potent in its ability to shatter the most fundamental assumptions in life,” clinical researchers John Jordan and John McIntosh write. “For a period of time, many survivors are truly unable to make sense of why the suicide has happened, what role they played in the death, and its implications for their identity and their understanding of the world.”

According to Jordan and McIntosh, those shattered assumptions revolve largely around relationships. For a time, that is, a person bereaved by suicide must weather the wrecked presuppositions that he or she held with respect to the person who died, to his or her self-identity, and to other people, leading to a “protracted search for sense in a seemingly inexplicable death.”

For nearly two years, this blog has regularly concerned itself with relationship assumptions that have imploded. “Knowing Mary,” “An Insight About How,” and “Choosing Suicide” are posts that reflect my disoriented bond with Mary and my effort to repair the “psychological havoc” that Jordan and McIntosh report as common in suicide bereavement (Grief After Suicide: Understanding the Consequences and Caring for the Survivors, New York: Routledge, 2011, 249, 252).

Blog posts about guilt, anger, and post-traumatic stress disorder have addressed the collapse of certain givens about my self-identity just as other posts (“A Priest Waits with Us in The Emergency,” “My Suicide-Bereaved Family and the Police,” and “Social Uncertainty”) have spoken of my assumptions about relationship to others that have been altered, sometimes for the better.

In categorizing our overturned assumptions in terms of relationship, Jordan and McIntosh provide a potentially clarifying way of dealing with the inner chaos of suicide bereavement. Their work also points to a possible path of bereavement healing that will be addressed in future posts.

Posted in healing, questioning in suicide bereavement, searching for an answer to "Why?", shock and disbelief after suicide | Leave a Comment »

Suicide Bereavement and the Return of Beauty

February 28, 2014 by Marjorie Antus

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My brother George sent this picture a couple of weeks ago. He’s holding my daughter Mary at a Virginia horse farm on an autumn Sunday in 1980. She was three years old at the time, a delightful child, full of wonder, who would die by intentional overdose fifteen years later.

During the first dozen years of my grief for her, seeing the photograph would have jarred a routine question: “How on earth did my adorable little girl ever get to a place in her life where she felt she had to die?”

It was a question without answer, an insistent probe into the reality of my daughter’s life. In early grief, that sweet, innocent picture of Mary would not have seemed sweet and innocent. It would have called into doubt every good quality she possessed throughout her life. It would have prompted me to read the ugliness of her suicide back into the beauty of that picture-perfect moment. It would have left me grappling with the fear that, at depth, life makes no sense.

An essential part of healing after suicide is that of reviewing one’s relationship with the deceased and exploring how it can be “disentangled from the manner of death . . .” clinical researchers John Jordan and John McIntosh advise (Grief After Suicide: Understanding the Consequences and Caring for the Survivors, New York: Routledge, 2011, 200).

Disentangling Mary from her suicide required the discipline of many years: clearly the most arduous inner housecleaning of my life. But it finally gave my daughter back to me in a healing, peaceful way. Even more, it allowed the beauty of her life to return in its fullness.

Seeing the picture of her and my brother now brings profound gratitude. It calls up several lines from John Keats’s poem Endymion that I have been waiting to use ever since I memorized them in college forty years ago: “A thing of beauty is a joy for ever: / its loveliness increases; it will never / Pass into nothingness.”

Posted in healing, loosening the grip of horrible memories, suicide bereavement | Leave a Comment »

Suicide: Unthinkable for Whom?

February 12, 2014 by Marjorie Antus

Last week, a column appeared in The Washington Post entitled “Losing two Langley High School students to suicide: Unthinkable until it happened.”

“These two 17-year-olds were athletes and students at one of the finest, most affluent high schools in our region,” writes Petula Dvorak. “They had families, friends, a future. Losing them to suicide . . . seemed unthinkable.” While one boy died on Monday and the other on Tuesday, officials considered the two deaths unrelated.

I followed this story online as readers began posting comments about it. I expected a barrage, because reader comments on the Post website can number in the thousands for provocative news stories. But after an entire day, only 17 people had commented on Dvorak’s column. The silence seemed respectful more than anything else.

Not only that, the seventeen people who did respond refrained from blaming anyone, remarked on the profound sadness, and noted the intimate connection between mental disorders and suicide. (In Myths about Suicide, clinical researcher Thomas Joiner writes, “My view is that virtually everyone, approaching if not 100 percent, who dies by suicide had a mental disorder or a subclinical variant thereof at the time of death,” 188.)

The most incisive comment following the Post column took issue with the notion of suicide as unthinkable. “That headline is out of touch with reality,” one reader remarked. “You can’t call teen suicide ‘unthinkable.’ . . . Acting like teenage suicide, or any suicide, is unthinkable isn’t going to help us. It is thinkable. And we can do a much better job of helping people open their minds to other options” (The Washington Post, online Feb. 6-7, 2014).

When my teenage daughter Mary died by suicide in 1995, her death was unthinkable to me and everyone who knew her. But it was thinkable to her; she’d been thinking about it for two years as her journals later revealed. I used to agonize over Mary’s ability to conceal dangerous thoughts and my inability to read them, just as I imagine the families of those two high school students are agonizing now.

Yet, psychologist Kay Redfield Jamison offers this insight from her experience as a suicidal teen: “Because the privacy of my [suicide] nightmare had been of my own designing, no one close to me had any real idea of the psychological company I’d been keeping. The gap between private experience and its public expression was absolute; my persuasiveness to others was unimaginably frightening” (Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999, 6).

Yes, we must do a much better job of helping people open their minds to options other than suicide. Before we can do that, however, we have to know that suicide is an option under consideration, and that’s sometimes far from clear.

Posted in questioning in suicide bereavement, searching for an answer to "Why?", suicide: unthinkable for whom? | Leave a Comment »

Grief: Not Something Just for Sad Occasions

January 24, 2014 by Marjorie Antus

Yesterday, I was talking with a friend whose husband died two months ago of cancer. Remarkably positive in early bereavement and not someone given to denial, she commented that grief for my daughter Mary must continue to be difficult. In fact, she said it must be the worst, most unimaginable kind of grief. I wanted to reply that losing a teenage daughter to suicide has required a steady healing effort over nearly two decades, but words failed. What came forth was a small grief burst, an outcropping of emotion that I thought had been dispensed with years ago.

In many ways, grief for Mary has been routed: I’ve gotten used to her absence; I’ve found a place for her in my emotional life that has allowed me to go on; I don’t think of her with sadness anymore, but, rather, with something like puzzlement that tends to be more intriguing than anything.

But grief–that small, cold stone–continues to show itself from time to time, despite the healing. What’s changed since yesterday is that I’m now trying to honor not only its presence but also its life-givingness.

“Grieving is not just something that we do on sad occasions,” writes Richard Rohr, OFM, Catholic priest and author. “It is a mode of existence that agrees to carry the sadness of things without denying or dismissing the pain as an accident. It is a way of living that incorporates dying. It is a way of remembrance that refuses to forget. It is not a maudlin, depressed, or self-pitying thing, but a way of ‘compassion’ that makes room for everything and holds on to nothing.”

For those bereaved by suicide who may be haunted their entire lives by “if onlys” and guilt, Rohr offers especially pertinent insight: “The grieving mode keeps us out of the fixing mode. The grieving mode keeps us beyond the explaining mode. The grieving mode makes the way of blaming useless and counterproductive. The grieving mode submerges us into a world deeper than words or control.” (“Foreword,” in Robert J. Miller, GriefQuest: Men Coping with Loss, Winona, MN: Saint Mary’s Press, 1996, 10.)

From what I’m learning, the grieving mode plunges us into the only world capable of transforming us, the world inside where God lives, the world where real healing–the messy, tearful, human kind–can occur.

Posted in Grief: Not Something Just for Sad Occasions, healing, suicide bereavement | Leave a Comment »

A Belated Merry Christmas, Mary

December 31, 2013 by Marjorie Antus

Over the past several days of family Christmas celebration, there were moments when my daughter Mary could have been mentioned and wasn’t. There was a moment around the dining room table, for example, when we realized an extra place had been set unintentionally and no one suggested it might be a place for Mary, lost to suicide in 1995.

There was a Christmas mealtime blessing absent her name and a restaurant toast to the good times that did not include her.

My discomfort with those small silences is not a matter of thinking Mary needed either a place at the table or a Christmas blessing. She celebrates Christmas perpetually, I believe, and is with our family always in a good way.

It is also not a matter of thinking silence is somehow deficient. In my first years of grief for Mary, I couldn’t possibly have voiced my love and confusion at a family gathering. Any words suitable for a group setting would have fallen woefully short of the truth. That no one else tried to use words registered as a sign of solidarity and honor. Back then, we knew why we were keeping silent.

Now, I’m not so sure. Maybe we, and especially I, got so caught up in the excitement of Christmas–the big meal preparation, the house full of people, the flowers, the music, the table setting–that we failed to be intentional with regard to Mary. We, and especially I, failed to make the simplest move in Mary’s direction. Mentioning her name would not only have made her present to us, it also would have made Christmas more real and more joyful. Saying her name would not have been about remembrance only. It would have brought to our celebration a depth dimension and a light that shines in the dark.

Posted in A Belated Merry Christmas, Mary, honoring suicide victims, silence in suicide bereavement | Leave a Comment »

The Unusualness of Suicide Notes

December 6, 2013 by Marjorie Antus

I’m grateful that my daughter Mary left a note saying good-bye and describing her motives before she died by overdose in 1995. Police confiscated the note, so I didn’t get to see it for several weeks. When I finally read the five-page farewell she had written in her physics notebook, it was like watching her smile and wave as she drove off a cliff.

But after eighteen years, her decision to leave a note seems more a courtesy than anything else, a grace note, a final kindness. It left no doubt about her intention to die, and while that certitude did not answer the deeper questions surrounding her death, it did spare us the exhaustion of trying to figure out whether her death had been accidental.

Mary’s note was a gift, and a rather unusual one. Three out of four people who die by suicide leave no note according to studies cited by psychologist and clinical research Thomas Joiner. “Knowledge of this simple fact could save a lot of heartache and confusion . . . It is not rare for relatives of suicide decedents–and from time to time even experienced investigators–to question whether a death was a suicide or not because no note was left. Closure for relatives . . . can be facilitated by knowledge that suicide notes are rare.”

Why this rarity? It’s not that suicides are impulsive, Joiner argues, because “the extremely fearsome and often painful prospect of bringing about one’s own death requires previous experiences and psychological processes that take months–at least–to accumulate. Those who end up dead by suicide have thought the act through many times, often in detail—” (Reading Mary’s journal after her death, for example, I saw the word “suicide” crop up two years before she died.)

The answer, rather, seems to lie in the mental state of people in the moments before they take their lives. It’s so unlike ours that it’s almost impossible to fathom. “To say that people who die by suicide are lonely at the time of their deaths is . . . like saying that the ocean is wet. Loneliness, alienation, isolation, rejection, and ostracism are a better approximation, but still do not capture it fully. . . . I believe it is impossible to capture the phenomenon fully in words, because it is so beyond ordinary experience . . .” (Myths About Suicide, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010, 119, 84, 123.)

That my daughter left a note, that anyone would leave a note, speaks powerfully of the human need to belong and connect, tragically foreclosed.

Posted in suicide notes, the unusualnesss of suicide notes | Leave a Comment »

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