Dear Noah

During my son's second stint in a psychiatric hospital, he asked me to tell him how I would have felt if he had succeeded in killing himself

Mother’s Day hike by the Bow River in Canmore, Alberta: Dave’s sister, Sandy; Elizabeth and her dog, Uno; Dave; Sandy’s husband, Wayne; Noah; and yours truly

On March 11, 2018, my then 20-year-old son, Noah, was admitted to the psychiatric hospital in our city after telling his cousin he wanted to kill himself. He spent six weeks in a young adult unit, where doctors threw so many medications at him (or, rather, made him take so many medications) that at one point my brother-in-law, an emergency room doctor, described him as “a f—king zombie.” He also had six rounds of electroshock therapy.

He was released from the hospital on a Friday. The following Monday, he tried to hang himself. I haven’t put that out in public before, because it is so unbelievably horrifying to me, but there it is. Exactly 44 years to the day that my father’s body was pulled from the lake he’d thrown himself into to end his mental anguish, my son tried to hang himself. And then he wound up back in a psychiatric hospital because (and I thank God every day for this) he stopped himself, and when his sister found out what had happened she called the hospital, against his wishes, because she knew we couldn’t keep him safe.

Noah was sent back to a different unit in the hospital. A week or so later, he texted to ask if I’d pen an essay or talk to him about how I’d have felt if he succeeded in ending his life. For the next few days, that task consumed me. Today, the day after another beautiful Mother’s Day—this one spent in the mountains with my family and my daughter’s boyfriend’s family—I’m posting the letter that was part of a very long and ultimately successful healing process for all of us. (I love that my Mother’s Day card from Noah was a thank-you note.)

I am doing this with Noah’s permission and blessing. I have anonymized some names and added contextual info in brackets for you. I should also tell those of you who are reading my memoir that there are a few spoilers in this letter—there is some info that will be covered in chapters in the next couple of weeks

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May 3-5, 2018

Dear Noah,

You asked me to pen an essay to tell you what would have happened if you had succeeded in your suicide attempt, and how I would have felt. I tried to write it as an essay, but it keeps wanting to be a letter. I think it wants to be a letter because to write it as an essay would be to imagine it actually happened, and I cannot bring myself to do that. These past few months have been unbearable. Your April 23 attempt to once again exit this world was painful enough without imagining, in detail, how our lives would have been shattered had you died.

I told you on Wednesday, April 25, that I cannot imagine my world without you in it. That is the absolute truth. I do not want to be in this world without you in it. You are precious to me, and you are my child. I’m supposed to go first, not you. You are everything I could want in a son (kind, funny, smart, thoughtful, helpful without my having to ask), plus a lot of what I was not when I was your age but wanted so much to be (tall, slender, athletic, good at math and science). You are also, at times, crabby, judgmental, and impatient. In short, you are human. And I love you.

Had you succeeded in taking your life, I would have felt hollowed out like a crater. I would have cried until my head felt like it was going to explode. (I did that on April 23. It was awful.) I would have spent the rest of my life wondering what I could have done to have saved you.

I would have spent the rest of my life punishing myself for having failed to save you. I probably would have blamed Dad and Elizabeth for not trying harder, too, and they would have blamed me, and there’s a very good chance our once-tight family unit would have blown apart. That happens with suicides: it breaks families apart. (Mom and Aunt Roz never got along very well before Dad died but after, when she and Grandma blamed Mom for Dad’s death, things got especially bad.) (Some day, if you want, I will tell you how Mom and Aunt Roz patched things up.)

If you had succeeded in ending your life, I would have felt utterly bereft and void and empty and alone and aching in a way that would never end. That’s describes how I felt after Elizabeth informed me that you had tried to hang yourself, and how I felt until two nights later, Wednesday, April 25, when we met with Dr. A— after you were admitted to 10-1-A and I began to sense that maybe now you had a chance to get better, because someone was going to listen to you and figure out what was making you so bent on killing yourself.

You might not be interested in the details of what I experienced the afternoon you tried to hang yourself, so you can skip over them if you want, but this is how that part of the day unfolded for me. It was about 4:30 pm and I had just left Sunterra, where I had picked up sausages. Remember, on Sunday night, when we planned meals for the week? One of the meals was to have been pierogies and sausages.

I was driving west on 57^th Avenue, headed toward Lendrum, where you used to play soccer for Southwest Sting when you were in junior high school. (Your uniforms were crimson. I was a team manager.)

My cell phone rang.

“Are you driving?” Elizabeth asked.

“Uh huh,” I said.

“You need to pull over,” she said.

“Why?” I asked.

“You just need to pull over,” she repeated.

My heart began to pound and my throat started to get dry. I had felt uneasy for the past few days, to be honest, and it had gotten worse in the middle of Monday afternoon when Elizabeth discovered you studying in the basement in the dark when we’d all thought you were at the University (because you’d said that’s where you were going). But I was kind of on autopilot and even though Dad had said he could take a cab to the airport to go to Ireland, I had insisted on driving him. I kept telling myself everything was okay, that the doctor had let you out of the hospital so that meant you were okay.

Now Dad was en route to Toronto (where, thank God, we managed to reach him so he could turn around and come back home before he boarded the plane to Dublin) and Elizabeth was telling me to pull off the road because clearly there was something awful going on.

“What’s the matter?” I asked as I pulled up against the curb.

“We’re all sitting here at Grandma and Grandad’s dining room table, playing Crib[bage],” Elizabeth said.

She was doing an excellent job being calm. I was impressed. I still am.

And then she told me what had happened, that you were looking at her bike in Grandma and Grandad’s front yard, and she noticed marks on your neck.

“What happened to your neck?” she asked you.

You told her it was from shaving. She didn’t think the marks were from shaving, but as she said, “I don't shave, so what do I know?”

Grandad knew. Elizabeth told me he said, “Come on, Noah. Those marks aren’t from shaving.”

Grandad thinks you are the bomb. He loves you to pieces. But I could imagine his voice. It was impatient. Here is what I thought when Elizabeth told me what Grandad said. I thought, “I hope Bill didn’t hurt Noah’s feelings.”

You had tried to kill yourself, and I was worried that Grandad had hurt your feelings. You’re sensitive. You don’t like to hurt people. I know you don’t. That’s why I don’t want to believe you really wanted to kill yourself. Surely you know how that would have devastated us all. But depression does that to people, warps their thinking so they think they are thinking about their loved ones, but really, they’re not thinking straight at all. I know. That’s what it did it to my father.

I cannot remember how much I have told you about my father’s death, so bear with me if you have heard this before (or just skip over it). Before Dad died, there was a joke in my family that I could sleep through anything. Construction workers could have operated a jackhammer at the foot of my bed and I’d have slept through it. But the night before Dad disappeared, I was awakened in the middle of the night by him and Mom arguing in their bedroom—our bedrooms shared a wall. It surprised me because they never fought. I could not make out words, only tone, and soon I fell back to sleep.

The next morning I asked Amy if she had heard the fight. She hadn’t: her bedroom didn’t share a wall with Mom and Dad’s. But she asked Dad what they’d been fighting about, and he told her, “It was my fault. Your mother wanted me to go back to sleep and I didn’t want to” or something like that. I didn’t remember because quite frankly I didn’t remember telling Amy about the fight. I never told anyone else about it until I was 24, when I started going for therapy.

Dad drove me and Amy to school that day, and then he drove his car to a lake about a half hour north of Utica. His car was found in the parking lot the next day. His body surfaced in the lake on April 23, nearly seven weeks after he’d disappeared. Mom insisted his death was an accident. Whenever I tried to talk to her about it, to understand why he’d have gone to this lake where we never went, and then had fallen in and drowned, she said, “You had 13 good years with him” and/or “How he lived was more important than how he died.”

I didn’t seriously entertain the possibility that he had killed himself until I was in my early twenties. Three things happened that forced me to face that reality. First, I found some condolence letters that intimated that he had been depressed. Then, one summer afternoon when I was visiting my grandmother in the Framingham Hospital, trying to talk to her about Dad, Aunt Roz ordered me away, sat me down in a conference room at the end of the hall, and blurted out, “It took me years to accept that your father committed suicide.” About a year later, I was asking Amy how therapy had helped her and she said, “It helped me accept that Dad killed himself.”

You need to know that I didn’t believe the letters. I had never heard of the people who had written them, so I was able to convince myself that they were nuts. And at the time Aunt Roz blurted out her theory, I didn’t like or trust her, so it was easy for me to believe she was nuts, too. It was only when Amy said she thought Dad had killed himself that I started seriously doubting Mom’s version of the truth, but I still wasn’t ready to face it.

When I went for therapy at age 24, my goal was to get a boyfriend. I kid you not. I did not know how to talk to guys my own age and I told the therapist (her name was Irmegard Wessel, which I think is a wonderful name, by the way, and she was a wonderful therapist and I hope your therapists are that good) that I figured it was because my dad had died when I was 13 and I’d grown up surrounded by women. I know I told you this the other night—I spent the next three years in therapy talking about Dad and his death. Irm made me realize I needed to find out what had caused the fight the night before Dad disappeared.

I drove from New Haven to Cape Cod one weekend with the express purpose of asking Mom about it. Not surprisingly, she was not eager to talk about it. Every time I brought it up she told me it was a bad time. Finally, the third time she said it was a bad time (this was about 24 hours after I’d arrived), I yelled at her. “It’s my story, too, and you need to tell me,” and then she did.

She told me that Dad had not been sleeping. He was worried that the temple was going to fail and he would lose his job and not be able to support us. (You were there in March for Mom’s funeral: after 44 years the temple is going strong. It has not failed. But that’s what mental illness does to a person; it skews their perspective completely.) Dad said to Mom, “You’d all be better off without me.”

When Mom told me that, I could not imagine what that had been like for her. Two months ago, more than 30 years later, as I wrote her eulogy, I thought of that moment in her bedroom when she told me, “He said you’d all be better off without me,” and still I could not imagine how helpless she must have felt when he told her that.

Now I know how she felt. I am still astounded at how she bore up under the pressure, but she was broken. A part of her hardened. Most of what I remember from the next four years that I lived at home were of being terrified of her rages and cowering when she and my sister yelled at each other. My relationship with Amy was damaged for decades because of Dad’s death.

Dad was wrong: we were not better off without him. We survived. We managed. But we were damaged and always will be. (It’s not just my instincts that are compromised. So is my sanity. When anyone is late coming home, when you or Elizabeth or Dad say you’re coming home at a certain time and you don’t, I panic, and I’m sure it’s going to be worse now. Your dad thinks I’m crazy to worry, but he doesn’t get it. And for the longest time, when he and I would fight and he’d storm out of the house, I would have panic attacks because my model for couples fighting was, the fight ends and the husband disappears and seven weeks later he turns up dead.)

So there’s some context for you.

Back to that afternoon, April 23. I wanted to come to Grandma and Grandad’s house, but Elizabeth said I should go home.

“You should call someone to come and keep you company,” Elizabeth said, but I thought that was unnecessary. Why did I need someone to keep me company? I just wanted to be alone.

Instead of going home, I went and got gas. The tank was nearly empty and I was struck by a vision that I might suddenly have to drive a long distance at short notice. I don’t know where that idea came from. Maybe I wanted to flee, to escape this nightmare that had started on March 11 and seemed like it was never going to end.

On Argyll Road, somewhere between 105^th and 109^th streets, I started to cry and it occurred to me perhaps Elizabeth was right: I should not be alone. My first choice for company was K—. She knows what it is like to have mental health problems and to have family members with mental health problems. But she was not answering her phone. My next choice was Anisa. She does not have mental health problems, but she is a child psychiatrist plus, unlike Shirley, she’s not working right now and she lives close by.

I got home, and I sat on the couch and waited for Anisa to come over and I started to howl. I howled for the next two hours. Every once in a while Elizabeth would come home, and later she told me she found the scene almost comical.

“Every time I came in the door, there was a different pair of women’s shoes in the front hall and a different middle-aged lady sitting next to you on the couch and you were in the same place the whole time, crying.”

(I have good friends. I am blessed. But good friends are never going to fill the crater blown open by the death of a beloved child, especially a child who chose to end his own life.)

You would not have liked to have heard what I sounded like, sitting there on the couch, howling and blowing my nose. Chip [our dog] was unsettled by the noises I was making. I imagine I sounded like a wounded animal. That is how I felt. Even writing this now, the tears are welling up in my eyes. I never want to cry like that again. I never want to feel like that again.

Grief sucks, but grieving for someone who was ready to die does not feel at all like grieving for someone who has been ripped from your life, or who has ripped themselves from your life, before their time. Grief for my mother – I’ve been grieving my mother since the Parkinson’s started getting worse three years ago. I will always miss her, but she lived a good, full life. It was okay for her to go, and given the horrible shape she was in, it was a blessing.

Your death would not be a blessing. Your death would be a tragedy. I know you are hurting now and that seeing into the future is probably terrifying, but you have a long life ahead of you and it can be an amazing life because you’ve got so much going for you (which, again, I’m sure you’re having trouble believing. I had trouble believing that about myself when I was your age, too, not to diminish what you are going through, just to say I think I have a little empathy).

The grief I’ve been feeling for what you are enduring, and what we are enduring alongside you, is nothing like the grief I’ve felt about Mom’s death.

I cannot remember if I told you this, but last Wednesday (April 25) when I woke up and the sun was shining and it was one of the first beautiful days we’ve had this spring, all I felt was sad. It was the most beautiful day and you could not enjoy it because you were stuck in a bed in the hallway in the Emergency Department at the Misericordia Hospital, and God only knows what dark thoughts were filling your head that would also keep you from enjoying this beautiful day. I wasn’t going to be able to enjoy it either, because it seemed so unfair to me that you couldn’t.

I was so grateful to Nurse Nicole and the Misericordia psychiatrist for springing you from that place for three hours so we could enjoy the sun and the river valley. And then, when we sat in the garden (really, a poor excuse for a garden) outside the cafeteria, just talking, I felt so good—mostly.

When you were lying on the ground, you kind of scrunched yourself beneath one of the picnic tables that was leaning (precariously, if you ask me) against the wall. I asked you why you were lying there and you said, “I don’t want my face in the sun.”

Do you know what I thought, Noah? I thought you were lying there because when I wasn’t watching you were going to pull the table down on yourself to try to kill yourself that way.

I am getting off task here. My assignment was to tell you what would have happened/how I would have felt if you had been successful in your suicide attempt.

My world would have been shattered. I suppose I would have gone on living, because that’s what I do. But I would have been broken and I would never be whole again. And you didn’t ask me to speak for the many people who love you, but they would have been broken, too. I said this to you last week, too: for you, everything would be done. You’d feel no pain. But the people you loved and who loved you would spend the rest of their lives hurting. Please don’t do that to us.

I pray that you are getting the help you need now so that you will never want to do that. It is going to take time, and it will not always be pleasant, but that’s when you lean on this amazing support system you have built, with your family and friends who care about you.

When you were in the hospital the first time, I had mixed feelings about your studying for finals. On one hand, I thought it was good because it seemed like a touchstone, something keeping you grounded, something to work toward for when you got out of the hospital. And at the time, we had no idea how long you were going to be in, so it seemed reasonable. As your time in the hospital was extended, I began to worry that studying was doing you more harm than good. I even asked Dr. Ab— if we should recommend that you withdraw. That was on March 30. His response: “I think that is up to Noah.” Just a few days later, he proposed the electroshock therapy that would keep you in the hospital for another two weeks. To me, he’d made your decision for you. But there was nothing I could do about that, and my frustration only heightened what was already a tense mood around the house. So I backed off. I knew how important those finals were to you, and I was terrified that if we took that option off the table it would be tantamount to us pushing you off the parking structure, or tightening the noose around your neck.

More than three weeks later, when you were in the Misericordia Emergency Room and Dad started talking to you, seriously, about withdrawing, there was a part of me that was angry at him. I could only imagine how much you were hurting, how at sea you probably felt, and here was Dad, taking away your lifeline. But as Dr. J— said, those finals, that semester, was also something of an albatross around your neck. I was grateful to Dad for being brave enough to step in there and say what I was too timid to broach.

On Friday night I listened intently as [your friend] Ian brought up the “forced withdrawal” subject as we were driving you back to the hospital. I know I mentioned this to you the other day, but it bears repeating in writing. I thought, “why did I not use Ian as an example? Why didn’t I think to remind Noah that Ian didn’t just withdraw, he basically bombed out spectacularly. Twice. And now, two years on, he’s found something he likes and is passionate about, and he’s going for it.”

My wishes for you are many, but in this particular context my wish is that you take some time for yourself. Relax. Don’t put pressure on yourself to perform. Just be. (I hope that sounds less hypocritical coming from me than I fear it would coming from Dad…) You have earned a break and more important, you need it.

My mother used to say things to me like, “You’ll find what you need when you stop looking for it,” which I thought was a ridiculous aphorism, but she had a point. If you stop obsessing over things and just let yourself (and things) be for a while, trust me, you’ll figure out what it is that you want to do and be.

Yesterday, May 4, you asked why Dad and I don’t want you to think about what you’re going to do in September. It’s not that we don’t want you to think about what you’re going to be doing in September, we don’t want you to think you have to make a decision right now, or even a couple of months from now, about September. You’ve been putting pressure on yourself for a very long time, and I know that Dad and I have not helped (I’m not sure how we have not helped, but I have some ideas. When you are ready, we can discuss), but for the time being, it’s important that you remove that kind of pressure from your life. So think about what you want to do, but you needn’t be in any hurry to do it.

Explore. Dabble. Enjoy that Spanish class. Enjoy tutoring at the Mennonite Centre. Enjoy canoeing and hiking and climbing and cooking, and if that stops being enjoyable, then you’ll find something else. Something positive. Something life-affirming. Not something to end your life.

Dad and Elizabeth and I and the people who love and care about you don’t need you to be perfect. We don’t need you to be cheery all the time. We don’t need you to adhere to society’s schedule of what you should be doing and when. You’re 20. You come from a family with very strong longevity genes and a good work ethic.

What we need is for you to be alive, so you can live the long, happy, productive and rewarding life that you deserve.

Love,

Mom

A little addendum: This took three days to write because I didn’t want to say the wrong thing, or leave anything out. Then it occurred to me, if I keep thinking this way, I’m never going to finish. So I would like to think of this letter as the opening effort in a longer conversation with you. If you want me to write you another letter, ask me some specific questions, and I’ll get back to you.