On March 11, 2018, exactly two weeks after my mother died, my then-20-year-old son was admitted to a psychiatric hospital. I’d known he was depressed. I had no idea how serious it was. I told myself he’d be in there for a few days. At most, a week.
In fact, he was in there for three months. Those were the worst three months of my life. That’s saying something, because 44 years earlier at pretty much exactly the same time of the year, my father went missing. I was 13 then and in my mid-twenties when I started trying to reconstruct the events of that time. That turned out to be more of a challenge than I’d bargained for, because (not surprisingly) I’d blocked out pretty much the entire period between when Dad disappeared and when his body was found nearly seven weeks later.
If I’d realized at the time that March 7, 1974, would mark the line between Before (when everything was good) and After (when I discovered how awful life could be), I would have taken notes. Or at least, that’s what I told myself when I started writing about Dad.
When Noah was admitted to the psychiatric hospital, after he told a cousin he wanted to kill himself, I began keeping a journal. You might want to write about this someday, I told myself. You’ll need notes.
Someday has come. Someday is now.
A Chart with Dates, Useful for Purposes of Comparison
              Dad                                                                         Noah
Oct. 9, 1973: 46th birthday                                         Dec. 4, 2017: 20th birthday
March 7, 1974: disappears                                         March 11, 2018: admitted to psych hospital
March 8, 1974: car found by lake                              April 20, 2018: released from psych hospital
April 23, 1974: body found in lake                           April 23, 2018: attempts to hang self
April 25, 1974: funeral, burial                                   April 25, 2018: returned to psych hospital
                                                                                   May 31, 2018: released from hospital          Â
                                                                                   Dec. 4, 2018: 21st birthday

Sending you hugs
No words. Glad he thrived.