Hope (Again)

Elizabeth was a protective older sister from the get-go

Trigger warning: This chapter contains mention of suicide

The day after Noah was born, one of the maternity nurses at the Misericordia Hospital in Edmonton offered to help me bathe him. As we removed his onesie and diaper, he lay silently beside the tub, staring up at us, his legs and arms immobile as if we had pinned them down —which we had not. All the activity in his body was taking place above the neck. His face was growing redder and more scrunched by the second. He pressed his lips together with a level of control that was impressive for a human who had emerged from the womb barely thirty-six hours earlier.

What happened next was even more impressive: He opened his mouth and let out a howl of anger and indignation that was so intense you’d have thought we were sawing off his limbs, not stripping him naked.

“Oh,” the nurse said, slowly, drawing out that one syllable. “You have a breath-holder.”

Maybe she was merely clarifying his sobbing style. But I swear her voice was positively awe-struck, as if she were a religious pilgrim who had just been visited by the Virgin Mary. And for that reason, I heard her pronouncement less as an observation than a prophecy: you have given birth to a child who will torture himself rather than take the easy way out.

Or maybe I only thought that when Dave and I went to see Noah on Tuesday morning. He was back in the Misericordia Hospital, this time on a bed in a hallway in the Emergency Department, three floors beneath the Labor and Delivery Ward where I’d given birth to him 20 years earlier. The last time I’d seen him was Monday afternoon as I was preparing to drive Dave to the airport and he was preparing to go not to the library and study, as he had told me, but to hang himself in the garage.

I should never have left him alone. On the way out of the neighborhood, I told Dave I was worried. “I can take a cab to the airport,” he said. “You don’t have to drive me.” But I didn’t want to believe anything bad could happen. I didn’t want to be that mother who worried every second of every day. All the bad things had already happened. Noah had been in the hospital for six weeks. Never mind the unsafe safety plan. Why would Dr. A. have sent him home if he wasn’t better?

He didn’t look better now, under the harsh lights in the hospital hallway. He looked as exhausted and depleted as I felt. I wondered if his head was pounding. Mine still hurt from the hours I’d spent crying the night before. Even my eyes ached.

Behind him stretched a line of beds, each occupied by another patient that the overcrowded Emergency Department could not accommodate. Noah had a front row seat to all the action: his bed was at the very head of the line. I did not ask why. I did not need confirmation for what I knew was true: he was at such a high risk to end his life that the staff needed to keep as close an eye on him as possible.

The activity level in the hallway swung from frenetic to frantic with no warning. I couldn’t imagine how Noah could have slept the previous night, even with the blackout mask and earplugs that he and the other hall-dwellers had been given. Every time another ambulance pulled up to the bay outside, EMTs delivered the patients into and then through the hallway, further ratcheting up the tension and noise.

At one point not long after Dave and I arrived, a crew wheeled in an obese, middle-aged man lying on his side. We couldn’t see his face: his back was to us. His pants were partially down, his exposed butt crack at the exact level with Noah’s eyeline. Just what a suicidal 20-year-old needs to see, I thought to myself. Or maybe Noah hadn’t even noticed.

I sure wasn’t going to point it out. I’d have preferred to pretend I hadn’t seen it, but pretending I hadn’t seen what was right in front of me was the reason that Noah, Dave, and I were in the Emergency Department in the first place, the reason Elizabeth had called the Police and Crisis Response Team not twenty-four hours earlier to do what I should have done on Friday afternoon when Noah had told me he was still planning to kill himself.

Ignoring reality had been my mother’s go-to survival mechanism when my father disappeared, though I didn’t begin to understand the extent of that until nine years later, when I found the condolence letters that launched me on a mission to face the truth. By the time Noah wound up in the Young Adult Unit at Alberta Hospital Edmonton, I had long accepted that Dad’s death hadn’t been an accident. Getting to that place had involved subjecting myself to a kind of emotional pain I wouldn’t wish on anyone, but living in Mom’s fantasyland had stunted my growth for years and kept me behaving and thinking in many ways like the scared and scarred thirteen-year-old whose world was turned upside down with no warning. Making peace with the truth was better for me in the long run.

Except the truth did not entirely set me free, something I would not fully appreciate until long after Noah had recovered. My failure to be more proactive throughout the winter and early spring of 2018, when he was depressed and initially hospitalized, was evidence that making peace with Dad’s death had no mitigating effect on the collateral damage caused by the secrets and lies surrounding it. I had convinced myself that I had conquered the hurt, confusion, and fear that had festered during the years that Mom refused to talk about what had really happened. My experience with Noah’s illness made it clear that those feelings hadn’t gone anywhere: they had simply gone quiet, waiting for the right trigger to rise up and render me impotent at a time when I needed courage, clarity, and strength.

That morning in the hospital, when Noah’s world had shrunk to a bed in the Emergency Department hallway, I could not have articulated any of those thoughts. They were percolating deep in my subconscious, ingredients in a stew of terror, shame, guilt, and anger.

I had only one clear thought that morning, and it was one that no parent wants to contemplate: my son was beyond saving.

He was never going to get better. There was no point in having hope, because the situation was hopeless. Noah wanted to die and nothing I could do would stop him.

It was an unbearably horrible, lonely revelation. And as I was about to discover, it was powerfully freeing.