The Gift of Grief

Don't Wait

For the past year and a half I have worked with Zen Hospice Project, an organization that trains volunteer caregivers with a background in meditation to serve at the bedside of those who are dying.

One of the precepts we learn during our training to act from while at the bedside is the phrase, “Don’t Wait”. As you can imagine, when it comes to death & dying, the phrase “Don’t Wait” can have many meanings. I wanted to share with you today how “Don’t Wait” magically appeared in the final weeks with my uncle, Roy.

When Uncle Roy arrived in the ICU at Kaiser Oakland, he was prepared. Not in the sense that he knew he would end up there, but in the sense that he and my aunt Kit had their things in order. He had his advance directive, he knew – and spoke openly about – his desire to not fight nature’s course when it came to his death, and all the necessary papers regarding life & death had been signed and dated.

This happens in many ICUs across this land, but I’m not sure Roy, or any of us, knew that myriad shades of gray come to us when a life is on the line. Questions regarding the possibilities of necessary procedures to sustain his life flooded his room: intubation, shocking the heart back in the case of another heart attack, whether to take certain medications on top of other medications to treat ongoing disease …these were the questions that hit Roy and Kit within the space of moments, hours, and days. These questions hadn’t been check boxes on the paperwork they had already done together.

I’ll note that the ICU is not a restful place. In fact, it’s the antitheses of a place of healing. That isn’t to say that incredible work is not done in the ICU—it is—and among the nurses and doctors that helped Roy during that time their care was superb. But when faced with the complexities of one’s life in a moment, with the beeps and pokes and prods—often at all hours of the night—made it a challenging place to hold a clear mind to make some of life’s most contemplative decisions.

Yet Uncle Roy faced these challenges each time they arrived.

One afternoon while I was visiting, the doctors came in to go over this “checklist” - if you will – of the gray areas. To clarify the treatments that Roy was willing—or not willing—to do. At one point Roy turned to Kit, then to me, and he said,  “What do you think I should do?”
Here was a man who followed his convictions on how he wanted to play out his life, yet he was concerned for his loved ones if he made the choice to go home to hospice. He had worked hard, had earned himself a beautiful life with Kit, and was grateful for all that he had accomplished for himself and for those who had shared his life with him.

And I’m certain this was a difficult moment for Kit. In fact, just by being in the room I knew that it was. But I appreciated Roy’s ability to face the questions. To ask his loved ones in the room for our opinions and not wait until an emergency might happen where his voice could not be heard.

And I felt that my job—as a hospice caregiver in that moment—was to hold two spaces: one for Uncle Roy and his desire to do what he felt was best for himself and for his life, and the other for Aunt Kit and her desire to keep her husband with her a bit longer. Luckily, mutual respect was a precept in their marriage and so the decision was eventually made to respect Roy’s wishes to leave the ICU and rest in the comfort of their home. Roy didn’t wait—he knew what he wanted—and he moved through this process with great care and compassion for both himself and for Kit.

He moved back to their home to Courageous Court.

The last night I had with Roy was on a Thursday night, two nights before he passed. I sat eating soup at his bedside and thought some more about “Don’t Wait”.  My husband, Wolf, and I had to fly out the next morning for the memorial service of the unfortunate death the week before of my brother-in-law.

I told Uncle Roy simply that we had to leave the next morning to see my family for Thanksgiving; I didn’t bother him with the details. He held my hand on his right, and the hand of his son, Sean’s, on his left.  We watched basketball and Wolf asked Roy for future life advice. Every so often I would say to him, “Uncle Roy, you seem tired, we should probably get going soon.” And he would squeeze my hand and say, “But Wolf hasn’t finished his soup yet.”

There he was again, considering the care for others.

I’ve seen this behavior many times in my hospice work, where patients don’t want anyone to leave, they have a lot of energy and chat for hours, but I only realized these details after the fact: that during that night, Uncle Roy was preparing for his next journey.

I knew I couldn’t wait. I knew it was possible that when I returned in ten days Uncle Roy may not be here. And I have a policy to squeeze every hospice patient I know before I leave them just in case. So on a commercial break during the basketball game with the TV on mute, I told Uncle Roy everything I needed to say. I told him how much I loved him, and that he and Kit had shown me what a marriage could actually be, and that he showed me how to choose a good man to be my husband. I had learned so many wonderful things from Roy and I told him I was grateful that he showed me the way. We cried, I kissed him, Wolf finished his soup – and on Roy’s urging a little dessert – and we left. Two days later Uncle Roy passed away in the arms of the woman who helped co-create his beautiful life.

It sounds like a simple story; it wasn’t. There were home health aides to navigate and moments of grasping and letting go. But what struck me about this beautiful life – and death – is that Roy – and Kit – met it head on. They had signed everything that needed to be signed – they had said everything that needed to be said – and thankfully, they could then put aside the “what ifs”, and the “I should haves”, that many people grieve long after those they love have passed.

Kit mailed me an article that San Francisco Chronicle columnist, John Carroll, wrote back in 2007. What fascinated me was that I received it in the mail just one day before Uncle Roy went into the ICU. This last part of the column sounds like John Carroll’s version of “Don’t Wait”. He writes: 

“But here’s what I’m thinking about: It’s not too late. Some people have died, but others live on. They are waiting for our phone calls. Maybe they don’t even understand that they’re waiting, but we know better. They will want to hear what we have to say. Even if they reject what we have to say, they will want to hear it. Because later on, they will remember the words, and meditate on them, and then maybe they’ll make their own phone calls, and the whole grace thing will go around the world again, chasing the demons.”

Don’t wait.

A Beautiful Day To Die

Addiction. Softening. Compassion for the alcoholic. Led Zeppelin. These are my life's realities, its awakenings, and the American rock legend that touched my summer.

I'll start by saying that It's rare that I write about the specifics of my hospice work, mainly because I respect the HIPAA laws that keep a protective boundary around the patient. But I believe that I am being of service when I share my learnings with a society that is deficient around death. I also feel that synchronicities in life can create a memorable death that is worthy of being shared.

The weather on this summer day was magically warm. Not a leaf fluttered as San Francisco's summer winds stayed off the coast. Nature's colors were saturated to their full potential and conversations carried though screenless windows hanging in the hot air to be heard. As the resident birds bathed in the bird bath on the back deck of Zen Hospice Project's Guest House, I turned to our Volunteer Manager and smiled, "What a beautiful day to die."

Over the weekend I had received an email that Princess, our five-month long resident, was nearing her end. She would possibly become a "coroner's case" if we didn't raise the funds it would cost to cremate her. She was estranged from her mother and young sons, from the father of her children, and her boyfriend caught in the web of his own addiction who no longer paid her visits. I read the plea for her fundraising on my phone and found myself more focused on the miracle that Princess was actually still alive. One nurse had explained to me that since Princess was only in her early thirties, her heart would probably keep beating even while her organs failed. I was sitting next to my father on his 70th birthday reading this plea for Princess, and when he saw my tears he asked what was wrong. I shared a brief description of Princess while he hung his head.

"Well, I'll write a check for $100," he said. I looked up at him in awe. A complete stranger who was willing to give. "Everyone deserves to die knowing they were loved," he said.

Princess was dying from the complications of alcoholism. Doctors call it cirrhosis. But what I've learned in 12-Step work, Princess was dying from a "spiritual malady," one that had her swollen to three times her normal size. During my weekly afternoon routine it would take two volunteers and two nurses to turn her for bed baths. Every Wednesday at 4PM I could barely lift one of her legs to rearrange the three pillows it took to support each calf and foot. Her edema—the swelling of the body—caused her such pain that I witnessed for the first time in my hospice work that a patient could completely separate herself from her body.

Princess was also a total kick. She was forthright and honest, incredibly smart, and had a great sense of humor. Her charm and wit reeled me in to her cause. These were her good qualities—or character assets as they are called in 12-Step—which also happen to be common assets among addicts. But these assets didn't surface in Princess right away. She was abused every which way during her short life, and so Princess had no idea how to ask for what she needed. Nor did she have the ability to actually believe that people—even strangers—would serve her when she had nothing to give them in return.

The first time I came to her room to ask her order for dinner she demanded I fetch her a Tombstone pizza with pepporoni and onions. I struggled with the restaurant quality range in a Buddhist kitchen that cooks whatever the residents want (including meat), but leans towards fresh, organic ingredients. I laughed at myself for burning her Tombstone crust, but I had sliced some onions myself and placed them mindfully around the pepporoni. Princess didn't even notice the crust, ate the whole personal pizza, and then cracked open another can of PBR. "Delicious," she sighed letting out a belch. In her final weeks her demands lightened, she even became specific. "I'd like vanilla ice cream with chocolate sauce, and a glass filled halfway with ice. But don't make the glass of ice right away. Wait a little bit so that the ice doesn't melt before it gets up here."

"Okay," I said. "anything else?"

"No, that's it." I left the room.

"Thank you!" she screamed from her bed as I made my way down the hall.

When I walked into Zen Hospice on that beautiful day I saw the two nurses, Candie & Grace, who had tended to Princess in those final months of her life. They smiled and giggled, commenting on the local news team who had been in the house to do a news story during the time that Princess died. Candie & Grace were the nursing duo who had bathed Princess every week, who had tended to her bed sores and her split, bleeding skin. They coined her Princess and took the lead on their remarkable, tender care. Princess had told Candie & Grace which dress she wanted to be dressed in after she passed and that she wanted the two of them in the room when her time came to go.

Candie & Grace began their death tale, a common experience among staff and volunteers at this mindful house for the dying. They talked about the volunteer who had sat with Princess while her breath labored. Then they shared how that volunteer had been sitting there for a few hours and finally whispered, "I have to go to the bathroom," as she had been holding it for some time. Grace sat down next to Princess, who lay with her head turned toward the wall with closed eyes. Princess hadn't been responsive for days. Candie then entered Princess' room and as the dynamic duo of Candie & Grace filled up Princess' room one last time with love, Princess turned her head from the wall to face them both, opened her eyes, looked at them one last time, and took her final breath. 

We raised double the amount of funds needed for Princess' cremation. And that evening after Princess' death our Volunteer Manager sent out the requisite email illustrating Princess' death story & concluded it with the lyrics below. His choice of words reminded me why I love this work. Mostly because I get to learn from those who never even knew they could teach.

And then I pulled up YouTube and got some Led out.

 

"...And as we wind on down the road

Our shadows taller than our soul.

There walks a lady we all know

Who shines white light and wants to show

How everything still turns to gold.

And if you listen very hard

The tune will come to you at last.

When all is one and one is all

To be a rock and not to roll.

And she's buying a stairway to heaven."

 —From "Stairway to Heaven," Led Zeppelin

 

Miscarriage Muffins

One of the best explanations of the grieving process I've ever heard is that each time we experience grief, we dip into our grief reservoir, and that each time we dip into the grief reservoir, we dip back into all of our past grief. I happen to know that in my reservoir live tenderness, vulnerability, feelings of uncertainty, and a habitual fear of change. When I dip down into my reservoir, I often come back to the surface surprised, gasping for air.

Some months ago I dipped into my grief reservoir. It was the five-year anniversary of my ex, Bryce's, suicide. I knew a thing or two about anniversaries from the previous four years, but I had made the assumption that five years had been enough time for me to get through this particular anniversary without falling apart. Surprise. When I dipped into my reservoir and watched the emotions surface, it occurred to me that this was a pretty significant anniversary and added to it was a cup of awareness, a quart of sadness, and a half cup of growth. So much had transpired and healed in my life since Bryce’s suicide that I assumed the event had just turned into a sad memory from my past. But it hadn’t. It had become the most significant event that had integrated into my life, so much so that it had directed me onto an entirely different path.

After Bryce's suicide, I started 12-Step recovery in Al-Anon and investigated a family tree weighing heavy with the fruits of addiction. I attended suicide conferences to research PTSD on suicide survivors and completed suicide support group training to help others who had been struck by the same trauma. I wrote multiple articles on grief and continued to help others through their own grief, particularly those struggling with a loved one’s suicide or those who had attempted suicide themselves. And I gratefully started to serve my community by doing suicide prevention with teens when I found out that Bryce's suicidal thoughts started at the same age. But most poignantly, I used my grief and all of its gifts to train to sit at the bedside of those dying through Zen Hospice Project. Looking back on this list of new commitments, life was both rich and full. It also offered me more meaning ever since the suicide had occurred; yet somehow I still found myself grieving five years to the day.

What I didn't realize on that day was that my grief was laden with new life. Two days later I learned that I was pregnant. I had never been pregnant before and it was a miracle to me that at the age of 38 I was able to become pregnant so quickly. My husband and I were happily whisked into a new take on our future just days after I felt myself drowning in my grief reservoir. So here they were again—happiness and suffering—all in a week’s work, just as life likes to do it - whip it up and bake it.

This recent news was also sprinkled with curiosity, a dash of anxiety, and a debilitating bout of constant morning sickness. I was miserable. I was depressed. I was excited and I was scared. But wasn’t I also supposed to be enjoying this little life growing inside of me? Surprise. I threw up everyday. I could barely leave the house in fear of puking in public. I had to trade in my healthy diet of leafy greens and vegetarian dishes for turkey sandwiches, chicken tortilla soup, banana-vanilla ice cream milkshakes, and peanut butter & jelly sandwiches each night before bed. Saltines and ginger ale became my staple bedside snack. This growing life inside me was a bitch.

Nine weeks into my pregnancy, I went in for my first ultrasound and came out with an empty amniotic sac. The egg had attached, my body had flooded itself with pregnancy hormones, but the baby had never grown into much of anything. It was merely a yolk. Two nights before that ultrasound, and a day free from puking, I had just noticed my tummy poking out above my pants. And I smiled with joy while making my husband photograph my baby bump from the side.

After opting for a D&C five days after that photo session, I lay on my aunt’s living room couch. My aunt comforted me with warm tea and cookies and sent me home after many hugs and tears with a bag of Meyer lemons. So what if my uterus had only produced a blighted ovum? Life—once again—was handing me lemons. 

I went home and searched recipes for something to bake my heart out that would take a bag of lemons off my hands. I shared the miscarriage news with my new neighbor who shared her miscarriage story with me over dinner. She told me to take my time—reminding me that sometimes the healing takes longer than we think—and that for her it took a full year. I listened as she opened her heart and then decided to spend the next two days alone baking. During those two days I learned something: that two batches of muffins are much better than one. And because my new neighbor had just switched over to a gluten-free diet, I made her a special batch, then I swaddled them in an old sarong and placed them at her door.

In the evening she sent me a text. “Very yummy and not too sweet,” she thumbed. “Slightly bitter, like the experience. ;-)”

That's how I came to dip into my grief reservoir to remember that grief bakes slowly over time. I recalled that women have grace to share from their experiences. And that when life gives you lemons, make miscarriage muffins, and bake them as fast as you can.

Miscarriage Muffins

Total time: 40 minutes
Servings: Makes 18 muffins

2 cups flour (substitute with gluten-free flour for gluten-free friends)
1 cup plus 2 tablespoons sugar, divided
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
3 Meyer lemons, divided
2 eggs
1 cup milk
1/2 cup butter, melted
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

1. Heat the oven to 400 degrees. Combine the flour, 1 cup sugar, the baking soda and salt in a large mixing bowl. Set aside.

2. Cut two lemons into 1-inch pieces. Put them in a blender and pulse until the lemon is finely chopped. In a small bowl, lightly beat the eggs. Add the milk, butter and chopped lemon. Stir.

3. Make a well in the center of the dry ingredients and pour in the lemon mixture. Stir just until all ingredients are moistened.

4. Spoon the batter into well-buttered cups of muffin pans, filling each half full.

5. Combine the remaining 2 tablespoons sugar and the cinnamon. Sprinkle about one-fourth teaspoon over each muffin. Cut the remaining lemon into 9 paper-thin slices; cut each slice in half. Top each muffin with half a slice of lemon.

6. Bake about 20 minutes, until golden brown. Run a small spatula or knife around each of the muffins to loosen, remove from the pan and cool on a wire rack. Serve warm.

Gratefully stolen from The LA Times Food section.

Litquake, NHK Japan News, & Me

Each year in October, my blessed role on the Litquake Executive Commitee arrives with the chilling winds. During our culminating event, the Lit Crawl, I curate a little reading series in the beautifully muraled Clarion Alley here in the Mission District of San Francisco. Muralists grace the walls expressing their hearts and minds and I bring writers and authors into the Alley to fill the space between. We set up a precarious stage made of four milk crates bolted to a wooden pallet, bring in a professional sound system and lights, and watch neighbors climb onto their roofs to sip beer as the city communes for the written words of their comrades. It's a magical evening. I feel moved that I came up with the idea four years ago, and my heart swells that San Francisco has come to enjoy it just as much.

This year a news team from NHK Japan decided to cover the Lit Crawl. They also decided that they alley was a cool place to shoot some B-roll. What I didn't learn until after the festival was that they wanted to use my story-how I came into Litquake and why I read in the alley-as the second half of their coverage. So here it is, the finished piece and all of its literary glory. The second half that covers my story and Clarion Alley comes in at the 6:00 mark, but the whole piece gives a solid glimpse into our beloved week of literary love. Beneath that, I have also included a longer mini-documentary that my good KiwiAussie friend, Adam, shot as his gift to our cause.

 

 

Lit Crawl - Litquake 2011 Mini Doco by Adam Griffiths

 

 

Hummingbird as Gift

 

Yesterday I finally started my writing group here in my beautiful home. It's been a long time coming. I was in a writing group back in '03-'05 and I have missed it something awful. There is something magical about a writing group, as if ideas flow through the group into the collective pens and onto each person's page. Like a channeling of sorts <insert new age California fruits 'n nuts hippy quip here>.

It was unseasonably warm yesterday for January. We should have rain by now. That worries me, but on the flip-side, it's days like those that have kept me warm here for 16 years and why I can't leave. One of among many other Cali delights. So I had the balcony door wide open to highlight the sprawling sunlit view of the giant roach clip in the west. 

I was just about to share my live writing from the prompt I had given our group... "The last time I kissed him/her..." as I had once again taken a stab at a scene I've been writing over and over for five years now about the last time I saw my ex, Bryce, alive before his suicide. It's a painfully sweet scene. More painful than sweet. Quite telling of my muse for this next book: the degradation of a renaissance man.

Just as I was about to read, something flew through the open balcony door. A bird? A big bee? So fast, what is that?

A hummingbird.

He was a big one. With a pointy beak and wings that could cut a fly in two. I thought and said, "Wow. It must be tiring flopping one's wings like that. I hope the little guy rests?"

"This is auspicious," Jenny from Denmark said.

We were all nervous, yet calm. I could tell that while we each sit with dying people every week, we couldn't stand the idea of that little hummingbird dying in my living room. Not as we were in the midst of writing about death, loss, spirituality, and meaning. Now really, what a cruel joke that would be?

Ben, the guy and tallest of our group, said, "I think I'll move over here so he doesn't see me as an imposing obstacle."

I couldn't look at first and kept turning away when he'd flop into the high window...his wings hitting the glass...over...and over...again, thinking it was an exit to the outside world.

Then Ben had a thought. "Can those high windows open?" he said.

I kept wishing we had a butterfly net. How DOES one safely catch a hummingbird?

We have a long pole that opens those high windows, so Ben fetched it.

And just as I was about to hand off the responsibility to "the man of the group" (something we Daddy-Girls tend to default to in stressful moments when men are around), I pulled up all the calm from all the meditation I've done, and the 15 minutes we had just done together before we started writing, stood on a step ladder, and slowly raised the pole toward the high window and the bird, and I effortlessly opened the window. 

The hummingbird landed on the ledge as if happy to rest for a bit. In no rush to leave.

"Go on, guy. Fly away. Move left. There now. Through the window. Freedom is near," were just some of the phrases whispered by the three meditating writers.

And off he flew, eventually, through the crack on the underside of the window.

We all breathed a collective sigh of relief.

This morning I looked up the significance of hummingbirds and this was my favorite find of the lot:

"...The first time is more of an awakening, the second is the opportunity to open your heart and accept the healing. The bird came not just to your house, but inside. You faced with experience with a gentle approach in catching and releasing the bird without harming it. This reflects your own personal healing journey, to face your own experiences with grace. You remind me of my own experience in my teen years when I rescued many a hummingbird as they frantically tried to escape through the boathouse windows, catching them in a fishing net and carrying them outside. This hummingbird was willing to risk its own precious life to help you in your journey, but there was no other option, we do what we must do without thought of our own wellbeing. The first hummingbird came to awaken and heal you so you could drive home safely. The second came to give you opportunity to give back. ..."

 

Collaborative Grieving: Many Voices Building Hope in The Spoken Coast Project

One of the gifts that has come out of my grief is the concept I've called collaborative grieving. I think of collaborative grieving as the opposite of isolation in our grief process. While the unspoken message in our society is that grief is something to process in private, outside of work hours, and as quickly as possible to return to someone's version of normal, I chose the opposite. I grieved out loud, in public, in workshops, with strangers, and now I feel free of my suffering because I had to do so.

In the rest of the world, collaborative grieving is ingrained in ritual and in culture. When I traveled alone through Asia for two years in 2000, I discovered grief was a part of daily life. There grief is not something to fear, or quieted to exist merely in life's shadows. Death and grief happen in community - and it is shared and processed out in the open among its members. In Indonesia on the island of Bali, processing death even has its own month - August - where villagers have their teeth filed, the dead body wrapped in a white sheet is placed on an altar to be carried by its community, and the body burns while its ashes float over loved ones into the tropical air. When I stumbled on this ritual during the month my parents visited me on the road, my father became uncomfortable - frustrated even - while I had to remind myself not to stick out my tongue, as if catching flakes of snow. I like to think that moment was my personal foreshadowing, as to how I might arrive at my personal place of comfort with death.

But being in Asia didn't bring me to collaborative grieving, or to sit on my comfortable cushion with death. It just gave me a glimpse into the concept. I had to struggle and grieve myself - and bring what I was experiencing after my boyfriend's suicide into my community - in order to find solace.

Insert The Spoken Coast Project.

I met Marissa Krupa, the creator of The Spoken Coast Project, shortly after Bryce's suicide. She most likely knew me as the girl in a heap of emotions who cried out my sorrow to strangers. Fortunately, I was able to return that gift of listening when she learned that her mother, and her brother, were both diagnosed with late stage cancers. Marissa went through her own grieving process - and continues to do so - through her project. Her brother, Mickey, unfortunately died early this year. But the way her community failed her in her grieving process prompted Marissa to look at her own life, and to make the necessary changes in order to honor Mickey's life as well as her own. She was laid off from her job, but she chose to leave the corporate sector that abandoned her to properly grieve her brother and find her own hope. How is she doing that? By climbing every peak Mickey climbed - from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego. She is feeling all of her feelings, as well as interviewing people about their own grieving process between each climb.

Marissa interviewed me this summer, and what arose from the ashes in my interview - and in all of the people she has interviewed in her path - was this trailer to introduce her project. It's about a fifteen minute film. And it's about death. But most importantly, it's about how we think we are grieving as individuals, but it's our collaborative grieving that creates the healing we have worked so hard to live with today. Please watch and enjoy. And if you are so inspired, please donate some dollars or some airline miles to her project so that Marissa can continue this very important work. She needs it. I needed it. America certainly needs it. And I imagine - that one day - you will need it too.

 

The Real Prescription for Healing Your Loss

How in the hell do I survive my loved one's suicide?

I'm often emailed and asked this question by friends, friends of friends, and just last week, from a woman in South America who lost her boyfriend and found my story in The Courage Companion: How to Live Life With True Power. Near and far, we are all reaching out for someone to help us navigate this traumatic loss.

I decided that the research, grief work, and learnings from my boyfriend's suicide five years ago is necessary for me to share with all of you. Not only because doing this all cleaned my slate to start anew, but because my grief allowed me to seek out diverse methods for healing fully in all areas of my life, and to come up with a real prescription for what I believe might just work for many of us left in the wake of suicide. To be honest, there is also a selfish incentive to sharing what I've learned with other survivors. Each time I share what I've learned, I get to watch myself heal and grow even further. It allows me to chart my progress and then take what I've learned to support others along this trecherous path.

Before I launch into what a magazine would probably title, Top Eight Ways to Heal Your Loved One's Suicide, I want to say that I am so sorry for your loss. I truly mean that. If you are here, this may be the first time that one person can say to you, "I know exactly how you feel," and really mean it. It is the first time in my life when I've felt 100% aligned with others (survivors, that is) and the first time in my life when I've felt I truly belonged (even when I didn't want to). No one should have to experience the level of guilt, shame, anger, confusion, and trauma that comes with the messy package that is suicide. But what I have learned in just five years is that if you take the time to process your grief fully, go into the trauma instead of treating it as just another aversion, and care for your heart as if it's the sweetest guest in your house, then the possibility to grow and expand and become more compassionate in this lifetime is more available to you.

What I've learned for myself after Bryce's suicide is that suicide is incrementally painful for three reasons:

1) it is shocking and often unexpected, even if we happen to later see that the signs were possibly there;

2) often our peers don't have the tools to talk about it with us because our society doesn't;

3) it's a stigma death, one that's unnecessarily loaded with shame and guilt in our world culture.

I have had to work very hard to move through all of the above. But the only way out is through, and through has now become a purpose in my life, to help others navigate suicide as I did. This way, we can rid ourselves of the shame and the stigma, and then educate ourselves so that no one has to suffer beyond the loved one we lost who suffered too much already. We may only have one life, so let's save ourselves while we're living it.

Here is my prescription for how to survive after a loved one's suicide:

1) Join a Suicide Support Group - it doesn't matter how far or close you were to the person who took their life, suicide has a profound ripple effect. Suicide Support Groups (which I trained to lead and will begin next year) can be found through AFSP (American Foundation for Suicide Prevention) here and through the American Association on Suicidology here. They both have incredible resource pages, as well. I did my suicide support group with San Francisco Suicide Prevention, and they list their groups here. Being in a suicide support group or grief group gives you a community of people who are going what you are going through, so they understand your pain and they are the people you can talk to about all that you are feeling. They are the only people I can go to to talk about suicide, fully, even today. They are the only ones I feel comfortable sharing the intimate details of my loss, of the trauma, of the secrets that died in the shame. In fact, I had brunch with four people from my suicide group last month and it continues to help process our grief today. A suicide support group is grounding, it is safe, and it is necessary. Studies prove this fact.

2) Process your grief fully - I also did a grief group that had a meditation focus because the eight week suicide support group had not been enough. I feel grateful that I had seven years of meditation practice under my belt when Bryce took his life. And as I was comfortable with the topic of death from my meditation practice, the Zen Center where I live in San Francisco offered exactly what I needed. The Zen Hospice Project —where I now serve as a volunteer caregiver one day a week—offers grief groups and drop-in groups. They also provide this incredible packet with some helpful quotes and a reading list on grief. 

I learned by watching others that when we don't fully process our grief, it shows up in our bodies, in our minds, in how we relate to our loved ones, and to others in our current day-to-day life. Help yourself by giving yourself the time to process the grief, no matter how long it takes. Many people will expect it *should* take you less time than it actually does. I have learned that often that is because they may be uncomfortable with their own ideas around death, or because your grief is too much for them. Let that stay with them, you have enough to deal with at this time.

During my loss, I had to teach myself and educate my peers by pulling back, hunkering down, saying no to outings, and to the needs of others upon me. Saying "No" taught me my limitations during my grief, and by doing so, I magically taught them that grief is personal and grief takes time. When I was soft with myself, others were softer towards me. It also taught my friends and family how to be with me during the grief years.

3) After you've helped yourself, help others - Early on in my meditation practice I realized that doing service always deepened my compassion. But I have found this to be particularly true with suicide prevention. This came much later down the road, after a few years, when I had worked through my grief quite a bit. How I did that is the following: 

-Overnight Walk & Community Walks with AFSP - these are healing opportunities to gather with other survivors and honor your loved one.

-I joined the Northern California AFSP Board of Trustees until I realized that being a Board member wasn't the best place for me. I'm much prefer "being in the field" if you will, by connecting to fellow suicide survivors one-on-one.

-AFSP's Suicide Support Group Facilitator Training - trains survivors to lead a suicide support group. I am interested in possibly focusing on those who have lost their partners. I took the training in May of this year and will begin my support group next year.

-Volunteering as an adult facilitator with Challenge Day - I was drawn to this work when I saw it on Oprah just after Bryce's suicide. As a volunteer adult facilitator, I join the organization when they go into middle schools and high schools and teach teens how to break down the barriers, the bullying, and talk to us about anything. Often they talk to us about their pain, their cutting, and their suicidal thoughts. For teens, these actions are often an extension of what is going on at home, on top of the pressure & bullying they now have in schools. It allowed me to learn how to be with teens and heal what Bryce first experienced as a teen himself.

4) Therapy and 12-Step family groups - I realized after my two grief groups (the suicide support group and the Zen Center's grief group), that wasn't enough. I still needed to talk out the trauma and the pain. I asked for recommendations in the field and sought out a suicidologist. The therapist I found taught suicidology to graduate students and had worked with survivors for years. She knew exactly the level of pain I had suffered and was a wealth of information. This one-on-one relationship was invaluable. When I finished my time with her (she had come out of retirement to work with me), I leaned heavily on Al-Anon, a 12-Step program for family members of alcoholics. People often assume that Bryce suffered from addiction when I am in "the rooms" (a term they use in 12-step regarding meetings), but this was not the case. But what I did learn, through the opportunity of tracing the lineage of my desire to be with him while at a 12-Step based rehab treatment facility for a family member the summer after Bryce died, was that I had done enough of my life on my own. Now I needed to learn to live my life again, but this time with the support of others.

5) Grief workshops - One day I mistyped my blog address and magically landed on Nancee Sobonya's website for her documentary, The Gifts of Grief. Nancee and I both came to the conclusion that there are gifts in grief if we allow ourselves to process our grief in order to find them. I highly recommend the film and her subsequent workshops.

6) Create a ritual - Ritual around death is severely lacking in our culture. I feel fortunate enough to live in the Mission district of San Francisco where the Latin culture celebrates Dia de Los Muertos. Bryce's birthday is November 1st, and every year on his birthday or the day after Dia de Los Muertos arrives in my neighborhood. I join other mourners and walk the city by candlelight in a procession that leads us to altars that people in the community have created to honor their loved ones they have lost. It is an incredibly healing night for me. If you don't have access to such celebrations, lighting a candle to honor your loved one on their birthday-or doing something kind for yourself to honor your loved one on their death day-is incredibly healing. This year on the anniversary of Bryce's suicide, I took a bit of his ashes out to the beach and sprinkled him out there. How I received his ashes four years ago was a surreal experience, but I have vowed that since Bryce and I loved to travel the world together, I will take a little bit of his ashes whenever I go to places where he never went. Next stop: Machu Picchu this September. 

7) Trim the Fat - One thing I learned very early on was who I could and could not spend time with after the suicide. Some of my friends were very angry at what Bryce "did to me" and voiced their opinions, sometimes too honestly. Other friends had an ingrained sense in them to just listen, as much as possible, whevever I needed it. Guess which friends I ended up spending more time with after the suicide? Bingo. There are some friends that require more than we have to give on any given day. These were the friends that I knew I couldn't spend much time with, if only because all of my extra energy (of which I had little) was spent tending to my grief. I made sure to let people know how I was feeling at all times and made no promises that I couldn't keep.

8) Read, read, and then read some more - Some of my best understanding as to why people die by suicide was by reading books on those who have researched the topic, and by those who have survived a loss themselves. Below are the most helpful books I read on grief, death, & suicide. And there is a whole stack on my bed stand that I have the rest of my life to read. I often feel that homicide and suicide are so similar because they are the most unexpected ways to die, leaving survivors behind to pick up their pieces.

Books on death: 

The Year of Magical Thinking - Joan Didion is an articulate writer and this won the National Book Award. It's a stunning portrait into losing your partner and what you have to face. 

Angel Catcher: A Journal of Loss and Remembrance - this journal written by a mother-daughter team who lost their son doing aid work for the UN in Africa is perfectly scripted to help you journal your loss and remember the details your loved one left behind for you. Fill it out so you don't forget. Read it later to chart your progress.

Tear Soup - this book is simple, kind, and it's perfect for kids. Or it's perfect for you when the heavy reading is just too much. I wrote an article for a magazine where I was staff writer entitled, "Serve Them Tear Soup, Kids Can Handle It", about how I discovered this sweet book and how deep inside me I somehow just knew how to talk to kids about suicide and death. Keep it simple. Kids do.

Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death - this was helpful regarding the trauma we face as humans when looking death squarely in the face. 

On Death & Dying - the bible on death by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

Half a Life - Darin Strauss' memoir about a tragic accident describes perfectly what life can be like while living it with unanswerable questions.

Books specifically on suicide:

Touched by Suicide: Hope and Healing After Loss

and

No Time To Say Goodbye: Surviving the Suicide of a Loved One - Carla Fine does a *fine* job navigating the intricacies of losing your partner to suicide.

Why People Die By Suicide - a son who's father killed himself, so he became a suicidologist and wrote the best book that explained suicide in concrete terms for me.

Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide 

and

An Unquiet Mind both by Kay Redfield Jamison - she stuggles with depression herself, is on staff at Johns Hopkins Medical School, and is also on the AFSP Board in NYC. She knows her subject matter deeply and lives with it everyday.

I Don't Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression - this book put the pieces together for me regarding men and suicide and insight to untreated early childhood trauma and how it can lead to depression later in life.

Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness by William Styron - he was a master in his time to write about his depression.

Go into your grief,
for there your soul will grow.
                                            - Carl Jung

 

The Courage to Prevent

One of the things you try to do as a writer while pounding away solo at the keyboard for days (or waking up grateful for jet lag that book themes, stories, and ideas are racing through your head), is get yourself some press. I'm lucky to have lived in San Francisco long enough to make nicey-nice with fellow writers, that once in awhile, press happens. As I wrote a few months back, a fellow Litquake committee member published her recent book, The Courage Companion: How to Live Life with True Power. which profiled my story of courage as one of the chapters. Insert The Voice of America, which broadcasts to 125 million people around the world and decided to do a story on the book and interview three of its contributors. I was happily one of them. You can read the story while listening to its broadcast on The Voice of America website here. And if you're so inspired, leave a comment on my blog about your own act of courage, comments are what I look forward to after sharing a story or two.

Discovering Choices in Wake of Tragedy

In memoriam for our friend, LSD, listen here to Through The Dark, by KT Tunstall

(photo from left to right, K, LSD, & me, circa 1980-something)

I received an email late Wednesday night from my mother. She didn't add to her own note, just "Sad News" in the subject line with a forwarded email from her friend from the town near Chicago where we had lived. Halfway down the forwarded email, my mother's friend wrote that my high school friend, LSD, had accidently overdosed at his parents' home and died. My mother's friend wrote,

"I think the last time I saw him was about 20 years ago. He was standing on the corner of Illinois Road and Bank Lane, right near your apartment, talking with Amanda. I remember how gorgeous he was and what a worry to all the mothers."  

After the sadness hit, and grief's familiar relatives made their way through my body (sluggishness & a headache from a mind that begins to drown in thoughts & memories), I realized that when I hear of a death close to me now, it bears double the weight because of Bryce, my former partner's, suicide. The visual that comes to mind is when teenage kids (the same age when LSD above and I were friends) run and do a "pile up" on one other kid's back, and the laughing faces and flailing limbs roll all over the back of the one sitting on the ground until they all topple on top of him. This is how the grief feels when I hear of someone I once loved and their premature death. Perhaps this is how LSD felt before he died.

When I re-read the email from my mother's friend, I remember LSD during that time when we were fourteen (and he was fifteen - the first one to drive, no doubt). I remember his killer smile. Driving around in the back seat of his dad's Cadillac convertible. Then driving around the next summer in the back of his own Jeep. I remember always feeling included around him, that I could come over to his house, play in his pool, flirt with the boys, listen to Steve Miller, and joke around. But what else do I remember, as it pops up so clearly from my mother's friend's email, and I think more about now that I'm closer to age fifty (the age those mothers were during that time) than sixteen? Her words, " I remember how gorgeous he was and what a worry to all the mothers." What a worry to all the mothers, she remembers.

I remember that to.

Her words made me think how lucky I was to get out alive and mostly unscathed. Not in the sense that I was a troubled teen (though in my own quiet way I most definitely was), but that the antics that we got away with during those years makes me shudder at what I could be up against raising a child these days. In the scheme of teenage antics, was what played out back then quite minor? Mostly, yes. At 10:00 p.m. as a handful of giggling 16 year-olds falling all over 18 year-old jocks, while 16 year-old boys yanked out the screen in the kitchen faucet to smoke out. But it made me think about the same scene that replayed itself every weekend until, I wondered, it led straight to what happened to LSD three nights ago. From 1989 at 10:00 p.m. on a Saturday to a fateful Tuesday night this past week in 2010.

LSD reached out to me some months ago and emailed me to tell me how happy he was that I had found love again. He had hope in his voice in that message. I've spent this week grieving how hard it was for him to keep that hope going. The same way hope had its way of failing Bryce.

I woke up this morning and read that in lieu of flowers to LSD's family, who always welcomed us into their home as much as LSD did, donations should be made to Hazelden. I thought about the obituary that read "age 38" and "Hazelden". Then I thought about my own family. About the thousands of dollars spent on trying to help family members through their addictions. I thought about my two weeks in rehab for family week for a family member's addiction, and how it led my own family to finally recount the addictions of our elders that were still living, now sober, or not. And then I thought about all of our family members who had passed. My great grandfather who took his own life in the bathtub. Or my grandmother passed out at the bottom of my mother's childhood stairs. And how the effects of those memories trickled down...and trickled down...until my loved ones, like Bryce, took their own lives. Then I paused and thought about the Al-Anon "Promises", and how I wished that all of my elders, and Bryce, and our smiling, handsome, friendly, welcoming, LSD, could have lived long enough to discover these promises for themselves.

"...We will discover that we are worthy of loving...We will love others without losing ourselves, and will learn to accept love in return...Our sight, once clouded and confused, will clear and we will be able to perceive reality and recognize truth...Courage and fellowship will replace fear...We will be able to risk failure to develop new, hidden talents...Our lives, no matter how battered and degraded, will yield hope to share with others...We will begin to feel and will come to know the vastness of our emotions, but we will not be slaves to them...Our secrets will no longer bind us in shame...As we gain the ability to forgive ourselves, our families and the world, our choices will expand...Serenity and peace will have meaning for us as we allow our lives and the lives of those we love to flow day by day...with (God's) ease, balance, and grace...No longer terrified, we will discover we are free to delight in life's paradox, mystery, and awe...We will laugh more...Fear will be replaced by faith, and gratitude will come naturally as we realize that our (Higher Power) is doing for us what we cannot do for ourselves..."

~From Survival to Recovery, pp. 269-270.

 

Coming Out Courageous

Earlier this year, fellow Litquake committee member, author and friend, Nina Lesowitz, called me one morning. As our fundraiser extraordinaire, I thought she was calling me for that donation back to Litquake since I shared with her weeks before about the surprise inheritance I had just received two years after Bryce's suicide. Instead, she called that morning to ask me a few questions about courage to include in her new book, The Courage Companion, and how one goes about finding it after the current love in your life chooses to take his own life over your love.

Two of my favorite quotes speak to what courage is truly about, the first, by my beloved Anaïs Nin, "Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage". The other, by one wise Eleanor Roosevelt,"You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience by which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, 'I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along."

I often say to friends, family, and other survivors, that Bryce's suicide made me more aware of what now in life is truly horrific. It taught me how I need to live my life now, how I now take more risks (like the need to speak openly about suicide, rather than whisper it as a secret like many learned to do), how much further it opened my heart, and how I go further into the causes, like how was it that I got there, meaning, how did I come to be in relationship with a man who took his life? It also taught me that the best relief comes from giving back my honesty to those who are on this path just behind me. Whether it be a woman in an emotionally abusive relationship, highly codependent, who doesn't know how to shut that door calmly behind her before she slams it in frustration one last time, or the friend who keeps letting her relationships turn into the top-bottom variety, where her partner calls the shots through silence, doubt, neglect, and she obliges by letting that neglect take over her own needs. 

Bryce's suicide was hopefully my life's only horror. The one event that arrived as a necessity for me to use as my launching point to look at future horrible events and say, "Well, this just doesn't trump suicide."

This came up surprisingly on my wedding day just one month ago. Two girlfriends scurried around my hotel room asking for things to do to busy themselves. "You're so calm," they said, "Why are we so nervous?"

I laughed.

"Actually, I think I have the suicide to thank for this one," a response they were all too familiar with by now. I think any life event that is supposed to make me nervous now fails in comparison to the nervousness, shame, fear that event had over me. Nothing really stacks up. "Plus, I'm marrying the right man," I said. "I should be calm." In a way, courage came simply, but only after the arduous task of gathering tools to turn me towards the courageous.

Please join by reading Nina & Mary Beth's chapter on me (p. 135, to be exact) and the full book on courage & inspiration. Nina asked the probing questions and I gave the honest answers. There are sparks of clarity, and realizations of what could have been, but most importantly, there is solace in having learned that it took the tools I gathered since that fateful January day to get me to the place where courage carried me through so I could quietly shut the door.