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.

 

 

A Letter To Grams With Shades of Hope

(If the video isn't playing, please click here: A Letter To Grams With Shades of Hope to view on Vimeo.)

At Lit Crawl 2008 in Clarion Alley during Litquake, San Francisco's Literary Festival.



Dear Grams,

It’s been five years since you died and I had an itch to write you an update, much like the one I would have given you in your pale yellow kitchen once you waved me in from the window. I’ve been theorizing about the dead for a while anyway, particularly whether or not you all look down to see what remains to terrorize the rest of us.

I envision you dressed in pink cashmere and pearls, your hair perfectly coifed, while gay men, like your best friends Ernie and Alan, flank you on either side. Did you hear their 30-year business and relationship went bankrupt? What a shame. And were you able to catch a hazy glimpse of that garish arrangement Ernie delivered the day you left us? I imagine if you had been there, you would have pursed your Lancome lips around your half-glass of bubbly, and asked Dad to turn up “Unforgettable” on the stereo. Wherever you are, I’m certain you’re still smiling, and I wanted you to know that after two years of hell, I’m finally smiling myself.

I use that bit of wisdom you wrote me on the back of a lined note card as my life’s mantra now, the one from your Christian Science reader that said, “Always do the nearest right thing.” It stuck so that we went ahead and etched it on your gravestone (next to Ernie’s arrangement, which we agreed would be best if it just went with you.)

A lifetime has happened to me since you passed. I finally turned those emails I sent during my two years in Asia into a book, became a writer with an agent, and met the man you always said I would meet. Yes, he took care of me as you had hoped he would, even supported me while I wrote that first book. Bryce was his name, and he could have graced any cover of a Patagonia catalog by kayaking a Class 5 river or skiing off a thirty-foot cliff. He grew a five o’clock shadow after one night sleeping under the Idaho stars, fixed anything that required his keen brain and two hands, and slipped a Gerber knife into his pants pocket with his change every morning. You would have loved him for completing household projects you’d assign him ten minutes after you met. I loved him because of his sensitive heart and the fact that he was a perfect 50/50 mother-father blend, because Bryce favored a brooding dark side. His pupils grew black, taking his green eyes hostage whenever he decided I was in the wrong. And while he loved to cuddle to make amends, he ended up spending more time curled up on the Thai green silk triangular cushion I brought back from Bangkok than he did spooning me. He’d sit on it at the window, for hours silent for days, until the green in the Thai silk worked its way back into his eyes and a smile might just get him standing. When the green returned, that meant his heart might soon follow, and “might” was always good enough for me.

If I knew now what I knew then, I may not have spent weeks, months, or four years trying to get him off that cushion and back into the realistic ebbs and flows of life. Or sulked whenever he got on Craigslist to search the Men Seeking Women once he hit his dark spot, which led him to question his love for me. You see, I never could understand how he couldn’t love me. I was your granddaughter for Christ’s sake and my name even meant “worthy of love.” I also would have refused my role as Bryce’s lifesaver had I known that I came from such a long line of lifesavers. Grams, you always expected me to wait for the man that would adore me, but I lay my excuse at your feet and admit here that I merely followed suit. No man ever adored a woman in my family. My male role model was a loving father who I saw for three days twice a month and the occasional Hush Puppy salesman whose move to win over my mom was to lure me into his catalog of white sandals. And even I knew at age nine that white sandals were tacky.

So at thirty, with a live-in boyfriend, I used my childish antics to survive.

Once Bryce’s moods and attitudes stopped becoming easy targets to pin my blame, I took a two-week trip to rehab this summer, and learned that I could let go of being his lifesaver if I let the love in for me for a change. But don’t worry, Grams, I didn’t just go to rehab this summer, the whole family did.

Sure, most families reunited over cattle on a dude ranch in the Rocky Mountains in order to get that Christmas card photo while wearing matching Polo shirts. The one that makes me puke and others feel envy. Well, Mom, Dad, Laura, Dave, their three kids and I decided to take the dysfunctional family vacation. We traveled deep into the heart of Texas, where the cattle herd only to become slaughtered on a platter as a Porterhouse steak and the families only reunite in order to get their shit together.

And Grams, we had five, 8-hour days to get our shit together.

But let me bring you up to speed as to what exactly brought us there.

After four years of living and loving my moody man, and then cutting the line to finally save myself, Bryce took his own life. I left two years ago this week, and two weeks later Bryce drove his father and our Volvo down a rural Idaho road at a 90 mph clip. He paralyzed his father that day, and spent the next three months bouncing from mental institution to halfway house most likely plotting his own demise until his plan worked. Later that next year, Laura’s husband, Dave, popped every ADD medication prescribed to my nephews, and whatever other pills he could scrounge from their cabinets, and lay himself on the cold cement of their laundry room floor. As I moved through my days dazed in grief, Laura tried to manage, while her family ran itself into the ground. Laura and I had stopped supporting each other, and I ignored her plea at the German bakery in Idaho that summer before when she whispered, “Amanda, get out now.” It wasn’t until we landed in the overly air-conditioned room at Shades of Hope, the best little rehab in Texas, that we realized these problems didn’t start with Laura or with me.

It took Laurie, Ms. Pat, and Ms. Tennie, the Texas therapists who kept us seated in straight back chairs, to help us weed through generations of secrets, withheld confrontations, and a box coined Pandora, which overflowed with codependency.

But Grams, you would have been proud.

On Day 1, I asked the therapists, “I just want to know where this all started?” And on Day 2, Dave, Laura’s husband, read us a letter admitting his thirty-year addiction with bulimia. Laura then read her own, explaining how she dealt with Dave’s disease by shutting down and spending herself into oblivion. On Day 3, it finally came out that Mom didn’t move to Chicago after the divorce so that we could live closer to Dad, but that she left Massachusetts due to the proverbial gun to her head, the one held by the wife of the husband that Mom was in love with. On Day 4, Dad had most of his balls back from that minor shock and happily participated in the group. He took his morning claim and our issues on the floor seriously and introduced himself saying, “Hi I’m Skip. I’m a co-dependent.” I’m certain he was the first white male Republican in Texas to do so. And finally, by Day 5, Mom stopped making jokes to cover up her pitfalls. I think it helped that she had spent the whole night before puking up her emotions (though she blamed it on the Porterhouse steak) and that I vowed to myself that I’d take care of her for the last time. You see, Grams, I found my answers in that air conditioned room, and as I took care of Mom lying on the bathroom floor. None of this started with Bryce, or with Dave, it never does. It started with Mom, and with her Mom, and with your first husband, Dad’s dad, and with his dad before that. Then it trickles down until the secrets become suicide.

It turns out Dad married Mom so that he wouldn’t have to admit to his college buddies that he didn’t think their cement hulled boat would sail them around the world, and Mom married Dad so that she could have babies that would finally bring her happiness. And I sat as a vegetarian in a catfish restaurant laughing out loud at both of them, saying, “Now those are good reasons to get married.”

It took just five days, Grams, all at Shades of Hope. There were shades of darkness and moments of light, but it took remembering your “nearest right thing,” to know that no matter what had happened in the past, there was hope to be had in my future.

My Boyfriend ’s Ashes

I met my boyfriend’s brother for coffee and walked away with my boyfriend’s ashes. As I stood waiting for my name to be called, hoping for distraction from the silence, I took a deep breath. In the last fifteen minutes, I hadn’t heard his brother once say my boyfriend’s name. You might think that made it easy for us to meet on a sunny day to talk in a crowded coffee shop, but it wasn’t. Because now that my boyfriend was gone, his brother and I had a lot less to say to one another.

I expected to talk about his suicide notes or how incredibly scary it was in those final summer months living with my boyfriend, and how I had cried myself to sleep in the second bedroom out of fear. I wanted to tell him that his parents and I had mistakenly believed the cuts on his brother’s wrists had come from a slip of his chisel. I wanted to know if he had also counted five suicide attempts from his brother’s final two-week journal entry, and how his brother could hide anything. As I sat waiting to hear my boyfriend’s name cross his brother’s lips, I wondered if his lack of questions for me meant he had known something that I hadn’t, and had known it so intimately that it would never be shared.

We put our empty mugs on the counter and drove to his house to retrieve the remaining items that I was meant to have. He asked, “What else is going on?” which had been his most probing question of the morning. Did he want to hear about any romance, or was he thinking that if I shared something then he wouldn’t have to share himself? But therapy, support groups, helpful programs, and new friends had taught me that I only had to share what was best for me. “Not much,” I said dodging a car that tried to cut me off.

He walked me through my old house, the one I had shared with him, his (and my boyfriend’s) sister, and her husband and daughter. He spoke about the new back porch that would include a handicap ramp for his father, who my boyfriend had paralyzed in a car accident just two months before taking his own life. The ramp would be removable because my boyfriend’s father wouldn’t have his oldest son’s legacy be that he had put his own father in a chair. His father knew he would move his own legs again some day, as did I, because we were both optimists, one of the very qualities that my boyfriend had envied in both of us.

We stepped into the kitchen and he handed me a rock I had given to him that I had stored in my boyfriend’s tool shed. My boyfriend had collected large rocks to build into a fireplace, a fireplace that he fantasized about with me as we lay under a tarp on sand watching moose dunk their heads into the Salmon River on our first Idaho river trip. His fantasies of the future had included me, so I spent our lazy afternoons on rock islands in the river looking for my own rock to contribute. I found a light gray rock with a solid dark gray stripe around the center, outlined on either side with two thin white stripes. An unbelievable rock that had only seen nature, but was found by a city girl. He smiled, throwing it into his handmade dory that we floated. Now I held the rock in my arms, just as I had held him that last time we were together, when we sat in spider position on the carpet facing one another. His tears soaked his neck while he questioned, “What is happening to me?” All I could muster after a year of hell was, “I don’t know,” through my own tears.

As I stood in the kitchen with the rock, I thought back to my attempts to find a container for his ashes last summer while visiting his parents. His mother had found four ceramic jars with corks to distribute a handful of my boyfriend’s ashes to his four siblings, but said that she couldn’t find a container for me. I had mistaken it as a form of silent punishment until she told me the shop where she had bought them so I could see if they had one more. I stood in the kitchen wanting to tell his brother how humorous that day had been, and how grieving sometimes did that to us, gave us laughter as a respite from our pain.

The town where my boyfriend and I had lived for the last two summers only had a handful of shops. I stood in the grocery store aisle with a strange smile, wondering who would ever go to a grocery store looking for containers for their dead loved ones. So I went next door to the shoe/outdoor wear/clothing/houseware store and crept around set tables hoping a perfect container might call me over to its shelf.

“Can I help you find something?” A blonde saleswoman asked while I tipped a container upside down to look inside.

“I’m looking for a small container with a top on it to hold something.” I figured my ambiguity might encourage her to bring options over without me having to whisper “urn” or “ashes.”

She walked me over to a fancy set of salt and pepper shakers, the kind with the glass bottoms and stainless steel tops that twisted right, exposing large enough holes for the salt to seep into boiling water or a pot of bubbling sauce.

“That’s not exactly what I’m looking for. It needs to be unbreakable, and have a top, like a cork, so whatever’s inside can’t escape.”

I wanted to be more helpful for her, until I realized that wasn’t my job. Not now, no more. My chest sunk until I smiled politely at her, “Thank you,” as I turned to leave the store. She smiled confused since she had shown me five containers that would never work. How could she know that the containers weren’t meant for dead boyfriends?

“Here, you can have my container of ashes,” his brother said, pulling me out of my daze. His mother had eventually found an empty jam jar for my ashes, but his brother was apt to keep the jar and give the other container to me. He stood at the junk drawer pulling out rubber bands and tape to wrap around his container that was now mine, the handmade piece of pottery with the cork stuck deep inside so none of his brother could ever come out. He pushed the cork in further with his thumb, wound the rubber band around the cork, and then taped over the cork four times with scotch tape.

“This is so surreal,” I said as he secured his brother’s ashes, reminding me of his brother himself.

“Oh, being here in your old house?” he said deadpan.

“No, you giving me Bryce’s ashes.” I finally said his name as if to jog his memory. “Sometimes I still can’t believe that he’s really dead. I would never have foreseen this years ago.”

“Yeah,” was all he gave in return.

I walked out to the car with the flawlessly lined rock in my arms and Bryce’s container of ashes between my fingers.

“What are you going to do with them?” he asked.

“I don’t know. I remember Bryce and I talked about flying his plane over Africa. Then he had this dream about me and a place I would build for travelers in the Serengeti, so I think having these ashes will give me more of a reason to get there someday.”

I explained to him that a part of me knew that the contents of this small container were no longer Bryce, but then another part of me felt he should go to a place where he had always wanted to go.

“But he’s just going to ride in the van with me for now,” and I smiled, climbing into my van.

I looked down at the small compartment in the console, just behind the gearshift, an ideal place for my boyfriend’s ashes in his small container. I nudged him in there securely, knowing that he would never spill out, and then I drove him home.

There Are No Coincidences

I never believed in ghosts. I didn’t ever have a reason to, but since Bryce took his life, there have been too many occasions for me not to believe. It’s true. In the six months since Bryce’s death, I’ve changed. I’m what some might now call a believer. Some people may think I’m crazy that I would even go there (“there” being: seeing signs, getting clues, contacting mediums, astrologers, intuitives, and acknowledging that there is “the other side”), but since I’ve always been a seeker, I was bound to find some things. The signs that I have experienced have provided me with a tremendous amount of comfort. They have helped with my grieving process, which as a survivor, is all that we can hope for while we heal.

The first time I got an inkling that Bryce was still around was when his parents contacted an intuitive after his death. The intuitive gave them a reading and without having any information on Bryce, she was able to see specific details of what tragic events had happened in Bryce’s life before he took his own life. She said names of friends and asked about past events that had happened in Bryce’s and his family’s life. She knew that Bryce had caused an accident that paralyzed his father just months before he took his own life. Goose bumps and shortness of breath kept me present during the twenty-minute reading, listening to all of his hidden truths (some that only I knew) spoken by a stranger made me realize that perhaps I could no longer scoff at television shows such as Crossing Over. It was a time to dive deeper.

I hadn’t dreamt much about Bryce in those early months, and I started to crave my own visions and conversations with him, to get answers to all of the questions that I wanted to ask him. I craved to find my own intuitive or medium to give me a reading and tell me how Bryce felt about this now that he was gone. I read the impressive book, Many Lives, Many Masters: The True Story of a Prominent Psychiatrist, His Young Patient, and the Past-Life Therapy That Changed Both Their Lives, about the Harvard educated psychologist who, against his own will, had been led by his patients towards past-life therapy. From it, he had learned that we met people from our past lives repeatedly. It had come recommended by the sweet girl who worked at my UPS Store, where I kept my P.O. Box, and once she told me about it I cried, because I remembered that Bryce had tried to get me to read it years before. Another friend recommended a medium named America, but she was booked for a year. Then she recommended another woman who had the gift, but she wasn’t practicing it full time. When she and I spoke, she told me that she would meditate and prepare to contact Bryce and that she’d call if anything came to her. I waited by the phone as a girl might wait for that certain man to call, but my phone didn’t ring. I concluded that his “spirit” had to spend time around his family in these initial months to give them the support they needed. I decided that I would have to find my support within this dimension, and not try so hard to search for it on the other side.

I let go, a lot. I finished my suicide support group, started to see my therapist every other week instead of weekly, and I made an effort to think of how my life might look better than it could ever have been. This is exactly when Bryce started to send his signs. I had spent this particular Sunday working on my book project and I was tired, knowing that once in awhile sitting down in front of the television provided some relief. Though my roommate and I have basic cable, I usually find myself going to public television to catch Frontline. It was nine at night, and since our local PBS station was showing a repeat, I searched for the other PBS station further up the channels. I stopped when I saw the familiar face of Dr. Wayne Dyer, the inspirational speaker who had done a handful of specials for PBS. Bryce and I had gone to see him a year before in San Francisco, which PBS had taped live in front of a thousand fans, and I remembered how we had never seen the finished product. What crossed my mind next was whether the cameras had ever filmed Bryce and me during the recording. The very thought of the possibility had me staring at the screen. The special had been an extension of Dyer’s book entitled, Inspiration: Your Ultimate Calling.

Years before, Bryce and I had seen the film, What the Bleep Do We Know?!, which marked the beginning in our combined quest to find out if humans really could create their own realities. As I sat to take in Dyer’s inspirational stories with the studio audience, he came to the part of the talk that I remembered when he read a letter that Ram Dass had written to a couple after their young daughter had been murdered. The letter had been read by the couple in Ram Dass’ documentary, Fierce Grace, which had been named by Newsweek as of the Top Five Non-Fiction Films of 2002. In addition, the film had come recommended to me when I broke down to a random yoga teacher about Bryce’s death in those first weeks. As Dyer read the poignant words of Ram Dass from the television, I got just as choked up as I had that night I had been there in the studio audience. Then all of a sudden the cameras flashed to Bryce who was now on the screen. I gasped and immediately picked up my phone to call my girlfriend who had been in the audience with Bryce and me during the filming. Then I sent a text to his mom and called Bryce’s sister. I was in shock. It was the first time that I had seen live images of Bryce since his death.

Dyer was nearing the end and came to my favorite part in his talk, how he had come up with the cover photo for his book. He lived in Maui, had just finished writing the last chapter of the book, a story about his friend who had died and how that friend had been fascinated by Monarch butterflies, when Dyer had walked outside to sit in meditation. A butterfly flew onto Dyer’s hand and stayed there for two whole hours while he walked the beach, certain that the butterfly was his friend. He told the story just as well this second time around on TV as he had that night. And just as he was explaining how open we had to be to see these miracles, the screen flashed into the audience and showed Bryce and me. I burst into tears. There were only two stories about death, and life after death, in Dyer’s full three-hour talk, and during those two specific (and quite special) stories, the camera had chosen to show Bryce. I was starting to believe.

Months later, I had planned to gather with some of Bryce’s friends and family to sprinkle some of his ashes in his favorite river. The intuitive had seen that image back in the reading months before, reiterating an idea that I had come up with, so we were secure in the fact that we had chosen to do the right thing. A week before, stressed and a wreck, I decided that I couldn’t handle the trip. I needed a vacation, a real kind, from Bryce, from the suicide, and from my grief. My closest friend who had stood by me during this tragedy helped me decide that we should go to an island to relax and get as far away from all of this as possible. In our day-long layover, we got a hotel room to rest before our evening flight, and for the first time in my life, my back went out. I couldn’t move, I couldn’t stand, and I certainly couldn’t carry my backpack. My friend asked me if I was well enough to go on the trip. Normally, I would spend some time considering if my pain was psychosomatic, but I was in so much pain that all I could do was sleep. I slept for four hours. When I woke up, my friend lay in the other bed.
“Amanda, there’s something I want to tell you,” my friend held her journal and a pen while I had just stepped out of the bathroom having taken a bath to try to relieve my pain.
“This has only happened to me one other time with my grandmother and I didn’t want to believe it,” she said quietly with ease.
I stood in my towel with wet hair and slowly lowered myself to sit on my bed.
“While you were asleep Bryce came into the room.” I took a deep breath and felt the emotions taking over, the lump move into my throat, and tears swelled in my eyes.
“What? What do you mean? How did that happen? Were you dreaming?”
“No,” she said calmly. “I was awake just lying here. He came in and sat down on the end of my bed. I know. It’s freaking me out, too.”
“I said to him, ‘Are you ok with her taking this trip with me?’” (Since I had cancelled the trip to deal with his ashes on the river.)
“He said, ‘Yes.’” I tried to straighten up and pay attention.
“Then I said, ‘I'm sorry that we've been talking about you and that I have been comparing you to Jordan (Jordan was her recent ex). I won't do that anymore.’ He said, ‘That's fine.’”
“And then he said this to me, ‘I want you to tell her that I'm going to take care of her.’”
I burst into tears, “Oh, God.”

The tears swam down my face and onto my neck. I paced the room back and forth, wondering what life was all about, wondering if Bryce had finally been ready to come give me the comfort that I had needed from the other side. I didn’t know whether to believe her. She didn’t want to take it for real either, so we talked about it some more.
Then I asked, “What did he look like?”
“I could only see his back. But he was wearing a red jacket. Actually, it was a red, fleece jacket.”
My friend didn’t know Bryce enough to know what he would wear. She had probably only met him a handful of times. Then it hit me.
“Wait, Bryce was most likely wearing the red, fleece jacket I gave him when he killed himself.”
In that moment, I realized, there are no coincidences.

You’re My Home

You once told me that I was your home,

and I wrote it down so that I would never forget.

I clung to that wrinkled piece of paper by mistake,

like it was an extension of your heart.

But then I learned that paper can never wrap its arms around you,

or hold your hand in a crowd,

or dance with you on an empty dance floor.

I thought it could, but that was my mistake.

So now, when I’m not busying myself with missing what was good,

I remember what it really feels like.

I’m more at home all by myself.

Remembering Him Best

“It’s going to be like that first morning when you found out about Bryce’s suicide. Each time you experience something for the first time it’s going to be hard.”
I picked up a piece of corn bread, layered it with butter and jalapeno jelly, and realized that the memorial service would be the first time I would see his parents since my boyfriend, Bryce, had taken his own life. It would be the first time I would see his friends, and the first time I would meet some of his friends that I only heard about from the few memories that Bryce had shared.
A friend explained the concept of “experiencing firsts” to me while I sat weepy across the table picking at delicious baked goods that I could hardly enjoy.

It would be the first time back in the town where we had lived together, the town Bryce had called home for thirteen years before the almost four that we had dated. He had talked about the timberframe building he would design and build for us: three stories and a penthouse apartment with floor to ceiling windows that would overlook the mountains and valley. It would also be the first time that I would go into Bryce’s office in his timberframe shop, the one that had taken me four days to paint cerulean blue. I had chosen the color to remind him of the oceans in the world that we would swim and sail. I had gotten the paint free from a local painter because he happened to have that color leftover.
“Hell, if you don’t take it, it’ll just sit in the back of my truck,” he had said while he coughed out the remnants of his Marlboro. When I would walk into that office now it would be another first, Bryce wouldn’t be sitting there, and his absence would be permanent.

Two of his friends on my radar still didn’t know about Bryce’s suicide. One named David was unreachable because he spent winters surfing the Pacific in Mexico and turned off his cell phone for four months. My quest to contact him became obsessive (which I had noticed was one way of dealing with the shock and grief). I went as far as emailing random surfers that I found by goggling surfing forums to see if they might be catching the same waves as my described friend. One e-mailed back.
“Yeah, I know that guy. Have never talked to him, but have seen him on the beach.”
I grew frustrated and wanted to e-mail back, “Well, do you think you could go up to him?” but knew I should monitor where I channeled my anger.
I never heard back from the surfer, chalked it up to the fact that catching righteous tubes was more important than connecting strangers and wondered if I had put the words "death" or "suicide" in the email would I have gotten different results. I had to let go of the fact that our friend might miss the memorial service, and wondered how long it would be before he learned the news.

It took some time before anyone could even think about having Bryce’s memorial service, but once the date was set, each family member and close friend worked out his or her own part. His family, aunts, uncles, cousins, four close friends, and I gathered beneath one of Bryce’s timberframe at his parent’s home for a light brunch. Then we moved into the living room and formed a circle on chairs and couches. One by one, we went around sharing our thoughts, a poem, or something we had written to explain what was special to each of us about Bryce. As we reached for Kleenex to wipe away our tears, we reached into our hearts to share about his life.

We had scheduled a larger service for the community that evening at the timberframe shop. Earlier the day before, I had driven to get poster board and as the sun reflected off two feet of snow, I veered off and got myself stuck. In this rural area without four-wheel drive, I had to wave down any car that decided to pass in the thirty minutes that I stood there wishing I had remembered gloves. An older woman, stocky and strong like most of the rock climbing, mountain biking type that lived in these parts, stopped her truck.
“Oh, did you get distracted putting on make-up?”

Her condescending tone had put me off, it was the same masculinity that made me miss the femininity that always surrounded me in San Francisco, but I was in such a sorry state wondering how I had gotten stuck in the first place that it didn’t occur to me to give her my real excuse. I didn’t bother telling her it was because I had reached for my ringing phone and couldn’t distinguish between the side of the road and the snow bank, and I didn’t bother asking her to give me a little compassionate break. She left me with a tow rope, a shovel and brief instructions as to how I could get out once someone came by, then she waved me off to make it to her appointment on time. I stood their shoveling around the tires and couldn’t recall anyone being worried about making it anywhere on time in this town. Then I looked up, a habit you do after someone dies, and I cursed Bryce. Though I didn’t put too much faith in there being a heaven, I didn’t know where else to look. I knew that wherever he was, he was looking down on me laughing, because he used to say, “You could never handle winters here.” It wasn’t that I couldn’t, it’s that I never would have wanted to.

Once the third truck came by and towed me out of my winter nightmare, I went to the timberframe shop and covered the entrance wall with photographs that I had taken of Bryce over the years. The photomontage started with our first road trip around Idaho. Then the photos and descriptions moved across the wall like the travels that had moved us around North America. There was the circle trip through the Canadian Rockies, the camping trip on the big island of Hawaii, our discovery of the Pacific Northwest and Vancouver Island, and finally our trip from last year through Mexico. Bryce had rebuilt a refurbished Japanese motor for a 1986 Toyota van that we drove from San Francisco down the Pacific coast to the middle of Mexico, onward through Mexico City, up into Texas, over to Florida, up the Eastern seaboard and across the states back into Idaho. He had bought the van for one hundred dollars, the motor for three hundred, and spent two weeks comparing the old motor to the new motor with the keen eye of a self-taught expert.

Next, he build a pine bed frame for the van which he cut down the center, installed some hinges, and made the piece so that it could fold up one side in order to get our personal items stored in laundry baskets underneath. It was in these glimpses of Bryce’s ingenuity that had attracted him to me. It was the way he could create and solve any building or mechanical mystery and turn it into a project that kept him focused. When he had finished that project, I crawled onto our tri-fold mattress with him as we lay like spoons. In that moment, I waited for those three words that I always wanted to hear from him. I realize now that the safest way for Bryce to communicate those words was through his accomplishments.

Back at the memorial service, faces I knew and faces I always wondered about filled the shop a hundred people deep. I was nervous to see anyone who recognized me, but as it goes in small communities, once you’ve left your mark, a hug awaits you around every corner.
Bryce’s best friend came up to me.

“Amanda, you won’t believe who’s here,” and he led me around a crowd of people.
Standing before me was our surfing friend, David. I ran into him for a hug as I started to cry. “They found you. You got my emails.”
David shook his head in grief, “I can’t believe it,” he said in the same shock I had had for a month already. “Wait, what emails?”
“You didn’t get my emails? I was emailing surfers in Mexico to find you. They didn’t tell you? Then how did you know to come?”

David explained that he had had problems with his Achilles' tendon, (which ironically to me had been Bryce’s same physical issue when I had first met him), and that he had come back into the Valley for one day and night to see his doctor. He had driven into town for dinner and someone had said to him, “Hey, you going to that thing for Bryce?”
David said, “What is Bryce having?”
I cried wondering if Bryce was up there orchestrating this all.
Moments later, while I stood in a circle of women blubbering about how strange it was that David had shown up, Bryce’s Aunt Ellie came up to me.
“Amanda, this is Katy. I think you two would have a lot in common, you should talk.” Katy was one woman that I didn’t recognize from the Valley, which meant nothing since it had only been my second summer here.
“Katy, I need to eat. Let me grab something.”
I trusted Bryce’s Aunt Ellie that she wouldn’t give me something I couldn’t handle. I also trusted her because it was one of the few relatives in Bryce’s family that he had recently grown close to during a time when he started to separate himself from so many others.

Katy and I went to the front of the table that was next to the microphone we would all begin using soon. As I tried to eat bite-sized spinach quiches, Katy started in on her story. “I don’t really know where to start?” she said.
“Just talk,” I said, knowing that after experiencing David’s arrival, nothing would faze me.
“Well, I didn’t really know Bryce, but I felt like I should be here. My boyfriend killed himself ten years ago.” I started to tear up again.
She told me how it had happened in her early twenties right after college graduation, how she had gone on to travel on her own, had gotten knee-deep into drugs and alcohol, had met another man and had gotten pregnant (and since had had a daughter). Then she told me how her boyfriend who she had recently split from had said to her, “You’re still not over him.” “Him” was her boyfriend that had killed himself ten years before.
“So, I thought I should come tonight because I don’t think I ever really grieved for him properly.” She mentioned how Bryce had sounded a lot like her boyfriend: brilliant, intense, talented, a perfectionist, and needing to be in control of his life. She told me how she had gone back to Chicago for his memorial service to be with his family after her boyfriend’s suicide, and then something struck me as a coincidence, so I spoke up.
“Where in Chicago was your boyfriend from?”
I had asked because I had already learned the world was small in these circles.
“Winnetka,” she said intently.
“Wait, what was his name?”
Katy revealed his name and I dropped my head into my hands.
“What is going on here?”
I didn’t think my body could handle any more shock.
“I knew your boyfriend.” I looked up at Katy whose face was now red with tears and in the same state of shock.
“Are you kidding me?” As she said that, the memory from my past that I had totally forgotten until now flooded my brain.
“Well, I knew him one day. I went to see a swimming meet. He was a strong swimmer, right?”
She cried harder. “Yes.”
I told her how I had gone to a swim meet with some friends to cheer on one of our friends and how I had remembered seeing her boyfriend. I admired his strong shoulders and chest, and how I had recalled how cute he had been and remembered his name since he had won the meet. It was a single memory from one day that I hadn’t thought about in seventeen years until this moment.
We sat there staring at each other not knowing what to make of our meeting. 

“Did Aunt Ellie know this when she met you?”

Aunt Ellie had been standing near the door and walked up to Katy to ask her how she had known Bryce. Katy told her that she had come with a friend of Bryce’s, and that she had never known him, but that she had lost her boyfriend to the same tragedy. I wondered what the message was to be in our meeting, but instead just sat with Katy holding her hand while we cried together.

Bryce’s business partner got on the microphone to help wipe away some of the devastation. We sat listening to friends and strangers do their recollections on what they remembered most about Bryce. One new friend of mine, a man who had lost his daughter to suicide years before, had told me to ask one friend to be within arms reach of me throughout the service. He had told me that I would need it. As I sat there listening to these people’s stories about Bryce, with my head spinning at the small miracles that had already been placed before me at the service so far, there was my friend who I had appointed as the person I could reach for. She pulled a chair up next to me, put her hand on my leg, and whispered, “How are you doing?”
“You have no idea,” as I blew my nose and smiled.

There were old backcountry skiing buddy’s who spoke of Bryce’s ingenuity again, how one time when his pole basket had broken, he had squashed a Budweiser can from his daypack to use it as a replacement basket. Then there was the architect in town who spoke of Bryce’s incredible talent for building timberframes and his impeccable work ethic. Next was a woman I couldn’t place in Bryce’s life. She talked about how Bryce would show up at her grandkids’ birthday parties over the years and how she had appreciated Bryce’s kid-like mentality. She talked about how Bryce would line the girls up on a hillside lying down, and then he’d play “Steamroll” and roll all 180 lbs. of himself down the hill over the girls while they giggled. Everyone in the room laughed as if we all knew that devilish side that had Bryce do things that might not always look like a good idea but somehow he managed to pull off. When the woman left the microphone, I realized where I had recognized her. When I had stopped at the corner drugstore the day before, I had broken down into tears seeing an old friend. While I had broken down to my friend explaining the photomontage I was making of Bryce, this woman had rung me up at the cash register. She had been the first person in town who couldn’t look me in the eye, now I knew why.
I got up and ran to the bathroom to see one of Bryce’s kayaking friends leaning against the wall.
“Amanda,” he whispered, “how many times did you run out of gas when you were with Bryce?”
I smiled, “Hold that thought,” and closed the bathroom.
There had been that time we had exited the highway onto the off-ramp and then coasted around the corner to gain momentum to land in that exit’s gas station. I remembered how we had been in hysterics with the luck of it all. Then there had been another time on our way to a friend’s wedding when I had forgotten that the gas light had come on (because Bryce had taught me that you always had more time than I’d think with a gas light), and we had to hitch to a gas station with an older couple in their cross-country RV. Then there had been the time in Mexico last winter. One of the tricks of the Toyota van was that the fuel gauge was broken. We had to watch it go down to Empty immediately after fueling up and then remember that during the second time the gauge went down to Empty, that this was the true gauge of our fuel. Bryce had confused the two, so we had to walk off the Mexican toll road into a town, spend twice what gas had cost back in the States, and barter the rest with some beer since we had run out of pesos.
I came back out of the bathroom and whispered to Sam, “I remember running out of gas three times, but it was probably more than that.”
“Yeah, it was four with me.”
I gave Sam a hug and went back to my seat to try to wring out a little more happiness.

On a back table, there was a book where people could write in their thoughts about Bryce, which was helpful for those who couldn’t have shared them in front of a crowd. On the cover of the book was a photograph of Bryce riverboarding. He was smiling as if he had always been in that space, though in the last year I knew he hadn’t. His smile reflected how we all wanted to remember him, as the adventurer, the free spirit, the kind of person who would try just about anything. However, what Bryce had become behind closed doors was in the other photographs that I had taken. He and I would go on afternoon hikes or drive out into the country to discover abandoned barns, and he would usually walk ahead of me. When I put together the photomontage, I noticed that I had taken so many shots of Bryce from behind that you would have thought I knew we might lose him someday. The contrast between these two types of photographs mirrored the exact contrast that was our relationship, and a life that he compartmentalized in order to hide what ailed him.

On the next table was a bowl full of polished rocks called thought rocks, rocks where we could write our thoughts with a silver Sharpie. A psychologist friend explained the thought rocks idea, that friends should write and decorate them to give to his parents to plant in their garden or keep in a special place. I photographed the rocks for my memory. Some read as: Peace, ’07 season is for you (which must have been from one of Bryce’s kayaking buddies), and Pure Love, which is what I had written as a reminder as to what I kept telling Bryce even in those final days when we had talked, that no matter what had happened in the past, he was always loved. The one fact that I had learned early on after I had left the relationship was that my love for Bryce was never going to be enough to save him. So I left my rock, hoping that if he was indeed coordinating the few miracles and moments that kept blowing my mind during this memorial service, at least he knew that even when it grew so bad, underneath that top layer of sadness was the pure love I kept trying to give him.

I walked around taking more photographs to have for my memory of this special night. There were a few stragglers next to the kegerator, resembling some off-campus parties in college. Men dressed in fleece, Carhartt pants and hiking boots topped off their plastic cups and laughed here and there. I walked over to a couple I knew and leaned into them, something I had done for myself throughout the night to old friends and new. Then I looked at the woman standing across from me, looking familiar but more dressed up in a skirt and a little mascara.
“Wait, I know you?” I said.
“Yeah, I’m the one who helped you in the snow this morning.”
My swollen eyes must have reminded her of what I needed to hear.
“And yeah, now I understand why you went off the road.”
I smiled, welcoming her forgiveness, and went back to taking photographs of what we had created here: words, thought rocks and memories, the very things that were the most important for us to remember him best.

Serve Them Tear Soup, Kids Can Handle It

When a friend’s dog was left for dead in the dirt road that led to her mountain ranch last fall, I was the one who was on the phone with her when she found him. “Oh, there’s a dog in the middle of the road,” was her first comment with just a tinge of annoyance. The next thing I heard on the end of the line was, “Oh my God, I think it’s my dog?” Her second comment was more a statement of shock slightly tinged with fear. Her last comment came through tears. “Oh, no! Oh, no…my dog is dead. What am I going to tell Liam (her eight year old)? I’m going to have to call you back.” She hung up. I called her back and got her voicemail where I said that she could call me if she needed anything, for me to pick up her two kids, whatever. Then I got in my car and drove to the bookstore in town.

Books are one of the gifts that I have been grateful for in my life lately. Books say the things that, at times, we can’t seem to say.

I asked the women at the bookstore if they had any children’s books on grief. I had spent some of my days away from my own book manuscript working in this very bookstore, so I knew where the children’s books were, I just needed the recommendation. I needed a book that was as sensitive as Liam. I sat down and opened up the children’s book, Tear Soup: A Recipe for Healing After Loss, written by Pat Schweibert, Chuck DeKlyen, and illustrated by Taylor Bills.

I read each page in the silence that bookstores so effortlessly provide, with only the sound of the pages turning to disturb me from the beauty of the words written on each page. When I got to this passage, I had to catch my own tears from smudging the ink.

“Grandy found that most people can tolerate only a cup of someone else’s tear soup. The giant bowl, where Grandy could repeatedly share her sadness in great detail, was left for a few willing friends.”

I paid for the book and angled it against my friend’s art studio door that she would find later to read to her son. The next day she called me and thanked me for the book, telling me that she and Liam were able to talk a lot more easily about his dog’s death once they had sat through one reading of Tear Soup. I made a mental note to buy myself a copy in case I would need it in the future.

Three months later I did.

***

“I feel like I’m unraveling.” Grandy cried. “I’m mad. I’m confused. I can’t make any decisions. Nobody can make me feel good. I’m a mess. I just didn’t realize it would be this hard.”

My oldest sister was fourth in line behind my other sister, my mom and my dad of who I told over the phone of my boyfriend’s suicide. She was the sister who had recognized the summer before that I may be in over my head in this relationship and spoke to me from the wisdom of her forty years. I had listened to her while we stood facing each other on the back steps of the little one room bakery in town, but I stared at my feet instead of her eyes that were the same color blue as mine.

“Amanda, you cannot be responsible for his happiness. I’m telling you, it won’t get any easier if this kind of stuff is coming up now.” She had witnessed my boyfriend blaming me for the sale of his house which he had put on the market a year before. She was right, it was hard to hear, and I loved him too much underneath the ridiculousness of his blame to leave. But a month later, when I left for a trip out of the country, I decided to voice my concern and take a break from the relationship while I traveled abroad. Then when I returned we were good again, so I stayed. This was the beginning of a year-long pattern, but really it was an extension of a pattern that was there from the beginning. He was down, I was down. He was up, I was up. I decided my emotions according to his and my gut knew it wasn’t right, but my heart was too attached. Because when it was good, it was so good, but when it was bad, I knew I deserved better.

When I left the last time, knowing that I would go down with him if I stayed, I had to do everything I could not to go back. We were mirror reflections of one another. We were soul mates. We had been placed in this lifetime to teach each other the hard lessons that might help us evolve if we were willing to work them out. But in the reflection was more pain than either of us could handle. I know this now.

When he killed himself I reached for my copy of Tear Soup.

My oldest sister was the first one to offer that after the memorial service I come be with her and her family. I booked my reservation that day. A week later over the phone she said to me, “We’re not going to tell the kids about Bryce. We’re just telling them that you guys broke up since they just went through the death of Wanda.” I understood that the kids had gone through the death of their grandmother just a month before, but I wondered what kind of lesson was being taught to their kids if they covered up the reality of life’s journey from them. I understood not telling them about suicide. I imagined there was a certain age to reach before such a conversation, but the fact was that I would have to lie if the moment presented itself. This put me over the edge, but I didn’t have the energy to take on the fact that this didn’t seem right and change it according to my wishes. How could I visit them for a week, just a month after his suicide, and pretend that Bryce had just become my ex-boyfriend? How could I turn the tears of devastation and shuffles of my tired feet into something like a break-up? But instead I kept silent and made a mental note that when I would have my own kids, we would talk about everything.

I arrived at their house after the memorial service exhausted on a snowy night. Though my sister picked me up, we talked in monotone, and it was my brother-in-law in the front doorway who asked me the one question I still crave everyday. “How are you doing?” I stood in my hat, gloves and coat and fell into his hug. I let go of the tears and lies that I felt I had needed to hide. I was learning that a good cry was a much-needed release. I started to crave a good cry as I did the very answers to the questions that would prompt it. While I cried into his shoulder, I looked over at my niece and nephews who watched me while their eyes darted back and forth in discomfort. I wondered if they now knew.

We sat down for dinner moments later and held hands for grace. My sister started. “Why don’t we each share something good that happened to us today?” I couldn’t believe the words coming from her mouth. Did she really think I would have something good to report? My eight-year old nephew was the middle child of the three, the one who always surprised us with comments to remind us of his sensitivity, so he spoke up. “I have an idea. Why don’t we say something nice?” My brother-in-law responded. “Okay, Ethan, why don’t you start?”

We lowered our heads. “Dear God,” Ethan said as I peeked to see his eyes closed while he spoke. “Please take care of Bryce in heaven.” The tears fell down my cheeks as I squeezed Ethan’s hand hard and smiled at him. My brother-in-law whispered, “From the mouths of babes,” and looked at me with his own tears and a smile.

“She sensed that people in church believed that if she really had faith she would be spared deep sorrow, anger and loneliness. Grandy kept reminding herself to be grateful for ALL the emotions that God had given her.”

When the kids were excused from the table to do their post-dinner activities, my sister, brother-in-law and I sat at the dining room table to finally reconnect. My sister told me that they had stuck to the idea of not telling the kids until the kids had broached the subject on their own.

“On Sunday after church we told the kids that you were coming for a visit. And then Christopher (the oldest of the three kids) said, “Is Bryce coming?” That’s when we knew we couldn’t lie. So we told them.” I held my hands together at my mouth hanging on her every word, wondering if the kids had asked how he died, wondering if they had told them. “We didn’t tell them it was suicide.”

My six year old niece, Katherine, directed me in her room as we got ready for bed. “I always sleep on the top bunk, so you can sleep down there,” she pointed to her bottom bunk. “Sounds good to me,” I said to bring calm within a room that had been attacked by toys. She curled up with her stuffed animals on her top bunk, while I moved all of her pink and lavender blankets to get into the bottom bunk.

We lay still in our bunks.

“Can you talk in heaven?” Katherine said from above. “Yes,” I said. “I think you can.”

“Is dog heaven next to human heaven?” I could picture her twirling the ear on her stuffed animal bunny above me as she pondered such honest questions. “I think it is right next door,” I answered.

The week before, I had fretted about how I might answer such questions when they came, but the answers were simple when the questions asked were so real.

A few nights later, after I had had some time to bond and hug and get to know my niece and nephews outside of the few times I saw them each year, I had my laptop idling on their living room chair. Katherine and I were sitting on the floor playing the card game Memory. She giggled after beating me two times, and then she caught out of the corner of her eye a photo that flashed on the screen from my photo screensaver. It was a group shot of Bryce, me and the three kids when we had visited last spring.

She looked me right in the eye.
“You know, I cried today at school because four people who are close to me died.”
I could only account for two, her Grandma Wanda and Bryce, but I also realized that with how heavy and sad it was in the air, I, too, felt the weight of four deaths.
“I want to see more photos of us,” she said.
“Okay,” I smiled.
It was rare for anyone to ask to see my photos. I had to dig through the photos that I had separated out into my “Bryce” folder, the folder I had created in those early days after his suicide because I couldn’t handle seeing his face pop up on my screen after my laptop lay dormant for five minutes. I opened up the folder that held more of the photos from our time that visit and began talking openly about Bryce.

“Remember this walk?” I said. “When I took all of those silly pictures of you on the swing set?” Katherine giggled. “Yeah, that was fun.” Then she did that thing that I used to do at her age, ask those questions that were wiser than her years.

“Why did Bryce die?”

I wasn’t totally sure of the answer to give a six year old, or the reason as to why he died either, and I thought of one of the last things Bryce had said to me before I had left the relationship, “Promise me that you won’t ever put me into a box?” he had said. I had to tell her something other than suicide. I had to be honest, but suicide was too young for her brain to comprehend, not to mention the nightmares it might create. So I did the best with what I had.

“Bryce had a disease in his brain that made him sick.”

“What’s the disease?” she said.

“It’s called mental illness.”

As we sat back on the floor to begin our next game of Memory, I wondered if I had just put Bryce in the very box that he had asked me to keep him out of.

“There were no words that could describe the pain she was feeling. What’s more, when she looked out the window it surprised her to see how the rest of the world was going on as usual while her world had stopped.”

I left my sister’s house and realized how proud I was, how I handled the secret of suicide by being open with her children regarding death. I was taking the time to be with my feelings, and to be honest with them by sharing what felt appropriate at the time. My mom visited them last week and told me that Katherine had talked to her about our time in February.

“Aunt Amanda was really sad when she was here,” she said. My initial reaction when I heard this from my mom was to worry, but then I realized that children also need to see sadness, and how fortunate we would both be when I would see her again this coming July for my dad’s 70th birthday. Then she would see that each day since the last I had grown a little less sad.

“As soon as Grandy tasted the rich flavor of that carefully made soup, she promised herself never again to assume that quicker was better.”

When I got back home I flipped through my copy of Tear Soup. I came to the page that was just an illustration. Drawn were three pots with the words “Profound loss”, “Major tragedy” and “More than I can bear”. Above the pots were spoons hanging from the wall to stir the tear soup that Grandy had made. Above the hanging spoons was a shelf with cookbooks leaning against each other with poignant titles. The first book was entitled, “Murder,” which surprised me. As I turned my head to read the spines of all of the books, I read, “House Fire,” which I had had my freshman year in college when two guys arsoned my dorm room, then “Divorce,” which I had experienced twice in my childhood, and next was “Flunked Geometry,” which reminded me of the D grade I had received in Statistics. After reading all of the titles, I realized that grief and tears were around more often than we adults cared to admit. Then, at the tippy-top, above “Infertility” and “Spouse Died,” was the book of “Suicide”.

I shut Tear Soup and decided to keep it within arm’s reach for that day when we might have to stir our own batch of tear soup.