Lucky

I had always considered myself a lucky person – a happy person. I have a large, boisterous family. My parents remained married their whole lives, and while there was sometimes strife between them, it wasn’t hard to tell that they were devoted to one another. I had enjoyed a lot of good fortune and very little loss. I even married my first love.

The first bump in the road came for us when we tried to get pregnant with no luck. There were a couple of years of humiliating infertility testing before we got a satisfactory diagnosis – I had a congenital anomaly of the uterus that left me with one fallopian tube and a very under-sized uterus. It was still conceivable (pardon the pun) that I could get pregnant, but there was a big question mark about whether I could carry a pregnancy to term. For the first time in my life, I felt unlucky.

It didn’t take long for me to emerge from my self-pity and realize I had options. Good options. I began looking into adoption. Private open adoptions were just taking off at that time and there were some high profile stories about adoptions gone bad. These stories terrified my husband, Peter. He imagined the pain of bonding with a child and then having to return the baby to his or her birth parent. He was not convinced this was the right path for us. We read a lot and went to adoption conferences. The wonderful stories of families formed through adoption gave us both hope and we began making our own adoption plan. We decided to adopt internationally, from Colombia, and began the application and home study process.

Before our home study was even complete an opportunity for us to adopt domestically became a possibility. We had deliberately decided not to do this, but this out-of-the-blue opportunity seemed fateful. Our social worker told us there was very little chance it would work out, but just several weeks after the first conversation we found ourselves driving south to await the birth of our daughter. When we held Emma for the first time, we couldn’t believe how lucky we were.

Our luck repeated itself 3 years later when I found myself pregnant. Our second beautiful daughter, Sarah, arrived a little more than 4 years after Emma and once again, I considered myself one of the luckiest people in the world: a nice home, a loving husband and 2 beautiful daughters. I was living a charmed life.

When a tragedy strikes, life changes in a head-spinning moment. On June 17, 2009 our lives changed forever when our beautiful daughter Emma took her life 5 days before her 17^th birthday. Emma had had some struggles throughout her childhood, but she was from all appearances a happy, smart, personable and accomplished young woman. Nothing could have prepared us for her death, and nothing could have prepared us for the journey with grief we have faced since her death.

It rained non-stop for the five days leading up to Emma’s funeral, which seemed appropriate. It was like the universe was mourning with us. Deaths by suicide are often hidden and shrouded in shame. We did not hide how Emma died. It was not a conscious choice. In our shock it didn’t even occur to us to lie. Thankfully, family, friends and our community rallied around us. We felt loved and supported and that was a great help.

The really hard part of the journey came after the funeral. People who had been supporting us non-stop began to go back to their lives. We were left alone to deal with the shock, shame, guilt and bone-crushing grief. Sarah was terrified that her family would fall apart under the weight of all these emotions. She had lost a friend to leukemia in 4^th grade and had watched that family disintegrate afterwards. About a week after Emma died the three of us were sitting at the dining room table trying to make sense of what had happened when Sarah declared, “We are not going to let this destroy us!” She was right, of course. We couldn’t let that happen. It wouldn’t be right for us, and it wouldn’t be the right way to honor Emma’s memory. We had to find a path forward.

In late August, 2 months after Emma died, Peter went back to work and Sarah went back to school. I had quit my full-time job so that I could be available for Sarah if she needed me, but my boss insisted that I continue to work at least a little – 10 hours a week; not because they needed me, but because she thought I needed some purpose. We were all finding it difficult to concentrate and be productive, but we had gotten some advice to just “fake it until you make it,” so we were faking our way through the days.

My boss’s instinct was right, and I soon found myself spending too much time alone with nothing to distract me from my grief. I decided to volunteer to be a guest reader for a kindergarten class in a neighboring city. Emma had loved books and reading from the time she was tiny, so going in to read to that class was almost like an act of communion. The children were also incredibly healing for me. The reflection of myself that I saw in their smiles, heard in their laughs, and felt in their hugs, made me feel that while I felt broken, my spirit was still intact.

Maybe it was reading those books Emma loved to the kindergarteners, but about 4 months after she died I began to get a rush of memories that I felt compelled to record. This came as a great relief because immediately after Emma died it felt as if all of my memories of her had been erased from the hard drive of my brain. I started a blog to capture and share my stories of Emma and for the rest of the first year and most of the second year I posted a new story every day.

We joined support groups – two of them – where we could share our heartbreak and shock with people who had experienced the same or similar losses. One of our support groups was for parents who had lost children in all different ways, but when we joined we were the only ones who had lost a child to suicide. Going in we thought that our experience was too different for this group to be helpful. But it turns out that shock, isolation, guilt and, of course, grief accompany the loss of a child regardless of the circumstances.

I also allowed myself to be angry, in mostly productive ways. I was distressed by the cursory way that the school supported and educated Emma’s friends after her death, so I educated myself and shared the resources I found with the district. I worked with the district for the better part of 2 years to get a more comprehensive suicide prevention, intervention and response policy in place. I became active in the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP), raising money to support education, survivor support, training, research and public policy efforts. Twice I joined AFSP in Washington, D.C. to visit my legislators, share my story, and ask for their support of important mental health legislation.

Sarah and I traveled to India on a mission trip to get some perspective on our lives. As unlucky as we felt on a day-to-day basis, we couldn’t ignore our privilege when faced with the wretched conditions we saw in the slums of Hyderabad. Yet, despite extreme deprivation, all the people we met were supremely joyful. Humans are resilient. We will be resilient.

And I formed new friendships. Looking back, I think this was perhaps the greatest sign of the resilience of the human spirit – that I could form new bonds in the face of a devastating loss. But I was lucky enough to have some wonderfully kind and generous people befriend me after Emma died. Some of the people I knew well before Emma’s death had an unhelpful inclination to try to fix me. These new friends were willing just to be present – to stand in the circle of my grief with me and let it be.

None of this was a silver bullet. Grief will have its day. You can’t will it away. We were shocked to find that the second year was harder than the first. I suppose we thought the first year was like a sprint to the finish line and that we would feel better when we got there. It turns out this journey with grief is more like a marathon. Life would never be the same and we needed to find a new rhythm – a new normal, as they say.

I’m 10 years out now.  We have found that new normal. I’ve been back working full time for more than 7 years now at jobs that have provided real purpose. Sarah has graduated from high school and college and has continued to lead us with her insights and determination. She has learned to tell her family’s story truthfully and openly and has found support and acceptance all along the way. Peter and I are celebrating our 33rd wedding anniversary this year, dodging a frightening divorce statistic for couples who have lost a child.  I still miss Emma every day. I still get sad. Anniversaries, birthdays and holidays are still hard, but I’ve come to accept this as the price of loving someone with all your heart, and I wouldn’t trade that love for anything. I’m a lucky person.