Mothers’ Day/Mothers’ Sorrows
How does a mother carry the pain of the suicide of her child?
Today, on the weekend we celebrate Mother’s Day, I sat with an elderly woman carrying her dead child. Of course, her adult child’s body has been buried, and she gave her a beautiful headstone with a message so dear as to make an observer pause in contemplation. But she carries the weight of her painful death, a foreclosed life, and her loss of her child’s companionship, first thing in the morning, and last thing at bedtime. She admits the weight is burdensome and she can barely do it. I ask what the carrying means, and she says she carries her because to set her down feels wrong to her: an abandonment? a betrayal?
I make a gesture like a woman cradling her infant in her arms. Babies are heavy the longer we carry them. We must rest, must find a cradle to lay them in, and we must do the myriad other things: cook and clean and make a living and tend to other people in our care. And importantly, we must feed and nurture ourselves, live our own lives—we are not on this Earth only to care for others: that is servitude.
Babies can’t stay in our arms forever. They grow up and become autonomous beings, with their own agency. We set them on their own feet.
Where is a sacred cradle to be found for a child who ends their life? How do we carry all the meanings we make of this? What part of the burden may a woman place into that cradle? How do we lay that body down: the hopes and dreams and the profound loss?
Another mother I know buried her child after he died of suicide in a jail cell. Her son told his jailers he intended to do so. Then they failed to remove the means of suicide from his cell, failed to observe the videos of him initiating his plan, and failed to perform a cell check for eight hours before finding his body. (If it’s important for you to know what he was jailed for-and I’d ask you why that is: he failed to appear in court after rolling his car off a mountain road.) They failed to keep him safe until he could appear in front of the judge the next morning. The judge would have ordered him to pay a fine, and more importantly, ordered him to get counseling, and this 27-year-old dear young man would have had the support to face and carry his burdens. Perhaps he would have transformed them into light.
His mother, along with his beloved and his friends, wrapped his body in a blanket and laid him in a natural grave in a beautiful mountain cemetery near where he lived until he died. His beloved gave everyone tiny paper hearts to write messages of farewell and love, and she placed them there with him.
Sometime later, after the earth settled and his mother settled her rattled nerves enough, she returned to his grave and placed a statue: a mother carrying her child. And then she went further in laying down the burden: she sued the jail for liability, and won. The burden of his death belonged not to her to carry, but to the people who had one job to do-keep a person safely in custody from Saturday night until Monday.
The sorrowful loss will always be hers to carry, though how she carries it is bearable because she could admit she did not have the power to save him.
But the first mother can sue no one (though I fear she is “suing” herself for liability). Because in suicide, we who survive and are close to that person, tend to assume blame. It may be natural, but it is an unfair assumption that we could have and should have known—read silent clues, been there at the precise moment to intervene—because we are not capable of being on duty 24/7, and we do not have custody of a person.
I asked the first mother: if your daughter could speak to you on this Mothers Day weekend, would she say, “I want you to keep carrying the burden of my death, Mom” ? She said, no, her daughter would not.
(What would your child tell you they want from you now?)
In motherhood, there is a saying: a mother is only as happy as her least-happy child. In suicide, we assume that we who birthed a child can never lay that child’s body down. And so we carry, because empty arms feel wrong. But mothers need somebody—some ritual, some solace— to gently take the body from their arms and lay him (or her or them) down, into the arms of another Love.
What are the rituals that helped you lay down the body of your dear one? What helps you carry your loss? What lets you live your life again, in spite of your child’s death? Can you imagine yourself picking up the burden of living your life anew?
May you find support to carry the burden of your grief. May you carry your own life forward.