Sorrow: Surviving a Son’s Suicide
by Susan Wight
I lift up the faded brown T-shirt and gather its softness to my face, inhaling the scent I’ve known since Rion was born. The one he had when I first reached for him in the delivery room and nuzzled his fuzzy head—that sweet and sour mix of milky warmth and puppy belly. I think I could recognize the still-familiar, but grown-up smell of him anywhere.
Neatly folding his cotton shirt back into a compact shape, I maneuver it back inside the clear, ziplock bag that preserves the odor, gently pressing out all the air before sliding the blue plastic tab to seal it shut. His shirt lives in the bottom drawer of my old walnut dresser beneath a stack of silky nightgowns.
I’ve been doing this—performing this private ritual—off and on for the past ten years, the shirt still pungent and smelling of our son even after all this time. It might seem like an odd thing to do, but it brings me solace and some temporary relief from the pain. In the beginning, soon after Rion’s death, I visited this keepsake frequently, but as the weeks, months, and years wore on, the need to viscerally connect with Rion has waned, something I thought would never happen. Now, I only dig down under the nightgowns in my dresser drawer when the occasional rough wave of sadness comes crashing down, catching me unexpectedly and throwing me off balance. At these times, I miss my son with such intensity it physically hurts, and I count the number of years it’s been since I’ve hugged him.
The morning began like any other, with my husband David, our younger son Winston, and me all waking, dressing, and jockeying for kitchen space as we each made our separate breakfasts. A strong sun shone through the kitchen window, not too unusual for a late October morning in the San Francisco Bay Area. I felt the warmth outside while I kissed David on the doorstep as he hurried to his car, dreading the tiresome commute to a nonprofit agency across the Bay. He had plans to come home early and prepare for his trip back east to visit Rion in Ithaca, New York where Rion had recently returned, trying to get back on track as a student at Cornell University’s School of Architecture. Winston bounded down the steps like a kangaroo, waving as he ran to catch a bus to Berkeley High. I returned to the kitchen to straighten up before beginning my graphic-design work for the day.
In the midafternoon, a sharp rap sounded on the front door. Our German Shepherd went ballistic, her loud, nonstop barking accompanying us as I dragged her into my office by the collar, shutting in her noise. I looked through the brass peephole and saw a youngish policeman in a dark-blue uniform, a redhead with a multitude of freckles, standing silently waiting for someone to answer his knock. At that moment, I was unaware that our lives were about to change forever as soon as I opened the door.
“Hello, Ma’am, I’m Officer Hughes. Are you Susan Wight?”
“Yes.”
“The mother of Rion Wight?”
I nodded, as my stomach clenched.
“Ma’am, I’m afraid I have some very bad news for you.”
I braced myself, slumping back against the door frame. Somehow, I knew what was coming.
“Early this morning, your son Rion was found dead in his car in New York, near the town of Cayuga.” Officer Hughes was trying hard to appear calm as he conveyed the news. “The detective who called believes he died somewhere between eight and nine o’clock last night. It looks like he took his own life.” His soft voice entered the vulnerable core of my being like a hot poker, searing a permanent hole through my heart and branding me a grieving mother forever.
“I feel relieved,” I whispered to the officer. And I did feel that way—relief from the growing mountain of worry that had been crushing all of us ever since Rion began fifth grade and we realized he had changed, seemingly overnight, from a cheerful boy to a miserable one. And from all the responsibility I’ve always felt for him and his unhappiness throughout his short life. That’s not the right way to respond, I thought to myself, feeling like I was standing outside my body watching two people perform on a stage—a stage disguised as our front porch—with one of them saying the wrong line.
The day before, on a sunny fall afternoon, Rion drove 40 miles up the length of a narrow lake in central New York. He parked his old Toyota in a small cemetery just outside the town of Cayuga among cracked gravestones and tall colorful sycamore trees. Maybe he sat and watched the evening sun set over the lake while drawing two signs, each with a skull-and-crossbones and words below it warning of a hazard. He taped up what he had drawn to the car windows in front and on the sides—a thoughtful thing to do we were told by the police—before sealing all the windows of the car on the inside with duct-tape and filling a large, white bucket with a lethal combination of chemicals, creating the noxious gas that would kill him.
For years afterward, David and I painfully tried to come to terms with Rion’s death and all that led to his desperate final act. Mired in grief and guilt, we lamented over the many poignant and now obvious red flags: his social angst and anxiety through adolescence, the inner demons that continued to plague him in college, the diagnosis of bipolar disorder. My inability to heal our son, to make him feel safe and whole, or even to help him in any real significant way has haunted me and feels like a huge failure. After all, isn’t a mother’s primary job to make sure her young survive? Just like what’s shown on the nature shows—the lioness with her cub, the mama grizzly, the barnacle goose down below watching her gosling leap for its life. I remember the times as a child I felt small and unprotected from my father, who was also diagnosed with bipolar disorder. My mother was no match for him whenever he became threatening, verbally abusive, and out of control. Many times my sisters and I feared for our lives. Those memories of my mother’s inability to protect me feed into my own sense of inadequacy, making me question if I was a good enough parent for our son.
I will always think of Rion as a shooting star that burned out early. His future seemed so bright and full of promise, yet how quickly it all dimmed. Smart and creative, he was an outsider who couldn’t find his place at the table, couldn’t partake in life’s banquet the way others his age did so effortlessly, leaving him always hungry for acceptance and the social ease most of his peers enjoyed. He was mostly a loner who remained on the edge of the crowd, longing to fit in but not fathoming how.
Mental illness seems to have become pervasive in our culture, yet is often hidden away, not outwardly shared and acknowledged, with consequences that are tragically real and dire, reminding me of growing up weighed down by the family secret of my father’s bipolar disorder. How many more young people are out there just like our son…how many more will do exactly what he did…how many more families will be devastated?
My heart aches for those like Rion, who start out on top of their game, only to be overwhelmed by thoughts gone wrong, compelled to sit on the sidelines in isolation, ultimately seeing only one possible exit from their pain.
The climb out of the pit of despair our family was thrown into by Rion’s deed has taken much effort and time. They call it “grief work,” and it feels like hard labor, both physically and emotionally. There is no hurrying through this kind of mire. David and I struggled deeply with the sadness and guilt over losing our son and not being able to get him the support he needed to alter the trajectory of his life. We had tried hard, though, as parents making sure he always had a warm, loving family around him and access to an array of mental health supports (psychiatrist, psychologist, peer support networks, and more).
We three left behind had to grieve Rion’s death in our separate ways. I spent a fair amount of time during the day alone, curled in a fetal position exhausting myself with tears that wouldn’t stop. I couldn’t do this when Winston was home. He needed me. I was grateful to David who went off to work each day and did what he had to do to support our family. That first year, I berated myself with intense feelings of guilt and remorse, blowing hot blame and anger toward those I loved the most, trying to deflect some of the awfulness I felt. David and Winston had their own versions of this. It was good that we kept our vindictive thoughts to ourselves, only admitting these things to one another in the recent past. How large we can grow and how tiny we can shrink under extreme adversity.
I worried about Winston, who turned 16 two weeks after that awful day and was impacted by his brother’s suicide in ways we are only beginning to comprehend. Winston felt guilty just for surviving—he lived when Rion did not—and also for his imagined negligence as a brother. He sometimes envied all the admiration from others Rion still garnered, a ghost sibling whom Winston couldn’t compete with or surpass.
In the months and years since our son died, I’ve had many dreams about him that have brought both joy and sorrow, but there were a few in particular that stood out. Each dream was vivid and lifelike and conveyed the feeling of my actually having spoken to and spent time with Rion. In all three, I was fully conscious that our son was dead and had committed suicide, but yet, by some miracle, I was actually interacting with him.
The first occurred soon after he died. I really didn’t know what I believed as far as an afterlife was concerned, but I had watched enough scary movies to make me leery of glimpsing any apparitions, even ones that might be as familiar as Rion. A childhood fear of the supernatural was woven into this dream, and in it I was alone, standing in the kitchen of our home when I heard slow footsteps coming down the front hallway, an eerie creak and clomp with each step on the wooden floor. In the dream, I guessed that the sounds were made by Rion and felt terror at the possibility of seeing or confronting his spirit. He might even be angry with me for somehow not saving him or having been the mother he needed me to be. Skirting around the hallway, I made my way to the front door, where I stood facing whatever was coming. Rion appeared with a male companion as they walked side-by-side up the long hallway toward me. The companion reached into his pocket. I was afraid he was pulling out a weapon of some kind—maybe a knife—but instead, he handed me a small wooden crucifix. Rion was wearing a drab brown T-shirt over brown pants and seemed somber and a bit worn out. He came close, gently put his hands on my shoulders, and looked me in the eyes. Then he said, “I’m okay.” He emphasized the last word in a way that helped me to fully understand. Rion was not cheerful or wonderful, but he was also no longer suffering or in pain. My fear dissolved as I sadly smiled at him and the two of us hugged. I was astonished at how solid he felt when I put my arms around him, for even in the dream I knew he was dead. I woke with the understanding that he truly was safe and that wherever he was, he was not alone.
Dream number two came one night a few months later. Again.…Rion was dead…but it seemed very lifelike. This time, he was dressed in the clothes he last wore—a black fleece jacket, black pants, and black shoes. In the dream, we were arguing about his suicide. I was adamantly against what he had done while Rion was advocating for the validity of his actions. He was emphasizing that there were many sides to the story of suicide. He pointed out that taking his own life had stopped his pain, that this would be an understandable and acceptable act if he had been a cancer victim. In the end, we hugged—and he felt solid and real. We each said, “I love you,” before I woke up. I was left with the sensation of having just spoken with him and of having truly spent time together.
A few years later, I had the third dream. In it, I went to find Rion instead of waiting for him to find me. I traveled to wherever he was, somewhere on the “other side.” Crouching off to the side of a path among vast green lawns and rolling hills, I spotted Rion approaching and watched as he walked by. He was wearing a shirt, tie, and dark suit and was moving with purpose toward some sort of event about to happen, something he was to be a part of. He seemed surprised when he saw me there. We hugged and again, he felt like an actual person. I could see that he was now in a better place than ever before, fully engaged in what he was doing and not the loner he was when he was alive. I awoke from that dream feeling a deep peace and a sense that Rion truly was still somewhere out there. I didn’t know exactly how that was possible—and I still had plenty of skepticism—but the three dreams helped me reconcile what had happened and come to a lighter place with it all.
It took David and me both a long time before we were each willing to look at and express how much anger and resentment we felt toward Rion after his death. For me, I had to first blame and berate myself for years before finally turning the flames of my fury toward our son. David said this was true for him, too. How could Rion have betrayed the gift of life that we had given him…how could he have thrown away his very existence like that? And I am also angry with fate, God, or whatever phenomenon allows certain families to skate through life with no hardship while others, like ours, get no such pass.
When I think back on how hard I labored to bring Rion into the world, not to mention all the years of work that went into raising him, protecting him, and encouraging him, the waste of it all makes me rage inside. For on some level, he had to know how much he would hurt us all.
David and I eventually accepted the feelings of disappointment and have mostly forgiven him and have come to terms with his death. There is, however, still the haunting realization that Rion wasn’t just the victim of a violent final act, but was also the selfish perpetrator of it and the one who ultimately murdered someone we loved deeply. He not only robbed himself, he also robbed his family of a future with him in it.
The official term used for people like us is “survivors of suicide.” To be a survivor implies that the mere act of staying alive is about as good as it gets after losing a loved one to suicide. We three have all made it through a figurative fire and crawled out the other side scorched, scarred, and transformed. In many ways, I now feel like an amputee. A core piece of my life that was once there is missing, yet sometimes I can still see, feel, and hear Rion like he’s a phantom limb.
The carefree and optimistic woman I once was is gone, as though the fairies came and stole her away, leaving a fundamentally altered substitute in her place, an adult version of a changeling. I am now perpetually braced for bad things to happen—I don’t want them to, but I am always ready.
Up until my midforties, when I almost lost David to a bout of pneumonia and sepsis, I was naively unaware of the potential for catastrophe that is inherent in daily life, for I hadn’t yet experienced a major crisis or loss. Then came the years of Rion’s emotional problems followed by his tragic death and the deaths of others close to me—my father before Rion, and my sister and mother since. After all that has happened, I see no reason why disaster can’t or won’t randomly strike again at any time or place, and so I live with low-grade, chronic fear that something terrible might happen to one of the people I love who are still alive.
The death of my mother was an especially tough one to bear, leaving behind only two surviving members from our immediate family of five: my sister and me. I miss my mother’s support, friendship, and the sense of protection her generation provided. David and I have both become that older generation, providing the buffer and safety net for those younger than us. Because of all this, I’ve slowly learned how strong and resilient I am; I understand that I am a person who can walk this difficult path and bear this heavy weight. Our marriage, too, is sturdier than it has ever been. David and I have shared a harrowing experience, but one that has soldered the pieces of our bond together and melded us in ways we could never have foreseen, veritably forging us into one unit.
Now, I feel a special connection to people who are also grappling with sadness and loss, and unfortunately, there are many. But death is no longer a ghoulish topic to avoid at all costs and is instead a familiar presence in my life and one I’ve grown accustomed to. I’ve read that the Dalai Lama contemplates his death in striking detail as a daily practice, helping him to appreciate the gift of life. I can understand why he does this and can see the value in this habit. My own little practice is to live each day based on how I might view what’s happening from the perspective of a deathbed. What things would be the most important to me as I lie dying? Certainly not money or travel or material possessions. It would be the friends and family whom I have loved and the quality of the love I have given them.
Susan Wight has been a commercial artist and copywriter since 1986, including clients such as Nolo Press and the National Brain Tumor Foundation. She was the editor for Crossing Nevada (available on Amazon) and has coauthored a memoir, Return to Ithaca, with her husband, David. Since 2002, she has been a member of the National League of American Pen Women (NLAPW), a professional organization for women in the arts. In 2009, Susan lost her son to suicide and has written about this loss in numerous essays and in Return to Ithaca. She lives with her husband in Berkeley, California.