by Carrie Lange
I understand now why it’s called letting go.
Because it’s like opening your hands when they are gripping so tightly, that your nails are digging into your flesh. When the thing you hold onto is being crushed, and blood is dripping down your arms.
Sometimes, when you have gripped your hands so tightly, for so long, they become frozen. When we were kids we would squeeze our hands in tight fists until they became paralyzed, and then laugh as we tried in vain to open them again.
Sometimes, you don’t want to let go of something because you’re afraid that if you do, you’ll fall and get hurt. But sometimes, holding on is what makes you fall down.
Sometimes, you don’t want to let go of something even though it’s hurting your hand. Because if you let go of it, it might be able to get at your throat, or your heart. Those can be the hardest things to let go of.
Sometimes, you don’t want to let go of something because then it will fall away from you, and you might lose it forever. And sometimes you do lose it forever.
On Earth, we try to make it more complicated than it really is. And I think the reason we do that, is because we don’t want to open our hands.
But when we open our hands, and the nails come out of our flesh, and this thing falls away from us, we can reach out, and take the hand of someone else. Maybe we can help them pry their nails out of their own flesh.
We can raise our hands up, fingers splayed wide, and we are free.
~ Dan
Chapter 62
Dear Dan,
One time I asked if you preferred Dan or Daniel, do you remember? You told me you preferred Daniel. But you always called yourself Dan. I wonder why?
I keep thinking if I can find the answer to the question about your name, I will find the answer to the question about your death.
I told you I would start calling you Daniel if you wanted, and you said you did. But you died just a few days after that conversation. I didn’t have enough time to get used to saying it. Now, it’s too late. You will always be Dan to me.
I wish you were Daniel to me. I wish you would have been Daniel from the moment we first met.
I wish I would have been able to know the man you wanted to be. But I will always love the man that you were.
The mystery of your death will always be contained in that single word - Dan - forever inscribed upon my heart.
~ Anne
Chapter 63
Consider how a being, in the world of the womb, was deaf of ear and blind of eye, and mute of tongue; how he was bereft of any perceptions at all. But once out of that world of darkness, he passed into this world of light, then his eye saw, his ear heard, his tongue spoke. In the same way, once he hath hastened away from this mortal place into the kingdom of God, then he will be born in the spirit; then the eye of his perception will open, the ear of his soul will hearken, and all the truths of which he was ignorant before will be made plain and clear.
~ Abdu’l-Baha (teachings of the Baha’i Faith)
~~~~~
That night when Anne fell asleep, Alexandra nestled in the crook of her arm, she dreamed.
She waited in the lobby of a grand hotel, just in front of the giant gold revolving door. The door was so heavy and so grand, that a person had to lean on it and push with their feet in order to get it moving.
Anne waited.
The ceiling stretched high above her, the highly polished marble floor gleamed beneath her. She watched the door, for she knew she was waiting.
Rich, red velvet furniture adorned the lobby, chandeliers which sparkled in the amber glow of Tiffany lamps hung from the intricately designed ceiling. She could see all of these things from the corner of her eye, but she watched only the door.
Waiting. For what or who, she did not know.
There were many people who came through the door. They struggled to push it, leaning heavily on it, as the door slowly built up momentum and speed. At first, they would struggle, hunched over, straining against the weight of the door.
But by the time it deposited them in the lobby, they were standing straight and tall. Sometimes they didn’t even have to touch the door any more, for the initial force was more than enough to keep it moving on its own. Sometimes, they would be going so fast by the time the door reached the lobby that they hopped quickly inside, as the other door panels swung around behind them.
There were other people who seemed hesitant. They looked at the door from the outside. Some tried to look into the lobby. Most eventually undertook the task of pushing the heavy door, but a few must have decided they didn’t want to come into the hotel after all and walked away.
Some people walked right on past the door without even seeming to notice it at all.
But she was not waiting for any of these people.
Upon entering the lobby, most of the people walked past her, and where they went after that, Anne didn’t know. To the front desk to check in, she supposed. But for some reason, she couldn’t turn around herself to look for them. It didn’t matter anyway, so she watched the door and waited.
A few of the people didn’t seem to know where to go once they got inside. They wandered around, looked up at the chandeliers, sat on the velvet couches. Some appeared to be napping, their heads bowed, eyes closed. Some seemed to just be wandering. Reaching out to touch a crystal which dangled from a Tiffany lamp. Pressing their noses up against the floor to ceiling glass windows in the front wall, which looked out onto the grey, fuzzy street beyond.
Anne thought she should tell them the front desk was behind her, but she had the idea that they wouldn’t be able to hear her.
Golden globes of shimmering luminescence floated around the lobby. They zipped out through the revolving doors like light passing through a window. When they got outside they streaked away, disappearing into the dark night beyond.
And then she saw Tar outside the floor to ceiling window. The light outside was dark, and he was just a shadowy figure, but it was him.
He looked in at her and his face was sad and faraway. And yet, there was a longing in his eyes as well. As though, perhaps, he hoped she would recognize him.
Anne smiled. She was glad to see Tar. Is this who I’m waiting for? She waved for him to come in.
Tar smiled and raised his hand up to the glass, resting his fingertips on it.
No, Anne thought, I’m not waiting for Tar. Her smile faded, and she lowered her hand.
The door stopped moving. A soft, quiet descended on the hotel lobby. Anne wondered who or what it was she was waiting for, and she thought maybe it wasn’t coming after all. How long should she wait here?
The people in the lobby with her faded away. As she watched the door, a man approached. He stopped briefly beside Tar, and then without any more hesitation, he pushed on the door. He pushed with such force, that it quickly gained momentum. And then he was standing before her.
Dan.
He didn’t say anything, but he smiled. And then, Anne remembered that he was dead. And she understood that he was here to say goodbye.
Anne knew that she was asleep, but she also knew that this wasn’t a dream. For one brief moment she understood that all she knew of reality had been the dream. This was real. Dan had never been so alive.
“I’ve been waiting for you,” she said to him.
Dan caressed her face, his spirit entwined with her own. The warmth of his touch radiated into her body and she smiled.
“I know,” he said. “I got lost, but now I know the way home.”
Anne touched his hand. “I thought I would wait here for you, and then we could go together.”
Dan reached down and took both of her hands.
Anne thought she could relax her body, and melt into him.
“No,” he said, “you can’t come with me. Time to let go.”
She knew immediately, that he was right. He was going where all the other people had gone. Behind her. Where she couldn’t look. Dan was okay now.
She nodded. “Yes
. Time to let go.”
Anne released Dan’s hands, and as he turned to walk past her, she saw reflected in his eyes a peace and a perfection which she had never seen in her waking or dreaming life.
The light of a million lives past, and a million lives yet to come.
About the Author
Hello, my name is Carrie Lange. I didn’t originally have this section in my book because I didn’t feel there was too much about myself that was worth mentioning. But many people have asked me how much of this story is real and how much is made up.
So, to get directly to it, every “real” thing that happens in this story is true and pretty much exactly as I experienced it (except the part about Dan joking that our names rhymed…though he did make an extremely lame joke at that moment), and a fair bit of the “supernatural” parts as well – at least as far as Anne’s story goes.
There really was a Tar and Rale in my life, though whether they were hallucinations or real spirits, who can say? They came into my life just as written. Granted, my interactions with Rale were not quite as concrete as Anne’s (except that first one, which seemed completely real and scared the hell out of me!), but yeah…he looked like Brad Dourif. And my daughter really did tell me that Dan was with his friend named Tar, and that night I dreamed of him…and yes, he looked like Alan Rickman! And Tar (or a hallucination of him) did in fact save me from pulling the trigger just as described in the story.
Of course, everything about Dan in the afterlife is pure fantasy, although I like to think that he, and maybe even Tar and Rale, were giving me inspiration. I often felt them around me as I was writing.
People have found it hard to believe the seemingly callous reactions Anne receives from those around her following Dan’s death. When I was writing this book, I did not tell readers who were critiquing for me that it was based on my real life because I didn’t want them to go easy on me. Over and over I was told that it wasn’t believable how people were treating Anne and that I needed to add some more compassionate people around her in order to make it realistic.
Please trust me when I say that I did tone it down. The truth is that people treated me with even more callousness and insensitivity than I portrayed in this book. I felt it was important to show the reality often faced by those who are grieving, especially if the death was from suicide, or something else that people feel the grieving person could have prevented.
The other reason I did not get support was because I was suffering from “disenfranchised grief”. This means the grief is not recognized by those around you. You are not entitled to your grieving for a variety of reasons. For me, it was a combination of the fact that Dan was not my husband but “only her boyfriend”, and the fact that he committed suicide, which carries its own stigma.
I wanted to portray the real experiences of a desperately grieving person, and the aftermath of a suicide. I want people to see just how messy it is. When a person commits suicide, their pain doesn’t end. They just hand it over to the people who love them the most. When someone dies, the pain and grief doesn’t end for those closest to that person when the funeral ends. The worst is just beginning for them.
I live in the Seattle area with my husband, who I met just as you have read. I changed almost everyone’s name for this story, but I let Dan and Kim - my husband’s late fiancée - keep their names. Whether intentional or not, they did bring us together, and we named our son, Daniel Markim, in honor of them both.
My daughter is now a teenager, and battling with her own depression. She has struggled with self-harm and thoughts of suicide.
Every year in America, 37,000 people take their own lives. That is over 100 people every day.
Day after day.
Week after week.
Year upon year.
Over, and over…and over.
For every completed suicide, eleven other people attempt it. That’s over 400,000 people. 400,000 different people. Every year.
One can only assume that for all those numbers, there are countless more who wish for it, dream of it, “If only I could…” they may wistfully ponder. Alone. In the dark. In the quiet, solitary recesses of their despair.
Suicide is the 10th leading cause of death in America and has surpassed motor vehicle accidents as the #1 cause of death by physical injury. Yet society as a whole attempts to hide it away, perhaps into those same, solitary recesses from whence it is born. The stigma of mental illness kills. It killed Dan.
My daughter, through her struggle to understand her own depression, kept asking me about Dan's death. This book first began as my way of explaining to her an unexplainable act.
If you, or someone you care about is depressed, whether suicidal or not, you need two things: medical help and hope. I can’t give anyone medical help, but it is my aim, with my blog and with my book, to provide some hope. Hope not just for them, but also for the many tens of thousands more suicide survivors. The victims of suicide left behind to deal with not just grief, but guilt and shame. Burdens which they often have to shoulder alone, cut off from a world which may look on them with uncomfortable eyes, or worse yet, accusing eyes.
If you are suicidal due to grief, as I was, the world has no idea what you are going through. You are drowning, and no one is even looking at you. Ask for help. Find a support group. The pain will lesson. But you will not lose your loved one again when it does. Nothing will take them away from you. Not time. Not another lover or child or friend. It’s okay to go on living when they are dead. Nothing will take what remains of them away from you.
If it were within my power, I would take each and every one of those 100 people who die every day at their own hands and put my arms around them and tell them, “Hang on for one more day. Life means hope. You are worth saving. Don’t give up.”
If you are reading this, I will say it to you:
Here is the sign you are looking for.
Hang on for one more day.
Life means hope.
You are worth saving.
Don’t give up.
Don’t give up.
Please. Don’t give up.
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Dedication
This book is dedicated to the memory of Daniel Leonard Rieske and Kimberly Hildebrandt Bunting.
It is my ardent hope that this story may give pause to anyone contemplating suicide, if only long enough for them to ask for help.
National Suicide Prevention Lifeline:
1-800-273-8255
www.suicidepreventionlifeline.org
It is also my hope that this story may open eyes. There may be someone in your life right now who is suffering silently from grief or depression and you don’t even realize it.
Put your arms around them and let them know that you are there.
Thank you.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank my daughter, Kendra Lange, who was my true inspiration for writing this story. “Why?” you always asked me. Why did the man who taught you how to eat Oreo cookies, color with pastels, and paint Easter eggs leave you? Here, in this story, is my only answer.
To my best friend, George Bridges, you supported me when no one else did. I was lost, and you came and found me.
To my husband, Mark Atteberry, truly can I say that you saved my life. We went from finding pennies together to building a life together.
To the Rieske family: Sharon, Bill, Tegan, Roxanne, thank you for welcoming me into your family. I would not give up one moment of my time with Dan to erase the enormity of the pain caused by his loss.
And finally, to my son, Daniel Markim Atteberry, you are the phoenix that arose out of the ashes of our despair. You are the happy ending to a sad story.
Special
thanks to Chris Skoglund, Monterey Sirak, Rick Ellrod, and Nadine Ducca. The insight, encouragement, and expertise of these four exceptional authors inspired me to keep writing even through the most discouraging of days.