My thoughts always circled back to David, never far from an internal dialogue of guilt and shame and a strange hopefulness that maybe I was wrong, maybe David’s family was right, maybe he wasn’t dead, maybe he would be found alive. The fire in Colin’s house reminded me of this—if David wanted to survive in the woods, he could.
David was physically the strongest man I’d ever known. He had lived off the woods with his father. He knew how to hunt, which berries and mushrooms to pick, how to build a fire like the Saskatchewans, the tribe his father befriended while working as a forester in Canada. I’d watched him build a snow hut and hike for hours without water or food. Why would a man who had learned so much about how to survive plot to take his own life? It would be one of the great unanswerable questions.
Ten days after David’s disappearance, Alice packed her bag and left as quickly as she’d come. I assumed she’d given up.
“You should eat more,” she said after our goodbyes at the train station.
“I know, I know,” I said. “You too, okay?”
She stiffened when I hugged her. “I’m sorry, Alice,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”
Alice’s forehead pinched, and the tip of her nose grew red, as if she might cry. In all of our weeks together, I’d never seen her break down, never even saw her close. “You know, the night he came home, I told him he should start putting his financial affairs in order.”
She tightened her hands around her bag, the veins in her slight hands bulging through. “He made phone call after phone call, and he heard things, things that upset him, from his clients, from his workers. How deep the trouble was.” Her voice grew thin. “In hindsight, I should have waited. Let him get on his feet for a few days.”
I swallowed. It had never occurred to me that the phone call David had made to me was the last of many—or that he’d tried desperately to gauge whether he’d be able to make a go of a new life. I’d had no idea others had told him the truth—that the company he’d built so lovingly was in shambles, and he would likely face bankruptcy.
I stammered, “You couldn’t have known, Alice.”
She looked at her watch, then pulled her neat handkerchief from its plastic folder and dabbed at her nose. “Well, I must go now.” Alice had tried to make the world as tidy as her home and failed. Now, she would inhabit her home alone, having lost the two men she loved most.
The police search-and-rescue squad had gone back to the mountain several times after its initial search and covered hundreds more miles with Boy Scouts and dogs. Now, the snow was coming, and the department’s search budget was dry. Maybe they could search again come spring. David’s sisters left the house one by one. Jill had passed her nursing exam and would begin working soon. Adele needed to return home to deal with her own divorce and her patients. My sister and mother flew home, promising they’d check in on us.
One of the most startling things to deal with in the aftermath of trauma is how quickly the rest of the world moves on. The tow-truck driver needed to be paid. The bank called due David’s home equity line of credit. My cellphone stopped working due to an unpaid bill. I was in the worst kind of limbo, one in which David had simply vanished, leaving me to tie up a million of his loose ends.
I was struck during this in-between time how Sophie instinctively wanted to re-engage with the people and activities that were present. She refused to be stuck in limbo, moving, as my therapist pointed out, like a tree in a windstorm. This was our big storm together, and the only thing that could soften the pain and the process for her was love and a return to the familiar.
I went back to work, desperate for something I knew. Back in my office, I pulled out a legal pad from my file and made a crude list of my priorities. It read:
1.Sophie’s emotional well-being (therapist?).
2.Buy a phone card.
3.Go to DMV—David’s car.
4.Hire an accountant.
5.Call mortgage company.
6.Call utilities.
7.Meet with investment advisor.
By the time I was finished, I had thirty items that needed to be taken care of immediately. I got started.
Snow fell hard and heavy in November. From time to time, I would talk to the officer from Clackamas County who’d run the search for David, and she’d give me an update. “More than a foot of snow in the gorge,” she’d say, then two feet, and then three. Normally Portland doesn’t get much snow; it was one of the heaviest winters we’d had in decades. One evening, I awoke from a night terror, my heart beating wildly and sweat covering my body. I’d dreamed of David, lost in the wilderness, barefoot, looking for his Columbia jacket. My pillow was drenched with tears. I knew then that we would find his body.
It was supposed to snow the day I told Sophie I would prepare her favorite meal of crab cakes and risotto for her and our friends, the Wilsons. We planned the meal at Colin’s house since I hadn’t even begun to decorate for Christmas. Sophie helped smash the crab and mush the cornmeal; we stirred rice and assembled crackers and cheese on big plates. There was snow falling quietly outside, and it was starting to stick. After dinner, we made a huge fire in Colin’s living room. Sophie snuggled next to me on the couch. Maddie sat on the other side of the room with her parents, and her sister Jemma was lounging on a long, elegant chaise. Colin, who’d been washing dishes, stepped into the room, the color drained from his face.
“What is it?” I said. “What’s happened?”
Colin motioned me to come to the phone. “Take this,” he said. “It’s important.” When we were out of Sophie’s earshot, Colin put the phone to his chest and held me tight. “They’ve found him.”
I felt my body collapse against Colin’s, the weight of the months falling in on me. He held my arm as I stumbled to his study. No, not now, I thought. Sophie is so happy tonight.
I raised the phone, and a man spoke. “Ms. Hamilton?” the voice said.
“Yes?” I whispered.
“We had a volunteer search team up on the mountain tonight. Seems like we’ve been over that place a hundred times.”
I was half-hearing the words. The voice seemed distant, distorted, too slow, like a tape played at a quarter speed. It felt like it was pulling me down into quicksand.
“We started back at the house and did a grid search again,” the voice said. “And, uh. Well, this is very hard to tell you, Ms. Hamilton, but we found David.”
My fingers loosened around the phone. I was going to drop it, drop to my knees. I held on, forcing myself to listen, forcing the reality I’d known for so many weeks to crash down on me.
“I’m very sorry.”
“Where was he?” I didn’t know how I formed words. A tremor ran through my body. My legs and arms began to shake. Colin’s study was the old Episcopal church office—cold tile and a high ceiling. The windows were frosted. I could feel my body freezing from the inside. Colin stood by me, rubbing my back. The blood stopped pumping to my extremities. My fingers felt white, frostbitten.
The voice continued. “He was about five hundred yards north of the house, ma’am, in a heavily wooded area. I don’t know how we missed it before. One of my officers said he swore he’d walked through that exact spot a dozen times. But there he was, all right. Sitting right up against a tree, with his legs crossed.”
I wanted to stop him, to say, please slow down, it’s too much all at once. But this was his trauma too, now, a total stranger and I now bound by a senseless death. I thought I was ready for this call, that six weeks had prepared me for the inevitable. I was not.
“And can I tell you something?” the officer said. “I’ve come across a lot of suicides in this territory. For some reason, this is a place people come to when they want it over. But this was different. He looked so calm. Peaceful. Really, I am not just saying that, ma’am. He looked like he was at peace. He was looking out at a valley, and he looked like he’d sat there for a long time before he pulled the trigger.”
My fingers went limp around the ph
one; the will that had held me up during the conversation was gone. I could not hear anymore. I could not manage the details of how he’d committed suicide, or why the dogs missed a man’s frozen body five hundred yards from where the search started. I could not ask him all the questions that the reporter in me would have asked: What was the caliber of the gun? Was his body decomposed? Was there any sign of foul play?
I whispered, “Thank you.” I shoved the phone into Colin’s hand. “Take this; please take this.”
Colin said something into the phone. I turned and walked away. I didn’t want to hear what it was I was supposed to do next, where they would take his body, and what kind of responsibility I had to the police department, or the coroner, or the dozens of people who had aided in his search.
I watched myself walk back into the living room, where Sophie and Maddie’s family were talking in low, worried tones, and I watched myself sit down next to Sophie, grabbing her small hands to make sure she wouldn’t run screaming into the night. She looked closely at my face, and her eyes widened. Her slender legs were covered with tights that were the color of the snow. Her long blonde hair was pulled back with a red ribbon. I noticed this because David loved her hair that way, out of her face, away from her pretty eyes and her lips that looked like a perfect heart. She moved her face closer to mine, and she tightened her grip on my hands until the blood left them.
I spoke slowly, so I would not babble, so I would not make her more fearful than she already was. The hardest part was hers to bear now. I tried to calm the tremor moving through my body so that I could tell her correctly, tell her the unthinkable.
“Remember when I told you it would be better if we knew, one way or the other, what happened to Daddy?”
Her face tightened, her eyes becoming wildly alert, as if she might bolt from my grasp, away from me. She interrupted, already knowing, already crushed.
“What, Mama, what?”
They were the most dreaded words of my lifetime, and I knew I had no choice but to tell the truth. “They found him, sweetheart, and he’s dead. I’m sorry, baby.”
I put my arms around her, holding her deep in my chest, trying desperately to cushion this blow. Her body fell into mine, a moment I knew I would have to replay again and again in my lifetime, a memory seared into my brain, deeper than the deepest grief I knew. The shuttle exploding, the Twin Towers falling, all the images of innocence lost I had ever seen—and now this, too. Sophie held my waist, her face buried in my chest.
I had never heard a child’s heart breaking. It is a sound so unforgiving I knew I would never stop hearing it. It would ring through my memory at exactly the same pitch, with the same intensity, reminding me of the crippling of her heart.
The deep, grieving wail she let out echoed through the home, into the street, interrupting the silence of the falling snow.
I held her.
AFTER SUICIDE
In 2013, suicide was the tenth leading cause of death, accounting for more than 41,000 deaths in America. If you have had someone you love commit suicide, you are a survivor. Ann Smolin, C.S.W., and John Guinan, Ph.D., authors of the book Healing After the Suicide of a Loved One, estimate that six to eight people are strongly affected by each suicide that takes place in America. That means more than a quarter of a million Americans become survivors of suicide every year.
There are predictable phases of pain that all survivors experience sooner or later: denial, grief, and self-reproach or guilt. Most survivors will re-experience the event through terrifying dreams. The ability to perform one’s usual tasks is impaired. And most survivors, write the authors, will torture themselves with repetitive interrogations of “What if . . . ?” and “Why didn’t we . . . ?”
The most common refrain I hear from suicide survivors is, “What if . . . ?” What if we’d been able to pick up the phone? What if we’d been there when he stopped by? What if he’d been hospitalized? What if he hadn’t been hospitalized?
The truth is that no one can ever be sure that a different choice would have prevented the suicide. The choice someone makes to commit suicide doesn’t come to pass because of a series of events. Many families have also shared with me how, after a suicide, surviving spouses and their in-laws blame each other. It is the nature of human beings to try to assign blame, but blaming someone else for a person’s choice to end his life is particularly malicious.
Smolin and Guinan suggest that the most direct approach to recovery is to attend a group meeting of suicide survivors. There are chapters in nearly every major city. You can find a group support meeting by going to the American Association of Suicidology directory, or by using the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP) website at www.afsp.org.
Other survivors find solace in reading all they can about suicide. I’ve listed a complete registry of helpful agencies and mental health organizations at the back of this book. Reading about the suicidal state of mind may help you understand the phenomenon of suicide.
I found the most direct and accessible way of healing was by writing. By having a record of what I experienced and what I was feeling, I was able to discontinue the rumination and replay of what went wrong in the years before David’s death. At a time when expensive and time-consuming counseling was not an option, writing saved me from my own negative thoughts. It is my hope that my experience might serve as a cautionary tale for other people who are concerned about a loved one’s mental health.
Chapter Twenty-One
The Kleenex boxes remained unopened.
A week after I’d taken the phone call from the sheriff’s office, I was too numb to cry, too numb to do anything but sit in my robe in my living room, staring out at wilted leaves gathering in the bottom of the pool. I’d lost David. Sophie was fatherless. And the ten years I’d stayed to try to keep a family together had all been for nothing.
The phone rang. I answered, zombie-like.
“Hi, sweetheart. We’re so worried about you.” It was my mom. I hadn’t returned her calls since Sunday, the day after they found David. What day is it? I looked at the date on the paper. Thursday. Oh my God. It’s Thursday, I thought.
“Mom, I just need some time to myself. I’ll be okay.”
“Are you eating? Are you able to take care of Sophie? You know I will get on a plane today and come back there.” My mother knew what could happen to me now, the trauma of loss, anger turned inward—depression. My mother had done the hard work of forgiving my father for his infidelity. She’d stabilized on a medication that allowed her to live a normal life.
She was better now—I was not. I knew what she must have experienced in those first few days when she sank into depression, the deadness of winter and the leaves gathering, decomposing. I expected to be flattened by grief in the days following David’s discovery. Instead, my emotions were as flat as the gray sky.
“I promise I’ll call you,” I lied.
She repeated herself, which meant she wanted an invitation. “We’ll come right back up when you’re ready. We’ll help with the funeral.”
I did not want her to suffer through this with me. She had suffered enough.
“Thanks so much for calling. You’ve been so great. I love you.”
The wind outside whistled through the trees. I shivered inside my thick robe. My toes curled in my Uggs. The newspaper stared back at me, the crossword puzzle blank.
Sophie walked into the living room, took a huge breath, sighed, and said, “I am so bored. I want to go back to school.”
She had taken a shower, pulled on her pink skirt and white hoodie, found matching tights and clean shoes, combed her hair, and brushed her teeth. I’d heard her stirring in the kitchen—I thought she was pouring herself a bowl of cereal, but she’d packed her lunch, which she held tightly in a pink and green lunchbox. I guessed she’d packed slices of salami, a pickle, cheese, and maybe some cookies—if we had any. I imagined how I must have looked to her, with my stringy hair and dull complexion, staring out at the nothingn
ess that follows death. I was usually the one bugging her to clean up.
“Are you sure, sweetheart? Are you feeling okay to do this?” I motioned for her to come sit by me. “It might hit you sideways when you’re at school, and you could feel unbelievably sad, or mad, or . . .”
“It’s terrible here, Mama. It’s boring. And sad. I want to go back to school.” She stood her ground, moving her chin sideways in a way only a nine-year-old can. It was 8:15. We had ten minutes to get her there on time.
Something surged through my nervous system—an energy that came from Sophie’s need. It was time.
I called the school to let them know she was coming back, rushed to my room, and pulled on a pair of sweatpants and tennis shoes. We grabbed our jackets from the closet and both ran to the car. For the first time in a week, I was doing something I knew how to do. I took my familiar route, down Burnside, past the Walgreen’s where David bought the antidepressants that sent him into his first full-blown mania, past the bank where he bankrupted us. The further I drove, the more I shivered.
Sophie noticed my silence and the way I clutched the steering wheel.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
I gave a fake nod.
“Then could you please turn down the heat?”
I looked at the car heater gauge, blowing hot air at eighty-seven degrees. I was still shivering.
“Oh, sorry.” I turned the heat off and bit my bottom lip. “Truth is, I’m not okay. But someday very soon I will be.”
The stoplight took forever. I studied Sophie’s face: David’s lips, his cheekbones, and his fair skin. Her green eyes were clear and bright—she’d stopped crying after approximately forty-eight hours. Her grief cascaded like a tidal wave. Now she seemed focused again.
All the Things We Never Knew Page 21