Mélancolie

I welcome this. The urge to write. Writing defines me, and grief seems to be annihilating anything that used to define me. So anytime I get the urge to write, I feel hope. Maybe someday I’ll feel like ME again.

Losing a child isn’t as I thought it would be. I imagined the total fucking loss of control and the undignified emoting. The wailing. The howling. The deep sadness. The guilt. The regret. That all happened. And still happens. But mostly, there’s a deep exhaustion. A flatness. An abyss. It saps my motivation. My energy. Makes me anti-social. Steals my joy. Causes me to forget even what used to bring me joy.

Recently, a friend, who also lost his son to suicide, sent me a photo of him and his wife sitting beside Albert György's sculpture, Mélancolie, on the shores of Lake Geneva in Switzerland. It describes this abyss perfectly. I’d seen photos in the past of this sculpture, but in spite of all the losses in my life: close friends, my boyfriend in an avalanche, both my parents, both my parents-in-law, I never truly understood it until I lost Sam.

Google tells me that Mélancolie/Melancholy “is a powerful bronze and copper sculpture that depicts a slumped figure sitting on a bench with a massive, empty void through its chest.”

That is what my grief is. An empty void through the chest. It is unimaginable. This mind-fuck of losing a child. Of having a child in so much pain that he had to jump 44 storeys to his death in a foreign country, all alone, thousands of miles from his family. From me. From his mother.

The empty void in the sculpture’s chest describes the numbness and emptiness I feel most of the time. I’ve been told this emotional remove is my body and mind protecting me from the ocean of grief below it. I dip into that well of grief, take sips of it, and then go back to the numbness. It’s the only way to survive. Most of the time, I can’t dip below my forehead. I know intellectually that Sam is dead. I can rationalize it. He had bipolar disorder, ADHD, and by the sounds of it, he was self-medicating with meth. He was taking steroids. He must have been in a sort of psychosis. Of course, he jumped.

Several times a day, I dip lower. To the level of my throat and shoulders. That’s when the dam springs a leak but doesn’t fully break. I’m still in control. I tear up but pull myself together. I know he’s dead on a very surface level. I can integrate that fact into my reality, but at the same time I can do necessary shit like shop for groceries. Or feed the dogs. Or deep clean the house. Or write about my boy as though this were happening to someone else.

When the realization reaches the level of my heart, shit gets ugly. No one wants to be around when a mother lets her heart know, even briefly, that her child is dead.

What terrifies me is that I’m not sure if the level has reached lower than my heart. I’m worried it hasn’t yet reached my womb. I’m worried that I don’t fully believe, in my body and my soul and my heart, in my gut, that the child who grew inside me is dead. That I will never see Sam again. That my son will never run up the stairs calling me Birth-giver. That he will never play with Juno and Wren again. That my daughter won’t have her brother with her through future joys and tragedies. That my boy no longer exists.

I seem to be a pressure-cooker these days. I can stay numb for increasingly longer periods–now it’s about six days–and then I erupt. I can feel the build-up. Sometimes I have to force the eruption.  

There are ways to blast through the stupor. Music always does it. Happy music. Sad music. Country music. Van Morrison. Bonnie Tyler. The Stones. Donovan. John Prine kills me. Dolly too. It seems so unfair that I can no longer play music without crying.

Another way to scratch away at the numbness is by writing a blog where every second paragraph proclaims: “My son is dead.”

And of course, reading years of texts between me and Sam does a good job. For hours I can relive the joy of talking to him, hearing his voice, only to come back to a world in which he no longer exists. That return is a great way to bring back some sensation to my soul.

Early on in this whole fucking nightmare, I placed my hands on the bag containing Sam’s ashes. I could feel the little chunks of my boy through the thin material. My boy. My beautiful blue-eyed boy. Who used to be a big ball of powerful energy on this planet, now sitting in a box on my sideboard. That broke me. I won’t do that again for a while. I welcomed the return to numbness.

Each one of these actions pulls me out from the cognitive dissonance I seem to be bogged down in. It brings me closer to believing my boy is gone.

In some photos of Mélancolie, on the other side of the hole is a stream of passersby, a chronicle of the continuation of everyone else’s life. Tourists who glance at the sculpture with curiosity. With admiration. With sadness. Some with an intimate understanding of loss. Some with the relief that “There, but for the grace of God, go I.” But they all continue past it, back into their lives.

Six and a half months into losing my boy, I’m keenly aware that other people’s lives have returned to normal. Melancolie is a powerful depiction of the isolation of grief. It’s like there’s another global pandemic and I’m the only one who got the memo. I’m living my own private Covid pandemic. I wear the same clothes every day that I’ve dropped on the floor the night before. I avoid people. Sometimes I don’t go out for several days.

But sometimes I get brave and crawl out of my cozy home for a bit. I’ll go to a large gathering

and spend the whole evening trying to not look like a mother whose son just killed himself, but after a few hours, when no one mentions Sam’s name, I want to shake someone and scream, “Don’t you know my son is dead?” Which is totally ridiculous, because not everyone wants to spend a dinner party talking about my son, and grief, and the possibility of afterlife, and signs, and the feather offerings Sam leaves me.

And really, neither do I. I want some normalcy in my life. The other day I went for a massage because my back went out. It was with a new massage therapist so he didn’t know about Sam. About why my back really went out. It was such a relief to simply be this aging woman whose body was broken down after years of mountain biking, skiing, kayaking, climbing, and carrying an 80-pound pack when she was 19 years old. Not because she is now carrying her 180-pound dead son on her back.

In spite of a few feeble attempts at pretending to be normal, I seem to be in a necessary stage of my grief: cocooning. It doesn’t come naturally to me, this not picking up of the phone, turning down invitations, not using as many emojis and exclamation marks in my texts, distilling my social group down to a very few. It even seems kind of rude, after spending my life worrying about how others feel, trying not to offend, avoiding conflict. I can check all the boxes for "people-pleaser," a term that makes me cringe, after spending my youth intentionally being more disgusting than the boys–burping, cussing, chewing tobacco, refusing to shave my legs and pits–to prove to the world that I didn’t give a fuck. When I in reality, it was in reaction to giving too many fucks.

These days, I’m determined to quash my inner people-pleaser. I'm determined to ignore any twinges of obligation. They say after a lifetime of giving too many fucks, when women hit menopause, we don’t give a fuck anymore. We’re old and no longer desirable, so we’re free from others’ judgement, free of expectations, free, free, free. The old “Sorry I’m late. I didn’t want to come,” shtick. When you lose a child, AND you are menopausal, times that by a gazillion. There are no more fucks to give. I don’t give a fuck about being polite. I don’t give a fuck about small talk. I don’t give a fuck about masking. All I can think about, talk about, write about, is Sam.

Losing my son is akin to losing myself. That seems like a very codependent thing to say, but I’ve heard other parents talk about the erosion of self upon the loss of a child. I thought, though, that I’d erode more fully. That I’d disappear. That I’d make myself disappear. That I would no longer want to be on the planet. So, when I feel like writing. That’s a good sign. I still want to be here.

This is what grief is.

A hole ripped through the very fabric of your being.

The hole eventually heals along the jagged edges that remain. It may even shrink in size.

But that hole will always be there.

A piece of you always missing.

For where there is deep grief, there was great love.

Don’t be ashamed of your grief.

Don’t judge it.

Don’t suppress it.

Don’t rush it.

Rather, acknowledge it.

Lean into it.

Listen to it.

Feel it.

Sit with it.

Sit with the pain. And remember the love.

This is where the healing will begin.

Monica Bobbit