What I Learned from My Mother's Suicide

I was 13 years old when I first realized that my mother did not want to live. One night during spring break of eighth grade, I woke to the dog barking and red and yellow lights splashing across the walls. When I peered out my window into the darkness, I saw my father standing beside an ambulance in our driveway and EMTs loading my mother—screaming and thrashing, strapped to a gurney—into it.

The day after she was hospitalized, I returned from my friend's house to find that my mother was back. Resting in her bedroom, she looked tired and withdrawn. Fragile but beautiful. She never spoke to me about what had happened; neither did my father. He wasn't much for processing things or grappling with heavy emotions, so we simply carried on.

Her depression fueled my tumultuous adolescence. By 16 I had been arrested for underage drinking and smoking marijuana. My driver's license was revoked for reckless driving. I dated men almost twice my age. From the outside, I had it all: popularity, boyfriends, varsity letters in field hockey and lacrosse. But in reality, I saw a therapist once a week and took anti-depressants.

Nobody could answer the fundamental question that underpinned it all: How do you make someone want to live? I was desperate to absolve myself and I thought if I understood her better, maybe I could. A week after she died, I met with her shrink, who told me that suicide was my mother's destiny, and that the timing had, in all likelihood, only 1 percent to do with our fight. Still, that 1 percent felt like a guilty verdict. Then he told me:"The thing she talked about most was you kids growing up and not needing her anymore. She got so much joy from mothering.

I had to stop chasing her story and start creating my own. I quit drinking. I ran a marathon. I climbed the Matterhorn.

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