United in our Grief Forum.

On September 24, 2016 I was returning from a week in England, where I had deposited my oldest son for his first year at university. I had been away for one week, and was looking forward to getting home to my husband and other two children - a 14 year old daughter and a 16 year old son. We'll call them Alice and Daniel. Sitting in the waiting area at JFK, I received a text from Daniel's ex-girlfriend. "Daniel just sent out a group text that just said Goodbye, and now he won't respond or answer the phone. I'm worried."

My heart dropped to my feet. Daniel had been battling bipolar depression for years, and had been hospitalized three times in the past year for suicidal ideation. Each time he had come to us, asking to be taken to the hospital because he was afraid of himself. We had finally found a medication that seemed to be working for him, but were always vigilant for signs that he might be struggling. When I had left the week before, Daniel assured me that he was doing well, and that he was not having suicidal thoughts. He had made a strong start in school, had lots of friends, and was passionate about serving as an officer in the school choir and singing in the highest level male group. Things were going well for Daniel.

I called my husband and daughter. They had been at a local park practicing softball for about 1/2 an hour, but were on the way home. When they had left the house, Daniel had been napping on the couch -- he and my husband had gone to a movie and lunch earlier in the afternoon. There had been no sign of anything wrong. When they pulled into the driveway and opened the garage door, the attic door was open and the ladder was down. My husband went up, and found our son dead of a shotgun blast to the head.

At JFK, my plane began boarding. I was in the first group, so I boarded almost immediately. I had a middle seat toward the back of the plane. I called my daughter's cell phone, hoping to hear that Daniel was at home, safe and sound. She answered, wailing incoherently, and I knew. I didn't know how it had happened at the time, but I knew that Daniel was gone. My husband took the phone and told me what he had found.

The flight home was excruciating. Needless to say, I was quite upset. Crying, face in my hands, muttering No No No over and over. The passengers on either side of me were angels. Imagine finding a wailing woman in the middle seat of the row you're assigned to for a 5 hour plane ride. I'm certain their first instinct was to request another seat, but neither did. A man and a woman and I, strangers all, endured that trip together, and they did all they could to ease my pain.

The following days went by in a haze. We were forced to stay with family for several days while a clean-up crew cleaned up the attic and replaced a wall in the house that had been soaked through. We brought our son home from England. We planned the memorial service. We cried and cried and cried.

The months since I lost Daniel have been long. I attend grief counseling, a suicide survivors support group with my husband, take my daughter to a grief group for kids, write in a journal. Trying to find a new normal is a challenge. It is easy to understand why many marriages cannot withstand the loss of a child. The process of grieving is a solitary endeavor. There is only so much that we can do to help one another. There are gulfs of silence in my home that did not exist before. There is no point in discussing what happened. No amount of talk will change the outcome.

The basic goal of parenting is to get your children to adulthood. With Daniel, we failed. That fact fills me with sadness, lethargy, makes me numb to any happiness. The stigma of suicide shames me. Though I know, with my mind, that we worked very hard to keep Daniel safe, my heart aches that we could not save him. My mind knows that Daniel died of an illness, as deadly as cancer but even less understood by medical professionals, but my heart feels the guilt of a mother who must have made mistakes that lead to this result. What signs did we miss? How could we have failed so miserably at the most important job in the world? I do not blame Daniel for what he did, but how will I ever be able to forgive myself for not saving him?

I know the question you are asking yourself, so I will try and answer it now. Knowing how he struggled with suicidal thoughts, how could we have kept a gun in the house, even hidden in the attic? The answer is that we did not have any ammunition for the gun, and we did not know that Daniel knew where the gun was. We told the kids that we had turned the gun into the police after Daniel's first hospitalization. As the gun was one of the only things my husband had from his own father, we hid it instead. It is a decision that we will forever regret, along with the myriad other little things that we look back on now and wish we had done differently. We will never know where he found the bullet. My guess is that he had it hidden in his room for a long time. He must have, because we disposed of all the ammunition before he returned from his first hospitalization.

One thing I do know is that Daniel's death has changed me in a very fundamental way. I have primarily defined myself as a mother for so long. I love motherhood. I always considered myself good at motherhood. That definition no longer feels genuine for me, and I have nothing else to replace it with. I suppose that will be the next chapter of my life.