When a life ends early, and we go on

I wrote most of this in the month after my 14-year-old former student Liam died by suicide, as I struggled to move through each day and develop a new understanding of the world without him. I share it now as I remember him in the days when we approach the one-year marker of his death.

To some, you are an angel. You came to the end of your worldly journey. You took flight. “Your wings were ready, but our hearts were not,” we say. You wait in heaven, kicking cloud-wrapped soccer balls across the great expanse of the sky. You smile down on us, and we hear your laughter shaking from the tops of the trees. We will see you again. 

To some, you are a resonance of energy passing between us and through us and shining from us. Your physical presence is gone, but your life force and your bright light live in us still. Your physical journey ended, but the work of your spirit did not.

To some, you are preparing to be born to this earth again. Your life as the Liam we knew ended, but you will return. You are gestating somewhere in a womb across the world, growing in darkness. You will be born in flesh as a baby again and live another life. You will continue in this grand life cycle of birth, death, birth, and though we have lost you, others will meet you soon and love you just as we do. Others will feel the blessing of your life. Others will know you. You will be a different person with different talents and personality. But in moments, they will see glimpses of the boy we knew and love.

To some, you were 14 years in ecstatic, cartwheeling, exquisite and painful human life. And now that has ended. You have returned to the quiet land of darkness from which your body was knit and your spirit sparked. You have returned to the silence, to the gentle void. You are our memories, and you are the way we will live and love differently because we knew you. 

And to every one of these stories about where you are now, there is a moment when I think, “That’s about right”, “Yes, there he is”, and “I believe”.

This universe is so vast and full of mystery, and we understand and perceive so little. I know nothing for certain. I know not how I can have a foot in each of these worlds of belief, standing suspended over uncertainty and faith like some Twister game of shifting perspective. But there I stand. I shift where I’m leaning, I move between here and there, and I rebalance. I find a new spot that feels comfortable–as comfortable as we can be in this process of grieving and emotional contortion. 

Sometimes I lose my balance, and I fall.

“Forget comfort,” I say. “Nothing about this should be comfortable.” Death is violent. Death is permanent. Death is darkness. Do not send others who are in pain there with visions of angels and charges of light-filled energy and soccer games in the clouds. Keep us rooted here, feet on the earth. This is tragedy. This is suffering. Don’t make it transcendence. Don’t make it peace. Don’t make it beautiful. We need not romanticize death and ending life when other people in pain are listening and feel the heaviness of death calling them and claiming them more than the slow, mysterious unfolding of life. 

For them, I want to cry:

We want you alive, here with us. You matter. Living, you bring something to the world no one ever has before or ever can again. The world needs you. The permanence of death will steal goodness and joy from a future that right now you cannot even imagine. It is a permanent ending to a temporary state of being. Death is permanent, but life is always changing, always moving, always transforming, always becoming. What seems impossibly heavy and stagnant and endless will find relief, will feel change. 

This pain will end. Yes, new pain will come. I won’t tell you it won’t. But you will be a different person when it comes. You will know, “I survived it last time; I will survive this, too.” And somehow as you grow, you will be struck by both your smallness and your significance, and the suffering you experience will be only one piece of a swirling dance of sorrow and joy in a world where 350,000 babies are born every day and the sun rises no matter what and the birds sing no matter what and the moon pulls the sea, and you will feel deep in your bones that you are a part of this mystery and wonder. 

When I look back on the darkest moments of my life, while I would wish them on no one, each piece, even the ugliest, most traumatic ones, begin to emerge in a larger picture of who I would become and how I would impact the world. Even as years later I fight “why?” and cling to images of how different I could be without those wrecking balls from my past, I cannot deny that where the wrecking balls landed, I found a way to build something new and undeniably beautiful that never could have risen without the initial destruction. 

I don’t know your story, but I know that when you survive this pain, you will hold the power to find a deeper gratitude, a new understanding of yourself, and a closer connection to all other people who have also survived. Bit by bit you will find yourself in rooms where you feel you belong. Piece by piece you will patch together a shawl of compassion for yourself, and you will watch your life unfold slowly, guided by what you have learned about your power, shadows, and passion.

This place is somewhere on the other side of choosing life, receiving help, and working through the darkness.

If you’re already getting help and working hard to overcome the darkness, and you still feel like the empty black swallowing the stars, wait. Please wait. Sometimes we work through the darkness, and sometimes all we can do is wait through the darkness. The pain continues no matter how many people try to help or how hard we work to end it. Sometimes all we can do is wait for the sun to rise again. And again. And again. And we trust that one day the sun will rise, and something new will rise in us, too.

A child has died, and in order for us to survive the pain of the loss and continue our good work and love each other, we develop some shred of understanding. In order to find hope and courage to continue, we find meaning in what has wrecked us. If we could have him back, we would choose his life over these lessons a thousand times.

Every piece is real to me. Every piece is true. Angels, energy, rebirth, endings, and darkness. I will gather all these stories in my arms and hold them tight. I will breathe them in. Hold them to my face and learn their scent. They will catch my tears. Together they will give me understanding that any one narrative alone cannot. As I am ready to drop any one of these stories, I will let them fall away. As I find need to reclaim stories lost, I will pick them up again. New stories will find me, and maybe each one will be woven together so that what was once separate threads on individual spools now becomes a tapestry of an image that holds the very message I need.

We each move differently through the processing of our grief. Let us allow ourselves to hold what we need. Let us sit with the emotional contortion of grief when it demands to be felt. Let us allow ourselves to hold whatever affirms life, acknowledges truth, and inspires courage.

We deserve a life abundant. We deserve the same fullness of life we would want for Liam. The light that he held, we hold, too. 

Photo: Josh Hailey Studio