When the letters first arrived, the thing that surprised me most was their length. Having published several books of personal essays, I’d received letters from readers before. The senders alternated between laudatory and confessional, insulting by accident and insulting on purpose. They shared a sense of camaraderie between some unsavory aspect of themselves and some unsavory aspect of me. Reading them, I did not develop a thick skin so much as a better awareness of the skin I have, the calluses and soft spots.
But these letters were different. These were sent after I published a memoir about losing a friend to suicide.
None of their authors wanted anything. No coffee dates, no contacts, no advice. I have never understood why anyone would attempt to “pick the brains” of people whose skills remain hazy, even to themselves, but these were not such requests. They were flares. Missives of grief sent by envelope as well as email, containing pages of pure loss. Many came offering further reading: obituaries, that saddest of attached documents. There were stories of lost parents, siblings and friends. The deaths were recent or dated, but the pain remained fresh for the writers long after it had been shelved by others as biographical fact.
At one point, I was getting about eight letters and emails a day. I am not the sort of author who writes with the intention of helping people. So eight is a lot. That number is not a measurement of the book’s success. It’s a measurement of our need to unburden ourselves about loss, about suicide in particular, and our struggle about how to do it in a way that feels honest and useful.
We’d better start learning. In 2022, the last year the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published finalized statistics for suicides, over 49,000 Americans died by their own hand, an uptick from over 48,100 of these deaths in 2021. Statistics tend to create a distancing effect, especially when it comes to suicide. Halve the number or double it, and you would still be reading this, wondering: Is that a lot or a little? What does it have to do with my person, my loss?
From an institutional standpoint, there are plenty of vital initiatives such as the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, which provides support for people in distress. But after a year of daily exposure to the broader conversation, it’s clear to me that our best shot at reducing the number is only partly in encouraging people in pain to contact faceless entities. The rest of the onus is on us. It’s in preparing ourselves for when people in either danger or in mourning come to us.
I set out to write the story of my friendship with my former boss who died by suicide and the ensuing grief, but writing a memoir involving this topic didn’t afford me more authority than I had before I started writing it. It was the letters that taught me that when we don’t move the problem to the forefront of our consciousness, to a place where we are not shocked or embarrassed by it, the danger spirals out in two directions: more death for people suffering in silence and less ability to cope with that death for the people left behind. So often, the prevention and the cure are the same. And yet, many of us refuse the conversation because we fear less-than-perfect articulation of turmoil or, if we find ourselves in the orbit of a suicide, less-than-perfect articulation of condolences.
When I expressed to a fellow author my fear of fumbling my replies or drowning myself by engaging, she shrugged: In writing the book, I had the conch. Now readers have the conch. I didn’t have to do anything. She was mostly correct.
These were not call-and-response letters, mirror stories about someone’s own first job or heartbreak. Readers seemed to be using the book not as a reference point but as a starting point. They shared the same tone of isolation and impotence. The book, by virtue of its subject, had propped open a door to a room that never should have been shut to begin with. The writers of these letters, lonely in their grief, needed acknowledgment of their devastation and rage, and I didn’t want to contribute to whatever forces had caused them to reach out in the first place.
So one weekend, I answered all of them. At first, I hated it. On top of not being a grief counselor or someone partial to tasks, I have an allergy to earnestness. This is not a coping mechanism. It’s that my personality has many areas in need of improvement, but one of them is not the straight-faced application of the word “journey.” At first, I chalked up my dismissal of grief vocabulary (“process,” “meaning making”) as a personal problem, a side effect of my profession. But if the letters are any metric, it’s not just my problem. These somber ways of speaking about death, sometimes performative, sometimes pat, wind up excluding those of us who transmit our pain through humor. This is me tackling the subject. You’re looking at it.
I started responding: “Thank you for taking the time to tell me about your friend” or “That’s hilarious, I can’t believe no one arrested her.” These replies helped me learn not to flick someone’s loss back to them, but to accept the enormity of what they were telling me. To appreciate it.
The same was true when I was approached with stories in person, when I could see, in real time, how people float in the confusion of suicide. “I don’t know why I’m crying,” someone would say. “This was 20 years ago.” But why would they not cry? Who told them their grief wasn’t worth this? The self-consciousness made their unmooring worse, keeping them out to sea for longer. All because they couldn’t be sure with whom they could speak honestly, openly or ever.
The letters have slowed. The most recent one was from the other side of pain. At a literary festival, a young woman handed me an envelope and walked away. I opened it on the plane home, expecting it to be the story of someone she’d loved and lost. But she hadn’t lost anyone. She had attempted suicide herself. This was not someone I had tried to reach, but she had reached me. So now what? Now I would teach myself how to respond.
None of us is the wrong person for this.
If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources.
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