Twenty six years ago today I was cleaning my kitchen

I don't remember if it was particularly dirty. All I remember is I had the uncontrollable urge to clean it. I am talking clean clean, the kind where you fill a bucket with sudsy, hard-core cleaning detergent and get down on your hands and knees and scour the corners. We had a big kitchen back then, bigger than any kitchen we've had since, come to think of it, so there was a lot to scour.

I was channeling my cleaning-obsessed Italian grandmother, scrubbing out the oven and emptying the cabinets so I could rid the dark edges of any dropped crumbs. And then I moved on to the bathrooms. It was a Saturday.

Every once in a while my husband would poke his head into whatever room I was presently scouring and say, hesitantly, So, um, are you finished yet?

At some point he dragged me outside to take a walk. We had a loop we used to do around our neighborhood. It started in our humble subdivision and reached up into a much fancier section that seemed like would be forever out of reach for us. Our habit after we both got home from work was to take this same walk. My husband was big into goal-setting and planning. He would say stuff like, What's our five year plan? What's the ten year? Twenty? Thirty?

I used to laugh at him. As much of an imagination as I had, I couldn't project out that far. We were twenty-six and twenty-five years old and had been married for three years and had just bought a house, things I couldn't have foreseen five years before. Five years before, I was, to put it plainly, a mess. The fall of my senior year in college I was in a dark place.

The truth is, I was suicidal. I mean, I was seriously thinking about how I would do it. The only thing that was saving me was that I was too tired. I remember going to bed one night and feeling like it was the end. I wanted only to stop the pain I was feeling. I wasn't afraid of death anymore and I couldn't imagine anyone would miss me if I were gone. Some part of me knew that this was an all-hands-on-deck situation because I started to pray. I am not a praying person, but that night I did. The prayer was a simple one:

Help. Help me understand why I should want to stay in this world.

The next morning I was exhausted and wrung out. I walked to class, stopping on the way to get the mail, how I always did, even though most days there was no mail. That morning there was a letter from my favorite professor. He was on sabbatical for the year and had never written to me before.

It was a strange out -of-the-blue letter. Basically, he said he'd been thinking about me and wondering if I was doing okay. He said, I hope you realize you have a lot in you that's wonderful.

After I read the letter it was like a veil lifted, and suddenly, I wasn't in a dark place anymore. I was outside looking in on myself, thinking very logically about my future, a future that the night before I could not envision.

I still couldn't envision it--at least not the particulars--but I knew with a weird degree of clarity that I could keep going. I could grow up. I could meet someone, get married, have a job, buy a house, have children...

Instead of dread and sadness and anxiety and fear, I felt curious. I wanted to hang around for the things that were potentially going to happen.

A few weeks later I met the man who would become my husband. Flash forward five years, and we are walking around our neighborhood where we've bought our first house. I've just finished scouring the entire place. "Oh, I understand now," my husband told me, "All of this cleaning. It's like the What to Expect When You're Expecting book says. You're nesting."

It turned out he and the book were right. That night we rushed to the hospital. In the morning we welcomed our first child into the world.

Tomorrow, he will be twenty-six years old.

No Answers. But Thank God for Books

Robin Williams died the other day. Suicide. Which seems to upset and confuse a lot of people. Mostly because we want to understand why. Coping with a death is difficult enough for the ones left behind, but when the death seems to have been preventable, it's even more difficult.

If only the person had asked for help or had gotten therapy or had taken medication or had tried harder to fight his depression or had snapped out of his bad mood or whatever, he'd still be around.

There's also a guilt factor. We wonder if we could've done more. We wonder if it was our fault in some way--to not have noticed the depth of the loved one's depression. Maybe we could've said something/done something or not said something/not done something.

I liked Robin Williams, as most people did.  We liked the version of Robin Williams that Robin Williams showed us. The manic, hilarious, brilliant man who appeared in Dead Poet's Society and Good Will Hunting and The Birdcage and Aladdin. Like millions of other people in my generation, I was introduced to him in Mork and Mindy. I suspect I was not the only kid who put rainbow suspenders on my Christmas list in 1978.

(Side note: I think I wore my rainbow suspenders one time, recognizing that the idea of rainbow suspenders was much cooler than the reality of rainbow suspenders.)

I am not one of those people who thinks suicide is a selfish or cowardly act.

When I was seven years old, my father committed suicide, so I have had a long time to think about suicide and depression and death and loss and grief.

Because I am a reader, I look for my answers--imperfect as they are-- in books.

When I was younger, I did this too. Probably because reading was a nice way to escape from real life. I loved fantasy books like A Wrinkle in Time, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and Charlotte Sometimes, mysteries like Trixie Belden, and stories about happy families like One of a Kind Family. 

I didn't read many stories about death. But the few that I did read, I read over and over. I didn't realize it when I was a child, but I think I was grappling with the loss of my father, and reading was a safe way to do that.

Some of those books have stayed with me.

A Summer to Die by Lois Lowry. This is Lowry's first book, interestingly enough. (If you don't know Lowery's work--she is the acclaimed author of The Giver, soon to be a movie.) A Summer to Die is about the death of a sibling, the MC's older sister.

Beat the Turtle Drum by Constance C. Greene, also a book about the death of a sibling.

A Pocket Full of Seeds by Marilyn Sachs. This book is heartbreaking. Main character Nicole is sleeping over at a friend's house when her entire family is taken away by the Nazis during WWII. She ends up in hiding at a Catholic school. There's a scene that's stuck with me where Nicole has a rare moment of fun with friends and a nun yells at her, basically saying that Nicole has no right to laugh when she doesn't know the fate of her family.

Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson, about the death of a best friend.

Some books I WISH I'd had back when I was a kid:

Try Not to Breathe by Jennifer R. Hubbard. Main character who has failed in a suicide attempt befriends a girl whose father committed suicide.

Fall for Anything by Courtney Summers. A girl's father, a famous artist, commits suicide and she teams up with one of his students to figure out why.

Looking for Alaska by John Green. A boy's quest to understand why the girl he loved died.

Okay for Now by Gary Schmidt. There's no death in this book, but it could be a life-saver for a kid struggling with a not-so perfect home life.

Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell. Also, a potential life-saver. Romance between a boy named Park and a girl from the wrong side of the tracks named Eleanor.


There are no definitive answers about why some people are so profoundly sad that they feel the only way to end the pain is through death.

Books don't have the answers either. But they give a little bit of comfort. A few hours of escape.

A voice that whispers, You are not alone...