March 12, 2020
I have a hole the size of the universe inside of me and everything else seems insignificant in the light of Elliot’s absence. Anne and I took Elliot out to dinner the night before he moved to the college campus. At dinner, he talked about being a tiny speck in the universe. I remember telling him, “The whole earth may just be a tiny speck, but when you are holding your cousin Sophia, or when your cousin Wes is looking up at you, you are huge – enormous – and they need you.”
Wrestling with Elliot’s depression
I look back at that conversation five months ago and cry. Why didn’t that thought disrupt the spiral of depression?
Yesterday marked five months since Elliot died. In my sleep and in the waking time between dreams, I thought a lot about him. My mind kept wrestling with his state in his final hours. We know that he had been playing Magic (an online card game) on his computer. He had made purchases Thursday night and in the early hours of Friday morning. Sleep disruption is a symptom of major depressive disorder that I was unaware of before Elliot’s death. I knew Elliot had a problem of staying up all night playing games, but I did not understand that gaming was his way of avoiding a sense of hopelessness.
Anne speculates that he made wagers with himself, win and keep going or lose and die. I have a hard time comprehending the weight he must have been carrying. In my life, even now while grief torments me all day long, I have never felt the kind of burden that seems to be so heavy that death is more appealing than the difficulties that appear.
He thought he was a burden. He thought he did not belong.
Thomas Joiner’s theory on suicide is that people have two feelings that drive them toward self-inflicted death: a belief that they are a burden, and the feeling that they do not belong. These feelings do not need to coincide with reality to be deadly. Elliot was the opposite of a burden. He was gifted, talented, a delight. While he thought he was an outsider; he also belonged. Elliot had high expectations for himself. While others could see his value and wanted to be with him, he could not see his own value, especially when he failed. His own perception is what mattered in the end. When Elliot talked about his negative feelings, I argued with him; I told him how loved he was or how special he was. I was blind to how he was feeling precisely because his internal thoughts were so far from his external reality. He saw himself as a speck. I saw him as a giant – but my arguments did not matter. One cannot convince someone out of depression anymore than one can convince a sick person out of heart disease, high-blood pressure or cancer.
Undiagnosed
When depression is undiagnosed it can do lethal damage before anyone realizes it is there. At the time, I did not know it was depression but in hindsight depression appears to have crept into Elliot’s mind a year before he died. It coincided with his pulling away from his childhood. He was starting to think about the future more seriously. What would he do after his senior year? He wanted to have his own beliefs and goals. He did not want to follow our rules. I am not sure if these life transitions were causal or correlational.
Elliot wanted life to work like a mathematics equation. He wanted certainty. Like most teens at one point or another, Elliot thought that Anne and I were just trying to control him; we did not have his best interest in mind, he thought. He rejected us and the world we were in and I think he believed we rejected him in return. Elliot looked for “just-right” fits for himself in friendships, in career path, in beliefs, and he felt a lot of pressure to get it “right”, right away. And then there was depression. First, it gripped him, and then it told him that he would never find his place, never find his people, never find God, never find meaning, never be home.
Death Spirals
I imagine the spiral in his mind:
Life has no meaning.
I have no meaning.
I am not motivated.
There is nothing out there to motivate me.
I have not done what I needed to do.
It is too late.
I have no value.
I am worthless.
No one understands
Everyone is better off without me.
I am all alone.
Life has no meaning…
If I only could have one more chance to see him
I spend a lot of time sitting alone in a crater of grief. Most days, I climb out and go to work or sometimes go to visit Anne or the kids in their craters. Sometimes, we all come up to the surface at the same time. Once in a while someone will crawl down and visit me in mine. At times, I even notice the craters Elliot’s death has created in the lives of others. However, most often, my time in the crater is time in the shadows alone. At times like this I sit there wishing I could go back to October 11. Then Elliot and I could sit together in a crater–me with my grief and him with his depression. I would not say anything but would sit with him in silence. We could sit there in the bottom of the pit for days and days. Ron Rohlheiser says that when someone is contemplating suicide they are too bruised to be touched. So if I could go back in time, I wouldn’t try to touch Elliot. I would sit with him. I would let him hear my breath in the darkness. Maybe I would not be able to stop the spiral but at least he would know he is not alone.
