My Dad suffered deeply from Depression. He was sexually abused by a neighbor as a young child. Surrounded by religious judgment. Guilt. Conditional love. He wrestled with these demons his whole life. Ultimately, he committed suicide a day before his 62nd birthday. 15 years ago this month.
The last words we received from him: “I love you all, but I hate myself.” Thanks to a neighbor who recently shared this video with me - found on a VHS tape in an attic - I just heard Dad’s voice for the first time in 15 years. Oh, his way with words. His tone. Silky flow. Weather worn. Southern drawl. It could sooth just as it could cut. Eloquence colored by the language of a sailor. I remember as a small child his reading me Cinderella and the sound and vibration and depth of the clock striking midnight as he slowed for dramatic effect - BONG! BONG! BONG! - my head resting against his chest. Feeling the vibration. His life was brutal within - those vibrations - but most never knew it. He was charming and gregarious and made you feel like you mattered - no matter who you were or where you’d come from. He knew others’ darkness in ways no one else could understand - ways others didn’t even understand about themselves - and loved them for it. He also fought for those people, his people - in schools, in the neighborhood, anywhere he found them. He took on challenges - in court as an attorney and in life as a Dad and Husband and as a community activist with my Mom in rebuilding our neighborhood - that just begged him to fail. I actually sometimes think he wanted to fail. It would have proven him right about himself. Fulfill the darkness. But, he didn’t fail. Yes, he had failings and weaknesses and flaws like any of us. But, somehow, he transformed his deepest demons into a life of beauty. Today, amid the noise and all of the activity of our daily - often transactional - lives, we look but we never see. We do but we rarely just be. I am as guilty as any. There is no nuance. There is no suggestion. We are missing the thrilling contradiction of bold humility, the creativity of belief, and the acceptance and ownership of the battles between our demons and our best selves. We are missing beauty. But, we cannot have beauty without honesty. We cannot have beauty without vulnerability. We cannot have beauty without tragedy. This is the truth of the human condition. This is the truth of my Dad’s life in hyper-focus. This is the truth of my memories. Our lives. This month. A suicide and a birthday. The contradiction. The tragedy. The beauty. Dad’s words in this video about our violent, crumbling, and forgotten neighborhood - an undeniable metaphor of his inner life - ring profound today as I reflect on it all: “You’d have to be blind not to see there was some beauty there.”
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![]() Last weekend, I went hiking with my wife and daughters. We headed to a familiar trail knowing from previous hikes that the bridge was out where we needed to cross the river. But, we also knew that a couple of trees had fallen previously and created a very workable bridge that we’d successfully navigated before. But, as we approached, we realized those two big trees were no longer lying across the river. They were gone. It’s early Spring now and we weren’t planning on swimming and didn’t have any water shoes and the water was high and quite cold - but it was the beginning of the hike and we had to get across. Given that our trees were gone, the next obvious thing to look for were stepping stones - some pattern for us to get across without getting wet. No luck. So, then we walked up and down the bank a bit looking for options. And, low and behold, there was actually another fallen tree reaching all the way from bank to bank. The problem was that there was no way any of us had the balance to climb across it. That wouldn’t work either. Ultimately, we all shed our shoes and teamwork-ed it across the river - my kids were total troopers as we slipped and slid and stepped on rocks of all shapes and sharpness while our feet slowly transitioned from painfully cold to numb. It was not easy or particularly pleasant, my daughter hurt her ankle for starters as her foot slid deep between two rocks, but we crossed and continued on a wonderful hike (albeit with a bit of a limp) that included a picnic at a waterfall. On the way back, we approached that same crossing and that same skinny tree traversing the river - and a totally different idea came to mind. What if we didn’t try to walk on it but rather used it as a balance rail? After all, the rocks had been even more slick and more treacherous than we realized the first time. We’d still go barefoot but we’d at least have something to hold onto. As we mulled this option, we also noticed that the river bed was markedly smoother - pretty much one solid rock - at this small section beneath this tree. We shed our shoes and were across in no time - no slips, no falls, no ankle injuries. This all left me curious as to why we hadn’t seen this tree and this section of the river as the solution when we first faced the problem that day of crossing the river without a bridge. We had looked right at it! Here’s what I’ve come up with: 1. We initially doubled down on our problem-centric thinking. We needed to cross the river and the bridge was out, and now our familiar fallen-tree crossing was out too! We unconsciously processed this as two problems (1. Need to cross and 2. No trees) when really it was still the original problem and the absence of a previous solution. And, we unfortunately started solving for the absence of a previous solution: we needed a tree to walk across because that’s how we’d solved this before, but the one flimsy tree we saw just wasn’t going to cut it. 2. We jumped too quickly to a new solution without creatively adapting the resources we already had and knew. The tree was key to efficiently solving our problem all along - at least on this day - but when we couldn’t find one to walk across, we threw it out as part of the solution. We jumped quickly to the stepping stones strategy and then to the straight-up wading strategy without thinking creatively about how the tree could still be used in a different way to help us across the river. 3. We didn’t fully evaluate all of the variables and possibilities available with a new strategy. We knew the water was cold and we weren’t exactly excited about getting wet at the very beginning of the hike. But, once we believed that was the only option, we just made it happen. We looked at the depth of the water. We looked at the speed of the water. We knew about the cold of the water. We knew the rocks were slippery (not that slipper though!). We knew they could be sharp. But, we didn’t consider the alternative possibility of finding a smooth, solid rock floor that was just 30 feet from us - beneath that tree. Problems and solutions both build inertia, and sometimes this is critical for efficient and quick decision-making. But, sometimes this inertia sends us on the wrong path or on a more difficult path to the same spot or perhaps even derails us altogether (my daughter’s ankle could have been a lot worse) all because of the initial ease of not thinking much or the comforting familiarity with a known version of the problem and/or solution. So, if we can start recognizing and feeling inertia in our work and in our lives and committing to pausing just for a moment to take in the situation anew, to make sure we’ve thought of all of the variables, seen them fresh for today, and built our best options from there - rather than yesterday - we will find small moments each day that can transform how we create our way through life. My Dad committed suicide 15 years ago this month.
He didn’t ask for Depression. He didn’t have any control over his sexual abuse as a child. He had no way to prevent his MS. He did what he could for as long as he could - until he couldn’t anymore. Since he died - the day before his 62nd birthday - I’ve been ever more conscious of time and of the things I can control and the things I cannot during my time on this planet. Choices versus just life. I have been hyper-aware of my own mental state wondering if and when that chemical imbalance of Depression - surely marked somewhere in my genes - might show up and throw me into a tailspin. Just life. I’ve been ever cognizant of my aches and pains and weaknesses in my joints, dizziness in my head, wondering if and when MS might show itself. Again, life. I am grateful every day that I have not yet experienced the physical brutality of MS or that dark hole of Depression. But, I also know that their absence in my life is no more because of my choices than their presence in my Dad’s was due to his. The last year has been rough on all of us as we daily face new questions and determinations of what is in and out of our control, what is really a choice - doing our best to get through the day either way. We have been stressed and stretched in new ways and like never before. We have proven we are bigger and more expandable and flexible than we ever knew and at the same time more vulnerable. Nobody asked for a pandemic. Nobody had any control over a tornado or a derecho or a flood or a damaging 70 mph hail storm. Nobody could have prevented 2020 in all of its trauma (and 2021 has been mostly more of the same). Yet, we have done what we can do to get by - and for me, as long as I can do it. For the first time in my life, I met a mental breaking point in December. I was never Depressed and certainly not suicidal, but something in that experience awoke my Dad’s ghost. I rebooted for a few days and went back to work and life just as I’d left it. Back to grinding. Nothing changed. Nothing newly controlled. No new light. I learned that as I kept pushing myself and kept grinding that something in my psyche kept getting ever so slightly darker and dimmer. Will this growing darkness awake those sleeping genes somehow? How long can I stay in this trauma before something in my biology gives? A shadow sits just over my shoulder. Just out of sight. Just out of reach - telling me I best be mindful of where I come from. And yet, as I openly and willingly talk about mental health with my children and with others - encouraging them and helping them get help - I find myself tested for the first time and failing. My hypocrisy around my own mental health adds another layer that dims the day further ever so slightly. I must step up. I must control what I can control. I must practice what I preach. I must listen to the ghost of my Dad and live the life I can while I have it. I have no idea if or when Depression or MS or another pandemic or anything else may come knocking. Who knows what tomorrow may bring? Today, I am fortunate to have choices. I simply must have the courage make them. ![]() At some point late in 2020, I was riding in the car with my wife - an unusually painful process at the time due to a bulging disc - and after a few quiet moments in my own head, I blurted out: “I haven’t felt this…just…ravaged since Dad committed suicide.” I’m not one for drama or overstatement. 2020 had taken its toll. The tornado. The pandemic. The school situation. The concern for family. The loss of a dear friend. The economy and its impact on my startup. The extra hours each day of work. Mourning my children’s loss of their school and their teachers. The isolation - without the alone time. The state of politics and discourse and democracy. The state of truth and those conversations with my children. The disc situation. I felt like absolute dog shit - physically, emotionally, spiritually, and intellectually. Within a few weeks, we’d add a Christmas-morning car bomb that rattled my house and an insurrection against our government to the ravaging mix. It’s been 15 years on April 27 since my Dad committed suicide. I have written extensively about it and have always focused my language around “living with suicide” because that’s what I do every day. But, that experience took a toll on me that was remarkable and long lasting - both confounding and clarifying. It forced a sort of reckoning with my understanding of my own sense of capacity and control - taking and giving me some of each. I have the capacity to live with suicide. I have the capacity to prioritize where and how and with whom I spend my time and energy and love. I have the capacity to create and iterate through my life - even when that includes tragedy and trauma. I can control where and how and that I allow myself to grieve (just not that I need to). I can control the kind of people I surround myself and my family with. I can control who I am as a person and how I live regardless of the circumstance. I don’t have the capacity to ignore my emotions and just “get by”. I don’t have the capacity to invest in shallow relationships. I don’t have the capacity to be all things to all people or to be my best self - especially when I feel ravaged in my very being. I can’t control that suicide and mental illness are facts of life. I can’t control people who don’t or can’t or won’t love unconditionally. I can’t control what life is going to throw my way. With all of that, I don’t know if my Dad’s suicide left me a little more dead or a little more alive. At the time, it was certainly the former. But, over 15 years of processing and evaluation and prioritizing and growing in my own life and with my own family and with my own capacity and control, I am at least more fully human than I was back in 2006. And yes, sometimes that means more tired and more hurt and more ravaged and maybe feeling a little more dead inside. But, it also means I see life with a longer arc and recognize my own capacity to bend it. So, I come back to my query as to the toll 2020 has taken on me - and surely on all of us. What capacity has it taken from me? What has it given or shown me? What control has it proven I don’t have? What control has it proven I do have? Has 2020 left me a little more dead or a little more alive? I guess I don’t know yet. But, at least I do know that I have the capacity to help define the answer. See also: Trauma Without Tragedy (The work of 2020 is just beginning) ![]() Last week, my girls (6 & 8) got their first email account through school. They were totally psyched. They felt so big. They had already found and were “chatting” among friends and neighbors by the time I knew they even had an account. (I’ll worry about that rabbit hole later and I feel certain it will show up in numerous blogs over the coming years.) But, for now, presence. Today, it’s kind of awesome just how excited they are. Today, it’s fun to see them enabled by technology. Today, it’s about a new tool for connecting with people they care about. Of course, I wanted in, so I gave them my work email. Now, they are spamming me… And, it absolutely makes my day. It’s a good reminder that the tools we use, whether email or Facebook or Snapchat or anything else, are not the problem. How we use them is the problem. How they reflect who we are is the problem. As a result, we - not the technology - are also the solution. So, today, I say email is a beautiful thing, a joy in my life, as it reflects, in the briefest moments of my day, the thoughts and love of my girls in the briefest moments of their day. Well. It finally happened. My kids discovered Uranus.
Well…their anus…er…your anus…um…Uranus. Giggling and vibrating like Beavis and Butthead, my two daughters (6 & 8) came home from “school” having spent part of the day learning about the solar system and the Big Bang and how the planets were formed - and, all I could get was: “Uranus, Daddy! Uranus. (butt out, one leg bent for emphasis, exaggeratedly pointing at their butts as if directing me from a 100 yards away that they’d found something really exciting). Uranus! Like YOUR ANUS! Anus, Daddy. Get it!?” I feel like maybe this was a beautiful moment in fatherhood. Raising two girls, it’s not that often that a Beavis and Butthead reference is accurate or warranted or endearing. Oh yeah, and planets and astronomy and the history of our world and our tiny place in it too. So glad they’re learning that! But, URANUS! Get it!? Aside from a fatherhood milestone, it’s really a developmental milestone. It’s a play on words. And they GOT IT! It’s a warp speed flashback through the galaxy of all those knock-knock jokes they told and didn’t get. Worse, the ones they made up and nobody got! (I actually love those.) Perhaps most importantly, this moment - Uranus - could well mean the liberation of the Dad joke. The possibility that puns and plays on words may actually land! This seems fundamental to the evolution of our relationship, our maturing mutual respect, and enduring love. How do you build those things without first “getting” Uranus? It may well be the linguistic fulcrum upon which balances the very possibility of fatherhood success. Am I reading too much into it? Probably. But, I get it. And, I appreciate it. And, it’s awesome. Uranus. ![]() As we got home, I grabbed my phone and looked for the text I hoped wouldn’t come, but in my heart knew would: my dear friend had tragically lost a young and healthy family member - father, husband, son, brother-in-law, son-in-law, friend. Seemingly perfect health. 47. Cardiac arrest. He’d been holding on in the hospital for days but the damage was done. The doctors had let the family know. I knelt on the floor - the only position that somehow made sense - and I began to cry. I sobbed for my friend, his family, those kids - as I do again while writing this. The kids. As I buckled toward the ground, my fists and knees balancing my body - a crooked and convulsing all-fours - I felt my daughter’s soft, light body drape gently across my back, her arm, tiny, wrapping, seeming to encompass me. This child I’d just come home with who was about to be banished to “some time alone” for her behavior, her wild emotions, her bickering, her temper, this child who hasn’t sat still for 6 years, this child so emotional herself, stood there, still, holding me. Her head now resting upon my upper back, her warmth comforting me. Her heart sustaining me. As my cries slowed and I sat more upright, kneeling, she slid from my back down my left side and grabbed my hand with her left while her right caressed my upper arm. She didn’t say a word. No one was watching her. My sobs picked back up for another round - she squeezed my hand tighter. She stayed there with me through all of my sobs and deep breaths and more sobs and breaths. Quietly. Still. Holding me. And this is why I was sobbing. And this is why I write. And this is why being a parent has made me stronger and more vulnerable than anything I’ve ever done. A crushing sweetness. ___ I write my blog as a sort of record that I was here, a breadcrumb of thoughts, and sometimes even a direct note to my children. I have to admit that I write, at times, for fear that this same thing could happen to me. What will my children know of me if something were to happen? What can I leave that lasts longer than memory? What wisdom could still be here if I were not? What love? How do I leave their world better no matter when I leave the world? And there, in this moment, in the arms of this sweet little animal, mustering a presence and a stillness never seen before - for the moment - I know I’ve communicated something far greater than words. And, again, this is why I cry. I know my friend’s lost loved one lives on with and within his children. Beyond words. The loss and pain are horrifying and yet somehow they will carry his light and love, holding it tightly, caressing it gently, comforting, with a crushing sweetness. ![]() Someone asked the other day: “how are you guys doing.” It’s a question we are all asking a lot and being asked by those who care about us. It’s a pretty complicated answer given the times, but I now feel like I have an honest - if not short - response. If you’d asked me three months ago how I would be doing if a tornado ripped through my community and then two weeks later we started hearing about hundreds and then thousands of Americans dying of a strange virus that would ultimately be killing upward of 100,000 in the U.S. alone with the epicenters being in states where much of my family lives and then another week or so later schools would be canceled and businesses would all be forced to close and we would need to wear masks to go to the store and stay at least 6 feet apart from people wherever we are, that this condition would last for two months and counting with the kids never returning to school and my wife and me not returning to work outside of our home and much of my community still looking like the tornado just happened… Stress. Anger. Disillusionment. Loneliness. Fear. Sadness. If you’d asked me to imagine all of that back then and how I would be doing two months in, all of these emotional responses would have been easily assumed. But, my imagination would have colored them far more intensely than reality has. All of us are more resilient in life than we are in our imaginations. Anyone who has experienced the loss of a loved one knows this. But, resilience is about bouncing back. We are still in it! We still don’t know how or when or if this thing will end - or when it will come back. Dealing with this requires something different: less wild imagination - more observation, less reaction - more reflection, less action - more stillness. Presence. Presence asks: what of this situation can I control? Stress scleroses around all of it that I can’t control, thus constraining my ability to control what I can. Presence allows me to maintain agency in the face of what feels like chaos. Anger reduces agency to reaction - a destructive behavioral loop. Presence asks what I know differently today, and based on that, what will I do differently? Disillusionment wanders and wonders in all that I don’t know, thus leaving me unsure of what to do at all. Presence makes the most of the connections and the tools within my grasp. Loneliness feeds on what I don’t have or is no longer within my grasp given the circumstance. Presence builds muscle. Fear builds scar tissue. Presence reminds us that our sadness must be accepted and tended to. It won’t go away. It may be stuffed or hidden or put aside for a variety of healthy and unhealthy reasons. But, it will be expressed at some point, in some way, and its easiest expression is in the present - as sadness. It is important for me to note that I am fortunate to-date to have remained healthy and to have not been touched by Covid-19 directly. That’s first and foremost. I am also fortunate to still have work and a home that was only modestly damaged by the tornado. So, let me be clear, I feel very fortunate despite the times. And still, Presence isn’t easy for me. In fact, it’s a discipline that, as often as not, loses out to all of these other emotional responses. So, Presence must also be a principle as much as it is a practice - a principle that drives and encourages the practice in the face of all the rest. Presence in the time of…whatever happens next. 14 years ago on April 27, 2006, my Father committed suicide. He had no light inside. Living with suicide for all of these years, I am ever aware that I have never had to fight that darkness - that Depression that ultimately consumed him, killed him. Largely thanks to my Mother’s tireless effort, indefatigable will, and a light that is implicit in her being, my Dad left me a light inside that he never had. My Mom’s light continues as a living gift to me and all who know her. Light and shadow go hand-in-hand to create form and beauty. Today, I am inside - every day. Looking for light. Like all of us, thanks to the pandemic, I am living in mostly physical isolation. But, I am also “inside” doing a lot of work mentally, emotionally, and spiritually to sustain my best self and try to remain a light of my own, to find the essence of this moment, to be present with it. A light defined by shadow. Shadow defined by light. I have captured these images of light and shadow throughout the inside of my house, the home where I was raised, where my wife and I are raising our children - the house still full of the light and shadow that so defined me. I am sharing these thoughts and images because I can. I am sharing them because I must. I am sharing them because it has been 14 years since I learned what darkness means and in that time I’ve also come to understand light. I hope you find your light in these dark times, and hold it dearly, grow it, share it, that it may be what guides you and those you love out of and beyond this shadow. |
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