List

Me, age 37

A teenage boy down the block has killed himself.

I see the boy’s mother driving up the street in her car, shattered and hidden behind dark sunglasses. My heart hurts. I cannot begin to imagine the grief that has swallowed her whole. I don’t want to imagine it. Instead, I pull my three children close and hold them tight, kissing their precious faces until they start to squirm.

How does she manage to get into a car and drive? I wonder. How does she get out of bed in the morning and physically hold herself upright?

As I dwell on how she is coping with such inconceivable sorrow, I realize with a start that I need to add suicide to my list. Immediately.

My list is the ongoing mental inventory I keep of the tragic things that cannot, under any circumstances, happen to my children. 

Each night before bed, I recite my list, enumerating everything that has the power to harm my kids. By naming these things in all their brute power and ugliness, I feel like I can somehow ward them off and keep them far away from my family. I know this is an illusion, but my list feels like a sacred litany, the most holy thing I can do as a mother.

Please God, I implore, keep my children safe from disease, cancer, mental illness, addiction, assault, rape, violence, natural disasters, car accidents, household accidents, bike accidents, drowning, kidnapping, choking, electrocution, acts of terrorism.

And now, at the end of that long dismal line: suicide.

I wrack my brain: is there anything else I’m missing? Not that I can think of, but sooner or later my list will grow. I’ll open the newspaper and read about a dreadful new calamity, and then suicide will be followed by something just as unbearable.

The courage required to be a mother is staggering. I’m overwhelmed thinking about how we try, in a million different ways, to protect our children from the world’s most unimaginable heartaches. We work so hard to raise up healthy and compassionate children in the face of – in defiance of – these perils. It makes me appreciate how much dignity and grace there are in the mundane details of our days, braiding hair, packing lunches, clipping little fingernails.

We have such simple and abundant goodness right here in our hands, if only for a fleeting moment or two.

I’m hanging onto it for dear life.

I wish you all a peaceful and blessing-filled Mother’s Day, especially Maria down the street. She is always on my mind. This post is dedicated to her.