The Stories That Shape Us: On Navigating the Aftermath of Suicide in Memoir

I’d already finished a draft of my memoir when I realized there was a chapter that was missing. 

I’d tried to write around it, to ignore that phantom limb feeling, the tingling that told me there was more to say. 

Until my husband, Rob, who read an early version of my book, approached me, confused. “You’re not going to mention Daniel?” 

“No,” I said plainly. End of discussion. Rob’s a drummer, not a writer, so I thought I knew best about the stories I needed to tell and what was worth withholding. I thought only I could decide what should be left on the cutting room floor. 

It was only later when I was in a group with other nonfiction writers that something started to thaw. We began discussing what we avoided writing about in our books. We began prodding all that had been left unsaid. For 20 minutes we each wrote and the words flooded out of me. The words I never wanted to put down on the page. The ones that told the truth: that before I met Rob there had been someone else I’d loved. A man, whose name I changed to Daniel, who died by suicide six months and 11 days after we met.

I thought I knew best about the stories I needed to tell and what was worth withholding. I thought only I could decide what should be left on the cutting room floor.

As I scribbled I understood something I hadn’t previously: Daniel’s demise felt like a punishment. A punishment for all of my pent-up desires. A punishment for wanting a baby so badly. When Daniel jumped off that mountain that day, I felt like a woman whose longing for a child was so strong it could push a man to his death. 

I thought by not writing about Daniel I was protecting him. I thought by not writing about Daniel I was protecting myself—from the guilt and shame of believing this man would give me the baby I so desperately wanted. By deleting Daniel from my life altogether, I could put that half a year into a box deep inside my heart where no one else could see it. But Rob knew something that the other writers in my class also saw. I knew it too, but I had forgotten. Our stories shape us. We can’t escape them. I was no longer the same person after Daniel. I couldn’t run away from him on the page. My book wouldn’t ring true to me without him.

I told myself that talking about my dreams for the two of us—and Daniel’s sudden death—would derail my whole book. I had other reasons too. My memoir was about my quest to decide once and for all whether to have a child. Would the suicide of a man I only knew for six months confuse readers? The monologue in my head became the voice of every imagined detractor. I criticized myself for grieving a man I barely knew. I blamed myself for missing the signs that must have been there. I pointed the finger inwards for not being able to save him. He had broken up with me three weeks before he died. Who was I to write about him? I asked. Weren’t there people who were closer to him, who had more of a right, who were entitled to these feelings of loss? 

And then there was this: I didn’t want to memorialize the memory of the person I was back then. The woman who would spend an extra half hour walking in her neighborhood to avoid the ten-block radius around his apartment once he was gone. The woman who would send Daniel Facebook messages after I knew he was dead saying “I miss you” and “hi, are you there?” and wait for the three dots to appear confirming he was responding. The woman who sat on his couch hoping he’d walk through the door on the night he went missing. Even if that meant that he came home with another woman—you see, that’s as far as my fear knew to go in that moment, the fear that he was cheating on me. 

Daniel and I lived together. We talked about having a child and getting married. I was 38 and I was convinced he was my last shot at love. My last shot at a baby. Or maybe my scarcity mindset around men and motherhood was all in my head. How do we know the difference between what our hearts tell us and the truth with a capital T?

I wandered around Daniel’s apartment that night looking for clues, certain that any moment he’d come home. I stared at a receipt on his table trying to decipher what it could tell me. I looked in his fridge. I studied his bookshelves. Even after I got the call almost 24 hours later, from his brother, telling me Daniel was dead, I hoped that a letter would come in the mail, a letter he had written in a frenzy just before he jumped off that mountain an hour and a half from Brooklyn. The letter never came. I even took a pregnancy test, wondering if a child was still possible.

What I was left with instead were waking dreams. We had hiked the same mountain he’d jumped off of only four months before. I had memorized its elevation—1,200 feet—because I saw it marked on a sign as we entered the park that day. When we had reached the top, we stood at the precipice peering across the Hudson Valley, the green of the treetops carpeting the world down below. I didn’t know at that moment that this mountain would be the end for us. The end for Daniel.

I had so many questions swirling through my head. Some, like “who was this person I thought I knew so well?” would unfold over time after countless conversations with his friends and loved ones. Others, like “why do I believe Daniel is my only path to motherhood?” would take longer to answer.

In my frantic need to understand his death, I turned to Google, the place so many of us go to answer life’s toughest questions—or maybe just to torture ourselves. Sitting at my computer I typed, “How long would it take a person to fall 1,200 feet?” and found chat rooms dedicated to scientists, researchers and others like me who sit around pondering at what point a person loses consciousness after they fall. I needed to know how quickly Daniel died. I needed to know what free fall felt like. I needed to put our future to rest. Of course, the length of his fall would depend on his weight and position and I spent days—weeks if I’m honest—envisioning him falling. I didn’t know exactly where he was standing when he jumped. If it was light or dark. Whether he fell head-down or feet-first. If he saw all of my texts and calls coming in: “Are you okay? Please call me.”

I couldn’t run away from him on the page. My book wouldn’t ring true to me without him.

Twelve seconds is the answer. A 170-pound person falls 1,200 feet in about 12 seconds. Daniel’s life and mine intersected for six months and 11 days, but in the end, it felt like 12 seconds. One moment he was there and the next he was not. One moment my dream of a marriage and child seemed within reach and the next it was not.

The question I was left with was this: How could I write about Daniel? And what would those pages convey? What could I show the reader by sharing the detail about watching his cherry wood casket be lowered into his grave? How could I be sure a reader understood what these memories of Daniel meant for my path to motherhood since that’s what my book was about, after all?

By the time the one-year anniversary of Daniel’s death rolled around I was dating Rob and he and I walked to Daniel’s apartment and brought a few bottles of Daniel’s favorite, Two Hearted Ale, as an offering. I read excerpts from one of Daniel’s books, Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost. “How do you calculate upon the unforeseen?” she wrote and as I sat there I asked Daniel and the universe that same question. The word “unforeseen” held so many layers for me: whether Rob and I would remain together, whether we would decide to become parents, and why I allowed my desire for a child to lie in a man’s hands.  

Rob and I are married now and we have a four-year-old daughter. We still have Daniel’s plant, one I took home all those years ago. Next year will be ten years since his death. Looking at the window sill where the plant sits I notice that some of the leaves are brown and brittle. Others are lush and green. Some years it sprouts white and pink flowers for over a month. Some years it doesn’t. Sometimes my daughter and I walk by Daniel’s apartment and I wonder if I should say: I lived here once. I can’t help but think that if Daniel was still alive she wouldn’t exist, or she’d be a different person altogether. 

Rob was right. The other writers in my group were too. We are everything that ever happened to us. If I allowed myself to hide on the page, to avoid writing about Daniel, my book wouldn’t be the same. I wouldn’t have been able to write so rawly and honestly about who I am. I wouldn’t have been able to show my transformation: from someone who looked toward everyone else to fulfill her desires to someone who went after what she wanted by standing on her own two feet.

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The Mother Code: My Story of Love, Loss, and the Myths That Shape Us by Ruthie Ackerman is available from Random House, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.