Commit Love: World Suicide Prevention Day 2016

The other night, I was at my friends house for dinner. A last minute invite: they had been out to the farm to pick tomatoes, boxes and bags of grapefruit-sized tomatoes, and needed to eat them, or some, that night before their red skins split and fruit flies swarmed.

The farm. My insides tumbled. Not their farm--they live in a c1820s home in town with an elaborate kitchen garden measured by yards not acres--but the Yoder farm, the Amish family who grows all the vegetables for the CSA founded, in part, by my ex-husband (with my intermittent help). In married life, my then-husband, the kids, and I drove for thirty minutes through Pennsylvanias failing farm country, a landscape of rotted barns, dilapidated trailers, and yards full of rusted swing sets, tricycles, and cars. The farm was bucolic, Amish orderly with tidy rows of tomatoes, cucumbers, and squash, a long driveway lined with grapevines and petunias, and draft horses nickering over their straw bounty.

Wed pick a trunk-full of tomatoes, stuffing out mouths with fistfuls of bright, sweet yellow cherry tomatoes, and then spend days processing sauce, salsa, and bags of whole peeled Romas. At the farm, we chatted with David, the farmer, and his wife, and their giggly half-dozen kids. Once upon a happier time, we had the family over for an Amish-English dinner party in our formal dining room. One daughter, six or seven at the time, told me it was the fanciest place shed ever been because Id lit candles and put them in gleaming crystal holders shaped like stars. Wedding gifts, no longer mine, like my friendship with the Amish family, divvied up in the Great Divide.

This is not about the loss of wedding gifts, but about the loss of friends. The real loss. Last week, a friend committed suicide. Impossible to imagine (and I try not to) because she was always suffused with joy, at least when I saw her. She owned the yoga studio where I practice. Her smile was a stabilizing force and she inhabited her body with a grace I can only hope to achieve. And yet, she is now so completely gone.

A strange, legalistic phrase: commit suicide. One commits crimes or commits to a relationship. But suicide? Perhaps initially as in committing to a cause of intended action. But wholeheartedly? That seems impossible: I once committed myself to such a course, but woke up in the hospital bed, and my life, while not intact, was given more time for repair. Even in the pain and inside the intention and in the bottle of pills I swallowed, even in my irrational thinking, unable to see any other possibility, I dont think I believed for an instant that I wouldnt wake up at some point, even if that meant years on out, and see my daughter and son and husband again. A temporary blotting out of time until I could wake into a life that had been returned to joy and purpose. A faulty, fleeting solution to the pain of now. A decision, in its execution, that seemed temporary.

Except so often, it isnt.

Sorrow for my friend in her pain and the consequent devastation. It is not easy to resist shutting down for good. Sometimes, I wander into that black, hopeless, ceaseless rumination that suicide might be the only way to gain a reprievenot as often as I used tobut the possibility (which, of course, offers no future prospect or potential) what I imagine as blank, dark silence can seem preferable over the unrelenting noise in my head (You are worthless you are unlovable you will never matter to anyone).

And then, my daughter emails me a sketch: the two of us, disguised as her invented cartoon characters. The mothers arm wrapped around the daughters shoulders. They gaze at the other as if besotted.

Love keeps me here. Friends, too, and their tomato bounty. Commit love, then.

Roberta sliced up platters of enormous tomatoes marbled through like steak, and layered them with mozzarella, feta, basil, salt and pepper.

Theyre as big as the brains of small children, Roberta said, laughing her big, infectious, so-alive laugh.

Or swollen alcoholic livers, Dan said. A wizard in the kitchen, he kept apologizing for our meal of tomatoes.

Or hearts split open by grief, I said.

Or hearts split open by love, Roberta said.

A way to counter sad mortality. The three of us sat at the table, speared tomatoes with our forks, while juice and olive oil dripped from our chins. We mopped up our plates with warm pita, spoke of our friend who was so completely gone, but present in our remembering of her, and moved into the restoration and warmth of laughter. Our meal: the joy of summers bounty and the pain of its end, and friendship that makes a feast from so little.