The Blue Moth and The Road Rash Bungee Cord

On April 7 I woke up at 5 am to the phone call that shattered my life. My youngest son Daniel at age 20 had succumbed to immaculately concealed depression and shot himself. Eighteen days later he passed away. Now, six months later, I have two new unwanted companions — the Blue Moth and the Road Rash Bungee Cord. Allow me to explain.

There is no roadmap to what happens when you lose a child, and suicide just adds to the depth of wandering the wilderness. To cope Lori and I reach out to great friends, family, and church. We lean into the community of parents who have gone before us in this journey, and it was heart breaking to find out just how many there were living very close to us. They say suicide is a silent epidemic — I agree.

This support network has been incredibly helpful. I need their strength when the Blue Moth visits or I take an unwanted ride on the Bungee Cord. For you see, the most constant thing about the grief process after the suicide death of a child is the unpredictability of it. There is no getting better every day, steady improvement, or anything like that. I am sure if you zoom way out things are “better” over time, but day to day, hour to hour, minute to minute, you just don’t know.

I met the Blue Moth in the excellent book Riding With The Blue Moth by Bill Hancock. It is a poignant tale of the loss of Bill’s college aged son in a plane crash, mixed in with a large dose of Americana from his healing solo bike ride across the country. The Blue Moth is the touch of grief and loss that comes to you and visits when it wants, for how long it wants, for whatever reasons it wants.

The name “Blue Moth” has a cool backstory, but for that you need to read the book. For me it is appropriate on many levels. Moths can appear suddenly, quietly, and all of a sudden are in your space. I can be busy working, say plowing through email. Then maybe I see a seemingly innocuous word like “business”, and the Moth comes. Daniel was in Business school at UGA before he passed away. So my brain quickly conjures up my son, and a touch of grief hits. Maybe seconds, maybe a minute later, it leaves.

“Blue” rings true also. I have never seen a blue moth, it almost sounds mythological. And dealing with the suicide death of a child is so out of the ordinary experience it deserves to have an unimaginable mascot.

The Moth sometimes needs no trigger at all for a visit. I can be deep in conversation about politics or geeky science things, and all of a sudden he lands. “Think about Daniel”, he says. And I do.

The Blue Moth visits me probably a dozen times a day, and slowly I am making my peace with him. However, the Road Rash Bungee Cord ride is disorienting and debilitating. Imagine you are in the car of life, riding down the road, listening to your tunes, going where you are going. But you have a bungee cord tied around your waist and then secured to the car. Most of the drive is normal, and you often forget the bungee cord is even there.

Then, with no warning, an invisible force pushes you out the door and onto the pavement. You drag, ripping open your skin, feeling pain that is raw, jarring, and out of control. Raw. That is the key word. The Bungee Cord is the big and evil brother of the Moth. The grief that hits is overwhelming. Thoughts like “I can never hug my son again”, “He is truly gone”, or “There is a massive gaping hole in my life” scream to life in your brain and crowd out everything else.

The depth of the emotional swing is overwhelming. It literally can stop my breath, activate the fight or flight stress flushing response, or sap any motivation to do anything. Technically the Bungee cord is usually triggered — lets say I see a 6’4” young man with brown hair and a big smile, or I read about friends’ college age kids doing something, or out of habit reach for my phone to send Daniel a text about a play in a football game I am watching. Although “triggered”, from the point of view of my day it comes with no warning. Bam. On the pavement, dragging at speed, feeling raw pain, with no control with what happens next.

Then, after minutes, or in bad cases hours, the cord snaps back and pulls me into my seat. It is time again to drive on in the car of life. It is time to join the next Zoom, write the email, do the errand, go to a social visit, go to bed, or just make a sandwich. Life soldiers on.

So life in some ways is normal, other than the visits of the Blue Moth and the Bungee Cord rides. Grief is with me, for the long haul. The best advice I have received is you have to learn to coexist with grief, you don’t manage or banish it. Trying to manage it is like trying to control the pounding surf instead of riding with it. Over time, my mentors tell me, grief will change into easier forms. There even is a kind that lets you have a bittersweet smile that shares the stage with the pain. I look forward to that day very much. Until then I will watch for the Blue Moth and brace for the Bungee Cord.