Introduction

Bruce's suicide note was a shocking testament to the horrible truth he was forever lost to us and had silently suffered years of painful confusion. A simple explanation he was gay and he was committing suicide. He wrote it for our understanding and to say good-bye with love, but reading it was like drinking acid. As keeping his homosexuality a secret became his poison, his suicide has become mine. You don't lose someone like Bruce without losing a great part of yourself.

I'd never imagined before Bruce's death; how losing someone could go beyond what I'd experienced in losing my father. I thought I'd felt the deepest grief and sense of loss I could ever know. But as much as it left an empty place in my heart, I accepted it. We prepare all our lives for our parent's demise, and usually suffer the loss over and over in our minds before it even happens. We think about it, we dread it, we realize it's as inevitable as our own deaths. So there is some mental preparation and natural understanding that each generation has its time. Of course, not always. People die young, many have, but not for me, not till Bruce.

Losing your child hasn't a drop of anything "natural" to it. Nature builds in this need to nurture and protect your children. They hurt, you hurt. Their pains, their sorrows, their well-being, you feel with them like no other person you love. Whatever happens to them, happens to you. Then there's the matter of how you lose your child. Suicide is devastating. There's nothing "natural" about it. It's not the result of the body breaking down by disease, it's not an untimely accident even. When it's a choice a person makes to end their human existence, to escape from seemingly unsolvable problems, then it's a mistake.

Now, seven years later, I begin Bruce's story with a letter that I hope reaches him, wherever he is somehow.

September, 1999

My Dearest Bruce,

I know you had to be in the deepest kind of pain to do what you did. You went so far away from all of us to a place you knew someone else would find you eventually. I know you planned it that way to spare any of us who loved you from finding you ourselves. I still get sick inside when I remember. So horrible, so all alone. Your beautiful face and tall, lean body was found smashed, broken and decaying on a precipice 450 feet below in the loneliness of the enormous Grand Canyon. My heart still breaks when I think of you and your tragic end, dearest child of mine.

You had to hate yourself to do that, had to be so lost in despair and hopelessness. I am so sorry, so sorry, my child, that I couldn't help you or save you, that I didn't see through the pretense you were living, and that I believed you were all right. What happened to you is my greatest and deepest sorrow.

I am haunted by the helplessness I've felt since then. Had you been murdered by someone else, or had an illness or accident take you, there would have been something tangible to blame for your death, something that could free my mind of the torment I've experienced. But suicide? How does a mother make peace with her child's suicide? And because your pain drove you to it, how, then, can I be angry with you, the murderer of my own son being the same?

Driven to it in your helplessness to do anything else? When I think of you alive, I remember how proud I always was, and still am, that you were such a wonderful human being besides a considerate and loving son. It wasn't just me who adored you, others also thought so highly of you, sincerely said what a great kid you were! That you were who you were, makes your loss so hard to bear, even now.

You destroyed our future when you destroyed your own. How did you ever think we "could handle it" better than you could? You were suffering, yes, but you had no idea what suicide does to the victims who are left behind as you were immersed so in your own pain. Our lives have been scarred with the worst kind of loss, guilt and regret that doesn't quite ever heal. Yet how can I be angry with you for doing it when you were hurting so much? I simply still can't.

Your letter exposed a tortured, depressed state of mind to which no one was privy, the weight of your secret bearing down so heavily on you. It's still so hard to understand that your being gay was the cause of your suicide. So what!! As your reason, it's made your death even more tragic.

My dear, dear Bruce, we didn't know, we didn't see! No one knew what was devouring your spirit, or understood the seriousness of your bouts with depression. Please forgive us all for being so blind. Not long ago, I read a sad story where a gay teen wrote he was "waiting for his mother to ask him if he was gay," because he couldn't bring himself to say it. They were very close and he believed she must have known, must have understood, so he took her silence to mean her disapproval. That wasn't the case, she actually had no idea, but it was "what he believed".

It made me wonder were you waiting for me to ask you if you were gay? Or did you think I knew, but disapproved? That possibility now hits me like a ton of bricks! If that's what you thought, then all the more your sorrow and mine, and I'm so sorry if I let you down, but I didn't know! I live with so much regret, my son. You suffered from a dreaded secret that destroyed you.