Hope Stone Story*

(This is taken from a memoir I am writing that is as yet untitled.)

At a Survivors of Suicide meeting I attended two years ago, the facilitator brought in a simple craft activity.

She sent two baskets around our circle, one of different colored stones, and then one holding various colored felt-tip pens. We were instructed to select a stone, and then we were going to write the word “Hope” on it.

This activity proved to stay with me because of what happened.

I was the last in the circle to choose a stone. By the time the basket got to me, there was only a black stone left. At the time, I didn’t think of Shirley Jackson’s short story called “The Lottery.” I simply thought that this black stone was entirely appropriate. After less than a year into grieving my son’s suicide, black reflected my heart at the moment. As I reached for a pen to write with, it occurred to me that no color would work. This also seemed appropriate, though, so I resigned myself to the task and picked an orange pen.

I wrote on my black stone, as instructed. And the word stood out, big, clear, easy to read. In fact, it popped out, like a neon sign lighting the dark.

Quieted, I put my stone into the basket as it went around again, as we were instructed to do. Holding the basket, our facilitator said, “The point now is to share our hope with someone else, to give our hope away.” She sent the basket around again, and we were instructed to pick someone else’s stone. I picked out a light stone that read “Hope” in green ink.

I pocketed the stone, felt it there with my car keys and some change the rest of that night, feeling its slight weight and thinking about my black, neon-lit stone I’d given away.

***
One morning last week, almost two years later, I walked by the dresser, and there it still sat, the light stone with green writing, next to some loose change. It reminded me of “my hope,” the black stone I’d written on. Then I thought that someone in my group had written on this stone, perhaps with the same reluctance I had, and had given me hope.

In that moment, I remembered that in the first weeks, the first months of grieving the loss of my son, I wondered why I was still alive. The world had ended on the day he died. Why was I continuing to walk, drink coffee, read books, teach classes, and spend time with my family and friends when there was no point? Hope itself seemed beyond reach forever. So why go on? Many people told me that they couldn’t imagine what I was going through. I also couldn’t imagine feeling like living again.

Today, I notice changes. I still grieve every day. I wrote a poem two days ago in which I observed that grief is like a thread that runs through my days. As an example, at the beginning of this month, on the first Friday of February, I once again went through sadness because the weather was nice and I was on campus and working. When I walked through the empty campus to the parking lot and looked at empty row after empty row of parking spaces, I remembered what had made me rush off to school that last morning. It was partly my worry about getting parking. Thinking my son was safely at school, I had raced off to get a place to park my car.

This is just one thread of memory I may always have to live with.

I also live with the memory of that black stone I gave to someone else. I remember that at the start, it was as though I were writing to myself, even in my darkness, that there was, or eventually would be, room for hope in a way I couldn’t yet see.

It was a good thing, I think now, to be given a stone, one as black as my heart, on which to absurdly write such an absurd word as “Hope.” I was acting in obedience to what the facilitator told us to do–but not with any inspiration. What directions my life might eventually move in, or how it would spread out to include both my grief and some new ways of thinking–I couldn’t have seen any of that at the time.

Living this way is still not always easy. I still can’t imagine what heaven or an afterlife might be like. That was and is an idea lots of people have told me to focus on–“Don’t worry, Michael is in a better place now. He’s in heaven.”

I can’t picture heaven. I can’t imagine this. I can only picture what I know every day in the normal world in which Michael is absent. I only have everyday when he is not there at our family Christmas get togethers or at his birthday. He never went to college as I hoped he would.

I continue to keep that stone written on by someone else as a reminder. The picture does change. It begins to emerge, always, in ways I couldn’t have imagined.
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*This was part of my newsletter this month. If you’d like to sign up to get my newsletter, please use the sign up form on the right side of this page.