On my short drive home that night, I smiled when I noticed the iris were starting to bloom in our neighborhood. I was sitting at my desk on the 19th floor of the Cincinnati Enquirer building at a new job as the managing editor I hadn’t quite settled into yet, just one photo of my children on my desk. I saw “Mom” pop up on my phone shortly after 10 a.m. The morning she jumped, she tried to reach me. Don’t try to figure it out, I told myself, stop asking questions, assigning blame, looking. It’s unspeakable, bewildering, confounding and devastatingly sad. Suicide is as common and as unknowable as the wind that shaped this rock. But all I could see were the peaks miles away, the trees greener and prettier than I imagined, tiny dots of figures moving slowly up the switchbacks, and the stillness of the world. I came back to the canyon for answers, or a deeper understanding of life and my mother, or maybe myself. I wanted to know every fact, every detail, to see everything she saw, because I didn’t have the one thing I wanted – the why.
I replayed our last conversation, and each one before it that I could remember. I zoomed in on the photo she took with her iPhone from the ledge looking out to the sunrise that lit the canyon that morning to see if the rocks or shadows would share anything new. I read and reread her last words written in cursive in the tiniest composition book that she had left in her Jeep, as well as the last text she typed, in which she both celebrates life and apologizes for it. My mom wrote of riding the Light Rail to a Diamondbacks game, of planting a cactus garden, of looking forward to summer in the already hot days of a Phoenix spring. I looked for clues inside this little card with a cartoon penguin drawn on the front, written in block printing so my 5-year-old daughter could easily read it. I read over the last letter she had mailed to my children.
#Keeping pictures up of people who have committed suicide driver
The latitude and longitude where she landed, the last words she said to the shuttle bus driver who dropped her at the trail overlook, her mood when she met with her priest just four days prior. She took them to a few Diamondbacks baseball games the last summer we lived in Phoenix. My mom would see my kids several times a week, dropping by to play a game or read a book. I went back to the spot because I wanted to know everything. She jumped from the edge of the Grand Canyon. I can say it out loud now: She killed herself. I still catch my breath here, and feel dizzy and need to remind myself to breathe in through my nose out through my mouth, slower, and again. Four years to the day since she stood in this same spot and looked out at this same view. It was Ap– four years since my mother died. Rangers often give the same unsatisfying answer: Wind. Visitors always ask how the canyon was formed. It is a place that magnifies the questions in your mind and keeps the answers to itself. Everything about that view is impossible, a landscape that seems to defy both physics and description. I stood and looked down into the canyon, at a spot where, millions of years ago, a river cut through. If you are at risk, please stop here and contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline for support. Trigger warning: This story explores suicide, including the details of how the author’s mother took her own life.
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