The PHurrowed Brow

Throughout the lead-up and on into my time at harvest, my family (nuclear and molecular, so to speak) had to tread some of life’s rougher and steeper trails in Colorado. My nuclear family consists of me, my wife, our daughter, and our son. My molecular family is bonded to me not by blood or marriage, but by the sorts of deep mutual friendships that durably strengthen both parties for decades and sometimes for a lifetime. You could call these covalent bonds, if you don’t mind me stretching the molecular metaphor. And as a parent, I view my offspring’s lifelong friends as being within this extended definition of family.

This segment is the second in a series featuring mountains both real and figurative,
climbs that are successful and not, and water that is varyingly life-giving, dirty, and toxic.
The series narrates experiences of me and of those around me in June and July of 2023.

Figurative mountains

There will be discussion of suicide and other forms of untimely death in this post,
so please stop reading if these matters jeopardize your wellbeing.
If you are in a low spot of this kind, please reach out.
Reach out to me, to anyone you trust, or to the 988 help line.

C (I’ll call her that) is my daughter’s closest friend. In the last days of June, C’s father was suddenly struck by health problems and died within days. This jarring shock was made more horribly surreal because C and my daughter (who are truly each other’s chosen family), had planned to come to Colorado the following week to scout locations for a wedding venue and to do other planning for C’s marriage celebrations. The journey from planning festivities of joyous union to the depths of mourning such a great loss was like falling from a cliff. After such a collapse, C faced a difficult ascent back to living in hope.

Just a day after Friend’s dad passed, there was another shocking loss. It happened a couple hundred miles south and west of home, in the high country where my son lives and works: one of my son’s co-workers killed himself, leaving parents, friends, employer, and co-workers like my son with the terrible, numberless, unanswerable permutations of the questions why?, how?, what if?… The depth of one’s grief and related difficult feelings is magnified by not having answers to those questions, and my son, too, suddenly had a steep path back to living in hope.

Those unanswerable questions after suicide are ones that I and most of my extended family have asked and re-asked since our own bitter experience of loss in 1995. As word of C’s and my son’s losses reached me in Kansas, my mind was already somewhat clouded with thoughts of such grief and questioning: the upcoming 3rd of July would be the twenty-eighth anniversary of the suicide of my brother Chris, the third of my six siblings. My dear niece (Chris’s daughter), my siblings, and I myself all have tender feelings well up as June ends. I experience these feelings as a brother, uncle, and as a father, for my son’s very life is entwined with the remembrance of Chris: my son was conceived in the weeks after Chris’s death and his middle name begins with the same letter as my brother’s.

When news of C’s father’s illness reached her, C rushed back to Colorado, as did my daughter shortly thereafter. Instead of serving as an aide in wedding planning, my daughter took on the role of supporting and consoling. Our Lafayette home became a place for them to stay when needed. C and her stepmom (and their families) naturally sometimes needed room as they worked through the difficulties that follow such a loss, for sudden shock and grief are not lessened by funeral planning and learning the ins and outs of estate law.

On the 30th of June, a harvest rain delay meant that I was not needed in the fields, so I drove home. I hoped that it would do some emotional good, for my family and for me. Indeed, on July 1st, I was able to have brunch with my daughter before the trip back to the fields, enjoying our short time together while lamenting the reason for her early visit and the need for me to get on the road. I know that being together even for such a short time benefited us both. (She remained in Colorado, ultimately for a couple weeks, and continued to be an indispensable support for C in dealing with things emotional, logistical, legal, as well as attending to practicalities such as meals, shuttling between the deceased’s family home and ours in Lafayette, so that C could focus on preserving parts of her father’s effects and setting funeral and estate plans in motion.) A good meal on a sunny rooftop patioamidst views of the mountains with a person you love is pretty darn therapeutic.

I did not get to connect with my son on that brief visit. Since his co-worker’s death, he had coped with the impacts thereof for several days, supported to varying degrees by his work and friend communities in Gunnison. And he was communicating with family by phone, though he had not fully disclosed the circumstances of his co-workers death or begun to express and work through the nature of his feelings about it. On July 1st, he drove to Denver to be with his significant other for the day before coming home to Lafayette on Sunday. He never communicated as much in advance, but it was important for him to have time to share what had happened and what he was feeling, and to get some much-needed TLC from his mom. Being back in the fields during his visit, I sure could not provide it. But my wife could and did. She had similarly given support and love to our daughter and C through some of the more difficult conversations and practical doings that followed the first days of unbelieving comprehension, intense reactivity, and sharpest grief. But my son was able to stay fewer than 24 hours. Also, his brief time at home was shared with my daughter and C, who were still facing steep struggles associated with C’s father’s death. In the end, he gave as much TLC as he got, and lost some of the time in which he could have shared (and lessened) his burden.

After my son left to return to Gunnison under the imperative to return to work, my wife shared with me by phone what he had experienced and was dealing with. And she shared her sense that his visit home had not been enough and that he was still in a low spot, with feelings he wanted to express, with questions he had to voice, with a need for the reassurance that comes from feeling loved. We agreed that phone calls and text messages would not serve us in helping him through and out of the low spot. The water that fell in the fields of Kansas on July 4th and again on the 6th gave me a window in which no wheat could be cut. I sluffed off the imperative of attending to wheat harvest and made my way to the high country. My son was there, and he should not face that mountain of painful questions alone.

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