I live on one side of the veil, he lives on the other. He is with my father, Charlie; he is with Bill and Bob and Jim Henson, my old friend, with his grandfathers and grandmother, with Laurie, the Swedish farmer he never knew, and with Milton, the poet. He is here, I am here; he is there, and I am there. We are living in a forever time; I touch that feeling in dreams, in music, in the fullness that throbs in my heart when day breaks, when the sun shines on the snow, when the candles are extinguished and the light of the spirit shines in my darkened room.

I live in eternity's light with those I love, bound by the laws of heaven, the laws of Karma, the sense and beating of the heart. Thank God for the here, and the hereafter; I am part of them both.

Stephen Levine, in "Who Dies," says, "Every one who dies leaves a skeleton in his closet; but the suicide leaves one in yours." I knew I couldn't ignore the skeleton, couldn't make the event of my son's suicide a secret that would bring its own torture and its own retribution. Facing my demons has meant refusing to remain silent, refusing to accept the shame of the last taboo, for today suicide is the last taboo. Facing suicide has meant weeping tears I didn't know I had to shed. Looking has meant testing my own faith and my own fear. Beautiful, terrible--surviving suicide has been another path from fear to faith.

How sharp the thorn, how bright the rose of memory, how piercing the pain, as though just today it had happened. Remembering is always like a cold shot of ice in my heart, like the first stab of the sword, deep, leaving its deadly wound. And how cold the winter was without him. I knew I could not go around the terrible place I now have come to know so very well. I had to go through it.

Though I had been on a journey of the spirit before my son died, and had meditated for many years, the death of my beloved son has been a powerful teacher. It is nearly ten years since he died, and in these past years, I have come to think of suicide and suicide survival, as spiritual issues, with spiritual answers that have come from the pain and the sorrow. Suicide has seemed always to do with the soul and with faith--a lack of faith or a deep sense of faith. Leonard Cohen says, "There is a hole in everything, that's how the light gets in." Without the wound there is no miracle. And I know these wounds are the entrance to a power greater than I am--an entrance to God, and, once more, to grace. Without it I am doomed.

Albert Camus describes suicide as the one truly serious philosophical problem in life: "Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest--whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories--comes afterwards." But reading about the philosophical questions that suicide brings up seems clean and crisp. Surviving suicide doesn't feel like that. Living through it is messy and emotionally as well as physically painful. Camus, and others, sound so academic, so clinical. Living through it feels like having your heart cut open with no anesthetic.

Faith has become my teacher, and death and loss and the sound of pounding waves and the pounding of blood in my own veins, singing to me that living fully and completely is the only way to travel from this darkness to the blazing light. I watch and listen as my daughter-in-law, and my granddaughter, and my loving and wounded family, find their way through this loss. My beloved husband Louis, with whom I have traveled this path, shares in every day and in every year, as Clark's death reaches the first decade of memory. My family, who loved him so, talks about Clark, about his laughter, his humor, his intensity, and his funny quirks. I have come to see that the laughter is so healing, and talking of my son's goodness and his foibles eases the pain and makes us all realize he is with us, forever, in spirit.

Even as I put one foot in front of the other, show up for my life, and the lives of my loved ones, learning to survive, I shiver when someone's suicide is mentioned, and the chill makes its way from my lips to my heart as I speak of my own journey, as I tell another survivor the things I did, the actions I took the way I moved from the initial terrible day of his death to this day. Putting the journey into words is one of the only ways I have found to warm the chill in my heart, to speak to another wounded healer.

There have been gifts I could not recognize at first. I have experienced the rebirth of joy, the feeling that I am living in the sunlight of the spirit, that God's hand is always in mine, and that He will not take me to a place where I cannot find meaning, in which I cannot be of service.

As my own guilt began to subside and I heard the voices of others who had walked the path that I was on, I began to realize that my son's suicide was a choice I had to honor, rather than take as an attempt on my own life, an unacceptable act that tore my heart apart. I began to see that this is just another path to acceptance, and surrender. When I began to accept this terrible action as my son's path and his destiny, I began to forgive him and myself and to find a way out of the dark place.