Derecho: The Storm on the Day of My Son’s Funeral

Derecho: A Storm Out of Nowhere on the Day of My Son’s Funeral

A mother’s grief. A funeral. A sky breaking open. Derecho.

On the day of my son Dylan’s funeral, nature and grief collided. A historic Derecho tore across the Midwest—a storm as sudden and incomprehensible as losing my only child to suicide. Derecho: The Storm on the Day of My Son’s Funeral is the story behind “He Left Too Soon,” one of the first grief poems I wrote after Dylan died. It is a story of burial, rupture, a mother’s love, and the shadow suicide casts across every life left standing.

The Day the Sky Broke Open

My son Dylan was twenty years old. My only child. When he died by suicide, the world’s order broke apart. Insides outside. Outsides inside. Nothing where it had always been. Nothing making sense. I was no longer the woman I had been. I was—and always will be—Dylan’s mother. I carried Dylan with me then. I carry him now. But the hole in my soul is infinite and vast.

On June 29, 2012, the day of my son Dylan’s funeral, a historic derecho tore through the Midwest. Violent winds. Falling trees. Power lines down. The midday sky gone dark. A storm out of nowhere on a day already torn from the world’s order. It felt as though the sky had broken open with me. As though God was grieving my son, too. And then the wind came.

When the Wind Came

June 29, 2012—the day of my son’s funeral. The temperature fell from 101 degrees to 73 in minutes. Wind whirled, whipped, snapped. Dark skies and clotted clouds swallowed the midday sun. We hurried toward the car before the rain came as papers tore across the parking lot and the light went out. Light extinguished. He left too soon.

Derecho—A Storm Out of Nowhere. Darkness on the wings of violent winds. Sixty to eighty miles per hour. Trees cracking. Branches breaking. Traffic lights swaying to and fro. As if in a dream I couldn’t break. A nightmare I would have to live out the rest of my life. My son’s funeral was on a day heaving itself pell-mell, uprooting itself, shaking loose all grounding, breaking all that held it dear, all that called it life, all that depended upon it to be as it had always been.

A day rupturing earth in a storm violent and of epic proportion. Derecho. Unpredictable. Violent. Sudden. We did not know we were in the path of such a storm. I had never seen—had never lived through—a storm capable of bringing down so much, so quickly.

The noise of the wind. As if it were screaming. Over and over, rising and hissing, falling and rising, screaming and moaning, cracking and casting itself broken. Falling down. Tumbling down. The sudden downing of it all. Power down. Wires down. Caught in the catastrophic exhale of sky, earth, trees, and now, even light extinguished.

Derecho—A Storm Out of Nowhere. Bringing it all down. Breaking things. Destructive nightmare of high, flat winds. A dark sky. A dark day. That week you took your life. That week you took me with you. The derecho did not become a metaphor afterward. It was there. Wind screaming. Trees breaking. The world tearing loose from itself. My child gone. The sky grieving with me.

“He Left Too Soon:” The Poem

He Left Too Soon

He left too soon,
Lifting life from June,
Casting torrents of rain.
 
His absence,
Breath of pain whose exhale can only bring
Heart heaving, this heavy beating of tears.

Breaking loose,
All hell in earth’s upturned rupture,
Death shoveling shadows over me.

As I bend to lay flowers on his name,
Inscribed and bronzed,
A permanence come to stay.
 
My love laced now with pain,
Standing over my son’s grave,
Death’s Derecho come to stay in my shadow.

©Beth Brown, 2021, “He Left Too Soon”

The Storm Had a Name

The poem came first. The name of the storm came later. Derecho comes from the Spanish word for straight or direct. It is a fast-moving, long-lived line of thunderstorms whose straight-line winds can reach hurricane force—violent, sudden, and devastating.

What is a Derecho?

Derecho comes from the Spanish word for straight or direct. It is a fast-moving, long-lived line of thunderstorms whose straight-line winds can reach hurricane force—violent, sudden, and devastating.

(Derecho is a) widespread, long-lived, straight-line wind storm that is associated with a fast-moving group of severe thunderstorms. . . Derechos can cause hurricane-force winds, tornadoes, heavy rains, and flash floods.

Chicago Tribune, By Russ Schumacher, The Conversation
Associated Press

The Storm’s Path

On June 29, 2012, the derecho raced from Indiana toward the Mid-Atlantic at nearly sixty miles per hour. Its path crossed Ohio and surrounding states, leaving widespread damage and darkness behind. Facts could chart the storm. They could not chart what happened inside me.

What Returned First

“He Left Too Soon” was one of the first poems I wrote after Dylan died. Born from the derecho on the day of his funeral. My heart wept then. It weeps still. My career. My teaching. My art. My music. My voice. My writing. Gone with him.

A great and terrible silence came over me. I could speak only a few words; shock and grief consumed everything else. I wrote brief notes on my phone about seeing my son in a coffin and about how that day was the second-worst day of my life, yet the words felt as though someone else had written them. I could not find myself—my voice, my reflections, my meaning—inside them. Months would pass before I could begin to return. The poem did not arrive all at once. It came from what spilled over: all I held precious and dear, the tears that would not stop, the way all of me went away the day Dylan died.

“He left too soon, lifting life from June” began small. Slowly, the line became the poem. My first season of grief. Summer. Dylan’s memorial date. My deepest sorrow laid bare in language stark enough to hold it.

Words drenched in loss. Cemetery words. Burial words. Words blunt with the finality of death. I had known sadness. I had never known grief this heavy. Grief that takes breath. Grief that lives everywhere inside the body after your child dies by suicide.

Grief distorted time and place. Shock. Horror. Disbelief. The hideous reality of my son’s suicide. This was the first time I wrote about losing Dylan. It would not be the last. I had so few words. For one who had read so much, I could find only the solemnity of language. A few sparse words that felt as heavy and weighted as the intense pain in my heart. Words of mourning.

“Casting torrents of rain” was true because drenching rain fell that week. It was true, too, because grief cast torrents of tears across every part of my life.

The Lines That Remain

My love laced now with pain,

Standing over my son’s grave,

Death’s Derecho come to stay in my shadow.

— from “He Left Too Soon”

The storm passed through. Grief did not. Fourteen years later, I remain where time stopped. Suicide still makes no sense. Confusion remains. Guilt remains. June remains catastrophic—the month my son died, the month I buried him, the month the sky came down. And still, Dylan’s name is here. In the poem. In the storm. In every day I have lived beyond the day he could not.

If You Wish to Read Further

These pieces return to Dylan from other distances: the poem itself, the date the body remembers, another season, and the questions that do not leave.

• He Left Too Soon: A Poem About Losing a Son to Suicide
• What to Say to Parents Who Lose a Child to Suicide
• Why Suicides Spike in Spring and Summer
• Too Soon, Too Cold: The Wind Doth Blow
• Navigating Grief: 5 Years After Losing My Son

About the Author

I am Beth Brown. Dylan’s mother. He was twenty, my only child. I write to speak his name, to give language to the questions that do not leave, and to companion parents who know this terrible loss. My collection, Where a Mother’s Grief Resides: Poems of Child Loss and the Work of Living On, gathers nineteen poems written after Dylan’s suicide.

Read Where a Mother’s Grief Resides on Amazon Kindle

If You Need Support

If you need support after suicide loss, these are three places to begin. If you need urgent emotional support, call or text 988.

• Alliance of Hope for Suicide Survivors — allianceofhope.org: information, a blog, and an online forum for survivors.
• The Compassionate Friends — compassionatefriends.org: support groups, community, and publications for bereaved families.
• 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline — 988lifeline.org: call or text 988 anytime for free, confidential support.

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