Losing My Son to Suicide: The Backstory of My Forever Son

Losing My Son to Suicide: The Backstory of My Forever Son

By Beth Brown

This is the beginning of my story about Losing My Son to Suicide: The Backstory of My Forever Son.

If you are a grieving parent who has found your way here, I wish I could welcome you under gentler circumstances. Losing My Son to Suicide: The Backstory of My Forever Son is the story of the morning my life divided into before and after—the morning I learned that my only child, my beloved son Dylan, had died. The story remains unfinished because my life with his absence remains unfinished.

Introduction

Losing My Son to Suicide: The Backstory of My Forever Son is my account of losing my only child, Dylan, to suicide at age twenty. Fourteen years later, nothing about this grief is finished, save for the life I used to live. Losing a child to suicide leaves questions where answers may never come: Why? What did I miss? What could I have done? Those questions, and the guilt and unease surrounding a death still burdened by stigma, have reshaped my life.

I created My Forever Son because I felt profoundly alone after Dylan died. I write to process feelings, to search for answers where there are none, and to express the ways traumatic grief after suicide loss can move through a parent’s life—returning at holidays, birthdays, memorial dates, and ordinary moments.

This story is closely connected to “A Mother’s Journey.” Here, I tell what happened on the morning I learned Dylan had died. In “A Mother’s Journey,” I write about what followed: the grief, love, memory, guilt, and attempts to live inside a life I never would have chosen. Together, the two pieces hold the life I shared with my son and the life I have lived without him beside me.

If you need help now: In the United States, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline for free, confidential support at any time. You do not have to be suicidal to contact 988. If you or someone else is in immediate danger, call 911 or go to the nearest emergency department.

A gentle note before you continue: This story, The Backstory of My Forever Son, describes the early-morning notification of my son’s death by suicide and the shock that followed. Please read in the way that feels safest for you—slowly, in parts, or with someone you trust nearby.

A Mother’s Journey Through the Heartbreak of Losing My Son to Suicide

The night sky still casts darkness everywhere, the shadow shapes illuminated only by the yellow dim of my porch light. No moon and not yet sun rising. A deep dark lacking stars.

That darkness was the last ordinary darkness I would ever know. Before dawn, three men stood at my front door, carrying the news that would divide my life forever.

The Pounding at the Door

Out of a Deep Sleep

The pounding on my front door continues. Am I dreaming? Bam, bam, bam. I open my eyes enough to see the clock on the nightstand: 4:08 a.m. Groggy and disoriented, I stumble down the hallway toward the front door. I hear men’s voices—deep, yelling, echoing beyond the door. “Open up—open up,” they holler.

I glance into Dylan’s bedroom, where our Gordon Setter, Maya, is whoofling her low, deep growl, an ominous warning that cuts through my haze of sleep. Dylan’s bed is still made, his teddy bear from his graduation party propped against the pillow, innocent in its stillness.

Terror grips me. What’s going on? Why are there men at this hour? Are they here for us?

I turn the corner to the landing, my heart thumping so loudly that it drowns out the frantic yelling from the front door. I freeze, gripping the banister, trying to gather my thoughts while my instincts scream at me to run.

Every second feels like a lifetime as the thudding grows more insistent. Maya’s body is tense, sensing my fear. I can almost feel her protective instinct urging me to move, to act, to face whatever waits beyond the door.

Terrified and fully awake, I realize Dylan has not come home.

Pizza, a movie with his friends, home for summer break after his freshman year of college. Dylan would return to Ohio University in the fall as a sophomore and move back into his dorm room.

It is Monday, June 25, 2012. 4:08 a.m.

Recognizing Dylan’s Belongings

Inside my house: a teenage son. A big, floppy-eared dog. English papers to be graded. A British short-haired gray cat. Dylan. And on the outside of my door?

Cautiously, I open it. The tallest man stands in the middle, holding a plastic zip-top bag containing Dylan’s Samsung phone and Fossil leather wallet.

Even in the shadows, I know the shape of my son’s things.

There is a moment of silence, thick and palpable. The beat of my heart echoes against the quiet hallway and the stillness of the night. The deputy steps closer and climbs the stairs to the landing where I stand.

“We need to come in to talk to you about your son.”

I cannot remember anything beyond what he says next. His voice is flat and monotone—no emotion, no ordinary cadence, no inflection.

Receiving the Terrible Truth

“Your son had some convulsions. He didn’t make it.”

I collapse into a chair. Shock. Heartbreak. My mind swirls with everything and nothing. A dense fog. Numbness. A scream without sound or words, rising from a place inside me I do not recognize.

The deputy places the bag containing Dylan’s phone and wallet on the sideboard—the same sideboard where Dylan used to fling his backpack after school.

“There’s no need to identify his body. The ID’s been made.”

And just like that, my son is reduced to what can be returned from all that was his life: his Samsung phone and the brown, trifold Fossil wallet I had given him for Christmas.

My 20-year-old son’s things in a hospital-issue plastic bag. Outside my door, the shadow shapes slip away into the night.

Three men whose names remain unknown to me had come only to deliver a terrible truth. No words of comfort. No hope. Only the stripping away of all I held true: my only child, my beloved son Dylan, had died.

The truth enters my body before my mind can understand it. The piercing in my heart is immediate, and it has never entirely left me.

Losing my son shatters all that I am, all that I know, and all that I might ever be again. My heart stops. My breath stops. Time ceases to move forward. All of me feels suspended in the surreal.

The world outside my door has taken my son. Inside the home I made with Dylan for nineteen years, I feel the cold delivery of his death draining the lifeblood from me.

The life I had known with Dylan was gone. Nothing would ever be the same.

If you are reading this because someone once came to your door, called your phone, or sat beside you with words that ended the life you knew, I am so deeply sorry. However the news reached you, you may recognize the disbelief—the mind refusing what the heart already fears. There is no right way to receive the unbearable.

The Aftermath

A Trail of Tears Where My Life Used to Be

I cannot breathe. I collapse into the gold-and-burgundy brocade armchair where I always graded papers and read books. The familiar fabric feels horrifying as the room spins around me.

This was the end of my world as I knew it.

In complete shock, I begin calling those closest to Dylan—his friends and my family. My hands tremble as I dial.

“Mom, Dylan’s dead.”

The words feel foreign and heavy as I speak them. She cries out and drops the phone.

“We’re coming over,” she manages to say.

The clock keeps ticking, but time no longer belongs to me. I sit inside the enormity of the loss—suspended, stopped, frozen.

I think about Dylan—his beautiful laughter, the warmth of his smile—and all of me collapses from the inside out into a grief that changes my life forever.

Calls begin pouring in from friends, each voice a reminder of the life that had been here only hours earlier. I struggle to find words.

That is the last thing I remember. All of me goes numb. I am fully aware of a hellish nightmare that has somehow become my waking life.

I am still alive, but I go away. It will be a long, long time before I can live again.

Why I Created My Forever Son

My grief is ongoing, as is my love for my son. My guilt as a mother who lost her only child to suicide still haunts me. I write essays and poems, photograph my gardens, and compose songs because words and art house my feelings that have no place else to go.

My Forever Son also records my stumbling search for help: the research, books, support groups, organizations, and coping strategies I found when I was still shattered by early grief. I share them for parents confronting traumatic grief, recurring guilt, suicide stigma, and the lifelong work of carrying a child’s absence.

This is the backstory of My Forever Son, but no story about Dylan can be finished. His life ended; my love for him did not. The grief is forever because the love is forever. I will keep speaking his name, asking the questions that remain, and writing from the life I now inhabit—one shaped by his absence and still bound to him by love.

Companion Reads

• Poems for Grieving Parents After Child Suicide Loss | My Forever Son
• Navigating Grief: Three Years After Losing My Son to Suicide
• 3 Years of Grief: Healing After Losing My Son to Suicide
• Poems From a Mother After the Suicide Loss of Her Only Child
• Guilt After Losing a Child to Suicide

About the Author, Beth Brown

I am Beth, Dylan’s Mom–writer, educator, and the creator of My Forever Son. My only child, Dylan, died by suicide at age twenty. I write about traumatic grief, maternal guilt, suicide stigma, continuing love, and the resources that can help bereaved parents live with a loss that does not end.