Beat Still My Heart: A Mother’s Poem After Losing Her Son to Suicide

“Beat Still My Heart”: A Mother’s Poem After Losing Her Son to Suicide

By Beth Brown · My Forever Son. In this post, I share “Beat Still My Heart: A Mother’s Poem After Losing Her Son to Suicide.”

“Beat Still My Heart”: A Mother’s Poem After Losing Her Son to Suicide opens with a suicide loss poem and then provides a narrative that speaks from the lived experience of losing my only child, Dylan, to suicide. I wrote “Beat Still My Heart” from the place where words first failed me. June 25, 2012, was the day my life split into before and after. Dylan, my only child, my twenty-year-old son, died by suicide. This poem is not polished grief. It is not softened grief. It is the sound of a mother still reaching through the darkness for her child.

Where the Sea First Broke

Some poems are written from memory. This one was written from impact. “Beat Still My Heart” rose out of the wreckage of losing my son and only child, Dylan, to suicide. It was borne from my cry: the raw grief of a mother whose world had been torn open, whose love had nowhere left to go but into language.

The poem and the story that follows belong together. One is the surge; the other, the undertow. One speaks in image and incantation; the other walks through the lived grief beneath those lines. Read together, they are not a poem with commentary attached, but one continuous elegy—grief as it broke me, and grief as I learned to carry it.

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Beat Still My Heart Poem

Beat still my heart,
Beat still my mind,
Weary though thou art
Carry his love along with thine,
Though heavy on thy shoulders
Crost fields throughout all time.

In the deepest dark of the bleakest night,
If light there be, then dark shuts it out.
Around you all is swirling,
Hurtling backwards now through time,
A hellish hue stricken each his years
When here on earth 'twas mine.
 
Deeply within that starless night,
Go deeper yet still darker,
Oceans depth to oceans wide.
Galaxies wide careening,
Spilling insides outside in,
To release thy soul still screaming,
Clasping hands and heart to his.   

Body, mind, soul, rough and ragged,
Weeping tears falling still throughout time,
Carrying weight of mourning and grieving
Falling broken when thou wert mine.


© Beth Brown, 2022
"Beat Still My Heart"
A Mother’s Elegy for Dylan

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Where the Poem “Beat Still My Heart” Came From

I am awash in grief, alive inside my life’s greatest tragedy. Sorrow crashes over me, shoving me beneath dark, storm-torn water. I sink to depths I have never known, struggling toward the surface on shallow breaths.

Frantic, I search the surging waves driving me down. I cannot find my son.

I reach for anything that might hold me: a piece of wreckage, a life preserver, some floating debris. There is nothing. Only the violent ocean of this new life without him.

No stars. No light. No color except the absence of color. The sea heaves around me, bleak and disorienting, while I search for any sign of Dylan and struggle to sustain my own life.

“Nothing worse will—or can—happen to me,” I tell myself.

At 4:08 a.m. on a Monday morning, a deputy sheriff and two officers tell me my twenty-year-old only child, Dylan, had convulsions and did not make it.

The only other fact I remember is this: Dylan had a dentist appointment at noon.

My life does not move forward. Time does not move forward. Everything I love most has been ripped from me.

“There’s no need to identify the body. The ID’s been made,” the deputy says, handing me a plastic bag with Dylan’s cell phone and wallet.

Submerged in despair, unanswered questions, and helplessness, I feel suspended outside reality. Is this even real?

I am in shock and sobbing, standing and then falling into the living room chair where I grade papers. In a flat voice unlike my own, I begin calling people: “Dylan’s dead.”

I call Dylan’s friends, my family, my friends, my work. People come to the house in the early morning, as though gathering together could bring him back.

Eventually I surface from the storm, but only into a world where my son is gone. Suicide changes everything. It becomes the undertow beneath all else.

I cannot hear, see, hold, reach for, or touch anything familiar.

I search for Dylan for days, weeks, and months. My heart aches in his absence, a sorrow that sweeps over every moment.

Questions haunt me: Why couldn’t I save him? What could I have done differently? The thoughts spiral until I lose track of days, nights, and the life I had known.

I grieve against darkness, against God, against myself. I cry out in sounds I do not recognize, searching for a way through what cannot be undone.

For a long time, I live inside paralysis. Slowly, the tidal waves come less often. Slowly, I rise far enough above the water to breathe.

I cry out to God, to Dylan, to life. Nothing changes what happened. But writing gives my pain a place to go, and from that place, “Beat Still My Heart” begins.

Closing: Love, Still

I wrote “Beat Still My Heart” because this is what happened to me. On June 25, 2012, I became Beth, Dylan’s Mom, living the before and after of losing my only child, my twenty-year-old son, to suicide. As I write this on September 1, 2026, my life has not, nor will it ever be, the same.

Losing a child to suicide is a forever grief and a forever love. The question Why suicide? Why? will always live inside me. This poem does not explain that kind of loss. It tells the truth of it: raw, gut-punch honest, and still beating with a mother’s love for her child.

If you are a parent newly standing in this wreckage, I will not tell you it gets easy. It does not. But I can tell you this: love remains. Breath by breath, hour by hour, somehow we keep carrying our children with us. Dylan is still my son. I am still his mother. And love, even here, still lives.

Companion Reading from My Forever Son

• Finding Hope in Grief: Poems for Healing After Loss — my poetry hub for grief poems, child loss, suicide loss, and enduring love.
• If Only a Mother’s Love: A Poem on Grieving a Child’s Suicide — a companion poem for parents carrying love, guilt, and the impossible questions after suicide loss.
• Understanding Suicide: It’s Not a Choice — a reflection on suicide loss, stigma, and the need for more honest language.

About Beth Brown

Beth Brown is Dylan’s Mom, a writer, educator, and bereaved mother writing from the lifelong grief of losing her only child, Dylan, to suicide on June 25, 2012. At My Forever Son, she writes poems and essays for grieving parents, suicide-loss survivors, and mothers carrying the forever ache of child loss. Her work is gut-punch honest, rooted in love, and written for those who know grief does not end because a child’s life ended.

If You Need Support

If this poem or reflection touches something raw in you, please do not sit with it alone. In the U.S., call or text 988 for the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, or text TALK to 741741 for the Crisis Text Line. For suicide-loss grief support, organizations such as Alliance of Hope and The Compassionate Friends offer community and resources for survivors and bereaved families.