What Happened? Losing My Only Child to Suicide

Fourteen Years of Grief, Love, and Remaining Dylan’s Mother

If you have come here because your child died by suicide, I am deeply sorry. I know the shock of waking each morning into a life you no longer recognize. My only child, Dylan, died by suicide on June 25, 2012. The question of “What Happened? Losing My Only Child to Suicide” is one I continue to live with. Fourteen years later, I remain his mother. I still love him, miss him, speak his name, and write my way toward him.

This is the story of losing Dylan and of living fourteen years beyond the morning my life split open. It is also the story of the love that remains. I cannot tell everything here, nor do I want to. Some memories belong to Dylan and me. What I can share is the truth of being his mother before his death, through the first unbearable years, and now.

Before I Begin

My Forever Son is a literary blog of grief, love, memory, and the life I continue to live as Dylan’s mother. I write personal essays, poems, and songs because ordinary language has never been large enough to hold what happened. This page tells one part of that story: the knock that divided my life into before and after, and the years that have gathered around it.

Why I Began My Forever Son

In the first years after Dylan died, I counted everything: hours, days, months, memorial dates. I counted the holidays I survived and the mornings I managed to get out of bed. Grief stripped language from me before writing slowly gave some of it back. I began My Forever Son because I needed somewhere to place the love, anguish, questions, poems, and memories I could no longer carry alone.

The blog became a place for memory, poems, music, photographs, and the language I could find for remaining Dylan’s mother. Poetry became one of the ways I could best lend voice to the deep emotions I felt. My poems hold Dylan’s absence, the love that remains, and the long work of living after suicide loss.

Dylan died on June 25, 2012. Everything I understood about time, home, language, and motherhood changed that morning. My love for my son, though, remains unchanged.

A Heart-Wrenching Grief

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 on my way to the front door. I can hear men’s voices.

I glance in Dylan’s bedroom where our Gordon Setter is whoofling her low, deep growl. Dylan’s bed is still made. 

Terror grips me. What’s going on? I turn the corner to the landing. I freeze.

Something’s at my front door. The porch light illuminates three men. Shadow shapes, their thickness and size, even dim in the yellow porch light, rise stark against the darkness of the night.

“Open up! Deputy Sheriff,” the tallest shadow in the middle of three shadows yelled. “Open up!” “Open up!”

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

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

Beth Brown, The Backstory to My Forever Son: A Mother’s Grief, My Forever Son

One Last Mother’s Day Card

I’ll love you forever, mom. Love, Dylan

Yesterday, I found a Mother’s Day card from 2012. It is bright orange, Dylan’s favorite color as a child, and it is beautiful. I wasn’t looking for the card, and it kind of just appeared. I saw it sticking out of a pile of other cards and things I’ve been intending to sort, organize, and put in a keepsake box.

The card says “mom, I can’t remember a time when I didn’t need your love and support. . .and I can’t imagine a time when I won’t. Happy Mother’s Day With Love” and Dylan signed it “I’ll love you forever mom. Love Dylan.”

That did me in. It’s now on my desk beside me, propped open to the “I’ll love you forever mom, Love, Dylan”

He Knew, He Just Couldn’t Tell Me

Dylan knew, he just couldn’t tell me. I love him so much still, always, forever. Love doesn’t die. It is only this interim between now and when I get to see him again that brings ache and sadness and a constant heavy heart.

Orange Always Was His Favorite Color

And now just this—orange always his favorite color,
His last Mother’s Day card to me—

And then June. Red Roses in June.
He left too soon,
Lifting life from June,
Casting torrents of rain,
And in his absence, only pain,
This heaving ache,
Beating tears come to stay
Still falling.

I knew his first breath and his last.
A month early, cusp of spring,
March awakening when still winter clings,
My little one in such a hurry.

Beth Brown, excerpt from “He Left Too Soon”

In the photograph above, Dylan is small enough to fit against me, his face open with laughter. I remember the weight of him in my arms.

From His First Shoes to His Last

From Stride Rites to Gray Nikes

I remember the giggles, the squeals, and all that blond hair. His little white leather Stride Rite shoes grew worn and scuffed because Dylan wanted to see and do so much.

I have Dylan’s first pair of shoes: little white leather Stride Rites, worn and scuffed. I have his last pair, too: gray Nikes, size eleven. Between them lies the whole distance I was given with my son.

Oh, little one, where did time go?

The Lullaby I Still Sing to Dylan

My Child on Earth Above in Heaven’s Care

My Child on Earth Above in Heaven’s Care, all music and lyrics © Beth Brown, My Forever Son.

Music belonged to Dylan and me long before grief entered every room. After he died, melody gave me another way to reach for him. I wrote My Child on Earth Above in Heaven’s Care in that space between longing and faith—the place where I still sing to my son.

Counting Hours, Days, Months, Years

Three years after Dylan died, I was still counting: hours, days, months, memorial dates. The journals from that year preserve a voice closer to the first shock than the voice writing here fourteen years later.

Holidays still felt impossible. I count hours, days, months, and years. The tears came more quietly, but I still look backward more often than forward.

Learning to Live As Is, As Now

I have never found a phrase that makes this loss bearable. Time has not healed it. Time has made grief familiar. Grief has become a part of me. My love for Dylan and my grief for Dylan live in the same place. I cannot separate one from the other, and I no longer try.

Carrying Ache and Love

I am and will always be Dylan’s mother. I mother him now through memory, through the poems and songs I write, through the stories I choose to tell, and through the private pieces of our life I choose to keep.

My grief continues to move in circles. A date, a song, the slant of sun in the afternoon light, or a teenager crossing a high school parking lot returns me to Dylan before I have time to prepare. I realize this is the way love remembers.

Fourteen Years After Dylan’s Suicide

Dylan remains every part of my life. Fourteen years out from my son’s death has not taken away this grief. Still I am his mother. I no longer live inside the first raw shock, but I do not live beyond my son. Love still rises first. Ache follows. Some days hold both so closely I realize my long-term grief has become a part of me.

Writing Toward Dylan

I began journaling in 2015. Years later, poetry gave me another form—more compressed, more exact—for writing the unspeakable fact of Dylan’s death and the life I continue to live as his mother.

When the Depression Came

Depression entered Dylan’s life when he was five years old. It did not define the whole of him, but it remained part of his life until his death. Nearly two hundred people came to Dylan’s funeral on June 29, 2012. He was deeply loved: a loyal friend, a brother in spirit to the boys he grew up with, a gifted musician, a scholar, and a kind soul.

Whenever the day grows quiet, my mind returns to Dylan—not to an idea of him, but to his voice, his music, the shape of his hands, and the quick intelligence in his face. He is my first thought in the morning and my last at night. I can fill the hours with work and ordinary tasks, but quiet reveals the depth of his absence.

Dylan is still my son. Still I am his mother.

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Dylan: Forever Loved

Written by the author’s sister, Linda

An excerpt from Twenty Years of Love: Dylan

Twenty Years

Twenty years: from birth, from before birth treasured and loved, Dylan. Held now in God’s hands, held always in God’s hands but oh how I wish him back.

I remember the first time I held him, how precious and small

In 1991, Beth called to share the news that she was pregnant. Beth had some health issues so there were trips to the hospital to protect her health and his, but finally, I got the call that he was born. I remember the first time I held him, how precious and small. I sat on the floor with him in my arms. . . .

Depression Sets In

As he got older there were signs of the depression, signs that got worse as he began to use drugs.

By the time he first was hospitalized for depression and addiction, we could no longer pretend his pain was not real.

I really wanted him to get well. I am a recovering alcoholic myself who suffered horrible bouts of depression in adolescence and early adulthood. Dylan came to live with us in 2012 after he had twice attempted suicide.

Forever Second Guessing “Was there something else I could have done?”

For a couple weeks, there were good times again: Dylan was clean of drugs, Dylan was taking his antidepressant, Dylan was coming to dinner and talking and being with us. But the turn downward, the spiral came and he withdrew again. I will be forever blessed with those few weeks of time we had and forever second guessing, “Was there something else I could have done?”

But our house was no miracle, no cure. There was not enough love to conquer his depression.

After yet another overdose, he went to a center that treated depression.

Twenty Years: And There is Hope Again

And there is hope again. As long as he was alive, no matter how ugly the attempts, no matter how deep his depression, we all kept hoping.

Read More

Linda Taylor, Twenty Years of Love: Dylan

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When the Depression Came

Depression Was There All Along

There were nearly 200 people at Dylan’s funeral on June 29th, 2012. He was much beloved, a close friend and brother to all the boys he grew up with, a gifted musician, an academic scholar, an incredibly kind and wonderful soul. He got sick with depression early on, when he was 5 years old, and in the end, just couldn’t beat this formidable

Walking Through Shadows

Dylan was, and will always be, my heart’s song and joy. I am forever bonded to my son, and he lives on, not just “in my heart,” but in everything I do and all that I am. I fully expect to be reunited with Dylan again–and this time for eternity–when God sees fit and it is time.

I miss and love and adore my son. All the time. And he is always my first and last thought each day. I have learned to be busy, distracted, during my days, but whenever my mind stills, Dylan is there.

Dylan is always there. Perhaps he is with me still.

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