STEPPING BACK FROM THE EDGE
My mom’s suicide changed everything. Here’s how I found hope again.
Istood and looked down into the canyon at a spot where, millions of years ago, a river cut through. Everything about that view is impossible, a landscape that seems to defy both physics and description. It is a place that magnifies the questions in your mind and keeps the answers to itself. ❚ Visitors always ask how the canyon was formed. Rangers often give the same unsatisfying answer: Wind. Water. Time. ❚ It was April 26, 2016 – four years since my mother died. Four years to the day since she stood in this same spot and looked out at this same view. I still catch my breath here, and I feel dizzy and need to remind myself to breathe in through my nose, out through my mouth, slower, and again. I can say it out loud now: She killed herself. She jumped from the edge of the Grand Canyon. From the edge of the Earth.
I went back to the spot because I wanted to know everything.
The latitude and longitude where she landed, the last words she said to the shuttle bus driver who dropped her at the trail overlook, her mood when she met with her priest just four days prior. I read over the last letter she had mailed to my children. I looked for clues inside this little card with a cartoon penguin drawn on the front, written in block printing so my 5-year-old daughter could easily read it. My mom wrote of riding the Light Rail to a Diamondbacks game, of planting a cactus garden, of looking forward to summer in the already hot days of a Phoenix spring. I read and reread her last words written in cursive in the tiniest composition book that she had left in her Jeep, as well as the last text she typed, in which she both celebrates life and apologizes for it. I zoomed in on the photo she took with her iPhone from the ledge looking out to the sunrise that lit the canyon that morning to see if the rocks or shadows would share anything new. I replayed our last conversation, and each one before it that I could remember. I wanted to know every fact, every detail, to see everything she saw, because I didn’t have the one thing I wanted: the why.
I came back to the canyon for answers, or a deeper understanding of life and my mother, or maybe myself. But all I could see were the peaks miles away, the trees greener and prettier than I imagined, tiny dots of figures moving slowly up the switchbacks, and the stillness of the world.
Suicide is as common and as unknowable as the wind that shaped this rock. It’s unspeakable, bewildering, confounding and devastatingly sad. Don’t try to figure it out, I told myself. Stop asking questions, assigning blame, looking.
Yet there I stood, searching.
We all know someone who has taken their own life or survived the suicide of a loved one. We’ve all asked: Why? What could I have done?
As our reporter discovered in her personal quest, the search for answers can be excruciating.
But the questions surrounding suicide have never been more important. Over the past two decades, suicide rates have increased by nearly a third in the USA. They are higher in almost every state, among men and women, rich and poor, young and old.
Suicide has become a public health crisis in America. We’re not sure why, or what to do about it, in part because we rarely talk about suicide and spend little time studying it compared with the other nine leading causes of death that round out our nation’s top 10.
USA TODAY invites you to read Laura’s full story and to listen to survivors share their stories of loss and hope at