Blog Post 7: Honor the Pain

This blog post was written months ago, while The Interpreter of Love project itself was slowly preparing for its launch. 

Warning: The post is deeply sad. Be sure to read the happy ending!

December, 2024

My firstborn

Last night, as usual these days, I called my older child, our firstborn, who is now 37 but was conceived on our wedding night, the baby I always called my wedding present from God and thought of as my “Starchild.”

This beloved child of mine who wants to die.  

For eighteen months.

The irony is huge and deep. Soon I will launch a website and the Interpreter of Love Project, as I have planned to do for years. I had to wait until retirement first.

I founded this project, most of all, for survivors of extreme trauma who are suicidal.

My child’s incredible anguish and pain erupted a year ago last July, with a separation (now a divorce) after six years of marriage.

A divorce can detonate deeper trauma. It did. I’m not at liberty to discuss the cause, which is not sexual abuse or physical violence. In some ways, it is worse.

And while no one deserves depression, isolation or despair, to compound the sadness of the situation (especially for this adoring mother’s heart, and our whole family), both our kids are loving, generous, honest, open and kind. Since childhood. No arrests or crimes, no drinking or drugs, no cheating on a spouse or theft—nothing of the sort!  

(Pilfered treats and the occasional teenage attitude during adolescence are about all I can recall.)

There has been depression yes, in both our children, but no suicide attempts, thank God. No hospitalizations or job losses, far less homelessness or psychosis.

Yet here we are. As I launch this website in preparation for launching the project itself, my firstborn wants to die.

Words can be daggers

Here are some words from the phone call last night that pierced me through.

I’m always lonely. All the time. 

My only reprieve is when you guys come to visit, or I come to you. Otherwise, my life is hell.

My life hasn’t gotten better, not at all, by any metric [since the marriage broke up]. Not one thing has gotten better. It has gotten worse.

I cry all the time. The last two weeks I’ve cried a lot, I think it’s been two weeks. Time has been very fuzzy for me

Compared to a year-and-a-half ago, there is not one thing that’s better. For me, it’s only getting worse. There is no end. 

Here I was, at the heart and root of everything I’d created the project for. Faced with huge helplessness. For I was remembering five weeks ago, when I got a very different phone call full of sobs and chokes that immediately brought me to red-alert.

Here is how that call went.

The most terrifying phone call of my life.

Backtrack a month: November 2024

The cataclysm 

I called and heard crying on the phone.

“How are you?” I asked in alarm.

(Fierce sobs from the gut) I can’t go on like this, Mom. It’s too much. I just can’t.

You need to hold on, I said softly.

No. It’s too much. I can’t.

(Gently) Are you thinking of hurting yourself?

Yes, I told you. I can’t go on anymore.

(Maternal panic, trying to keep my voice calm.) Are you saying you’ll kill yourself?

Yes. As soon as I get the courage.

(Crisis mode, where I go deadly calm) Will you promise me to call me first?

No.

My husband and I had seen this risk of suicide coming over the last months, but never before had I heard this refusal to call us first.

I hesitated.

Will you promise to call your therapist before you try?

No. She’d have to call people in on me.

There, on November 4, 2024, I faced the deepest, most intense crisis in our family’s history. Without warning.

I immediately said, We’re coming down this weekend.

No. (Sobbing, choking) No parent should have to see their child like this.

A brief argument ensued.

What if we come anyway? I insisted.

(Almost fierce, cold and firm). You can do whatever you want, Mom. But if you come, I’m not going to see you.

(Just as firm) I’m going to go bring your father in on the call.

I did. My husband, in horror, immediately said that we were both coming north to visit. We got more denials, even though our visits every few weeks have been a lifeline.

(Darkly) I can’t stop you. But I’m not going to see you.

So I brought our younger son in on the call, and our daughter-in-law—they’ve been together, happily, for fifteen years.

All three kids are close. So much love.

It took over an hour of intense effort by all four of us to get permission to go north and visit our suicidal chlid!

We all went, or rather three of us: our daughter-in-law has another dire emergency and couldn’t join us (though she often does).

How a family comes together in the darkness 

In the five days that we visited our firstborn that week, there were times—I’d never seen it before—when I witnessed what I can only call a sucking-out of the soul.

I mean when someone’s chin, shoulders and body droop, and all life seems to leave the body, as if the spirit is leaking out through the feet.

But things got better as the days progressed. The four of us—parents and their two grown kids—feigned normalcy. We walked in beautiful parks and along the sea. We attended a splendid community event (with live piglets!) and went out for coffee, dinners and more.

On the night before my husband and I left to fly home, we had pizza sent to our hotel suite for an intimate dinner with just the three of us.

To my dismay, we were back to despair.

“Things will never get better for me. Ever.”

This time when I heard those words, I tried to hold the pain inside me.

I didn’t say, “Things absolutely will get better!” though I yearned to. I tried instead to stay soft and gentle and not argue back but simply be present.

The two of us sat side by side on the sofa in the hotel sitting room with my husband in a chair facing us. At last, in a pleading voice, I whispered. Please. Hold on. Just hold on. 

Then came the quiet words when I least expected them. Gently, like a gift. Affectionate, quiet and warm.

I will, Mom.

I collapsed in my child’s arms, weeping from the gut in deep wrenched sobs. Enfolded like a child in my grown child’s warm and loving arms, half-crazed with the hugeness of the gift, with feral sobs of relief as the tension and strain of the week burst out of me.

I wept and wept and wept. 

(I am crying to write this. I still hear those words in my ear like a sweet zephyr. I will.)

And now, here is a personal word to parents. If your child tells you they want to die, or they have no friends and never will again, or they will never have a spouse or babies or a “real” life, most of us as parents (mothers especially) want to jump in and say, “That’s not true! You will make friends, you will marry again and have a good life!”

We want to say all those things because we’re not therapists. We’re mothers.

They train therapists to “sit with silence” but not parents. They should. No one taught us how to bear witness to another person’s pain, far less our child’s. How to hold and share the pain, how to relieve the burden a little by receiving it.

Instead, we want to leap in and snatch our precious baby from the darkness that threatens their life like the incisors of a tiger. We want to seize our baby and bring our child to safety.

As a result, we argue with the pain instead of honoring it.

This instinct is wholly commendable—and often wrong.

It’s a reflex. I have said such things far too often in the last eighteen months: Of course you’ll be all right! This is depression speaking, and trauma. It will pass! It will! And it’s not true that you’ll never have friends or never marry again

Back to last night. Conversations with Dad, younger brother or Sis-in-law tend to be what I call “distraction conversations.” They all (except me) love to talk about technology, video games, pets or politics, and whatever else young people want to talk about. It’s valuable and warm conversation, a vital form of human connection that we all need. 

And of course, conversations with Mom can be warm chitchat too. But often I am the person who receives and holds long details of the pain and despair, tall he horror of cataclysmic, suicidal depression.

It’s my job, I have felt, to listen and receive and hold the pain.

I’ve been relearning this job. Teaching myself another way to be present. I have tried, through trial and error, to train myself not to react by arguing, protesting or pushing back.

I have tried instead to listen. To validate the pain and anguish. To soften and receive it. To become a vessel for the pain, so that my firstborn feels less alone. I have tried to be a witness and honor the pain.

Pain so deep so visceral I remember it too well myself. I had two spells of it—In my teens and twenties, and later as I neared forty. The first suicidal period lasted over a decade. The second lasted three years.

During the first decade, I had no one to hold the pain for me. No one to hold me. I will never, ever forget it. Pain so deep can’t be wished away by all the mothers in the world.

We can lift cars to save babies. We cannot lift the darkness.

Now I have tried to not to leap in wearing my Supermother’s cape. Instead, I take off my cape and sit with the anguish. Simply try to share it, so that my child feels less alone and always, always knows there is someone—besides a therapist—with whom it’s safe to speak and say anything, anytime.

Last night, near the end of the call, came an apology I didn’t expect. Mom, I’m sorry for always being such a downer.

(Softly) Oh, you never have to apologize to me for being down!

At that point, without planning or rehearsa,l I explained in simple words what I’ve just written above. How I was trying hard (and yes, often failing, but still trying) to sit listening. Sharing the pain, so that it feels a little less of a burden.

After a brief silence came a thoughtful reply. You might be right.

I went to green alert. The good kind, when you feel something shift in the air. I grew thoughtful too.

Really?

In fact, Emma agrees with you.

Emma, the cat? I nearly burst out laughing. Because it’s a standing joke between us that the two cats always disagree with me, whether it’s about politics, the weather, food, climate change, anything.

So I exclaimed, But Emma never agrees with me!

Emma agrees with you because she wants me to be happy.

I laughed. For joy. It was so sweet.

Something in the air between us softened. We grew still with pleasurable peace. A relaxation, nearly an exhalation of the spirit. Mother and child, united in a way I can’t explain.

And I thought to myself, though I didn’t say it aloud: Oh, there will be hard times ahead for both of us, my dear! But at least you know we’ll never give up on you, in this loving family that adores you so. Tonight, at least, I know you feel that.

So the evening ended. Sweetly, on a tiny note of hope.

In such times, a tiny note of hope feels like finding a goldmine in the desert.

This morning at the gym, lying on my back on a foam roller with little weights in either hand as I stared at the ceiling and listened to transporting music, I recalled that conversation. And I wept.

Silently. In the gym, tears streaming.

Wept for the beauty of the conversation and that precious moment when we both felt the air soften and grow still, and hope perfumed the air like the scent of roses.

POST SCRIPT

July 16, 2025

I forgot I had ever written this blog post. So much has happened since then.

To recap: weeks after the events above, things got worse for a while. And then, when least expected it—a sudden breakthrough. A transformation in our firstborn.

So many positive things have taken place since then! No more talk of suicide. Getting permission to work remotely in another state where both our kids grew up and our younger son and daughter-in-law reside was the decisive moment of the change.

The place where husband and I had lived thirty years, raising our happy family.

Now there is hope. Our child is not alone. Deep hope of healing, of establishing community and connection await. In fact, our younger son and daughter-in-law swear there is a community standing by to welcome our firstborn.

I created this project to instill hope in survivors of extreme trauma. But above all, hope for suicidal survivors.

The irony is deep and huge that here we are, with this family tale to share.

I am feeling peace and hope. Please send us prayers and love. I send you mine.

Love and kisses,

Amira