Still From Sky I’m Falling
A Poem About Being Haunted by Guilt After Losing My Son to Suicide
Still From Sky I’m Falling: A Poem About Being Haunted by Guilt After Losing My Son to Suicide
STILL FROM SKY I'M FALLING
Still from sky I’m falling,
Your name calling my way down,
Silent screaming, up-churned spinning,
Turning earth the shade of blood,
Still-framed fragments from the filaments
Of my life that was your love.
For to lose is to live, and to live is to die,
Having once never told you, how extinguished hope
I--would be--my life, broken-hinged,
Falling faster, paralyzed, cross-wings downed,
A bird in flight, storm-forced spiral,
Death-winged cry.
Still from sky I’m falling,
Your name calling my way down,
Silent screaming, up-churned spinning,
Turning earth the shade of blood,
Still-framed fragments from the filaments
Of my life that was your love.
Bent knees collapse, down-grounding,
Weeping even in my sleep,
Searching skyward, look home angel,
Desperate seeking you in dreams,
Downed and falling, bough now broken,
The nest where love gave you your wings,
Baby bird I couldn’t save you from the violence
Life brings, where perched waiting for my returning,
A darkness filled the sun-soaked sky,
Shadows circling, stealth wings silent,
Swooping down without a sound,
Claws of hawks sharp, piercing, clenching,
Lifting you to feed their young.
Still from sky I’m falling,
Your name calling my way down,
Silent screaming, up-churned spinning,
Turning earth the shade of blood,
Still-framed fragments from the filaments
Of my life that was your love.
©Beth Brown, 2023A Poem About Being Haunted by Guilt in Grief After Suicide Loss
A Poem About Being Haunted by Guilt After Losing My Son to Suicide: Still From Sky I’m Falling reflects a deeply personal and emotional journey of grief and guilt after losing a child to suicide.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: I write deeply reflective grief poems about losing a child to suicide. You can find more poems here. Eleven years ago, I lost my 20-year-old son, my only child, Dylan, to suicide. Losing my son to suicide meant entering a dark, deep period of grief and mourning from which I wasn’t sure I could ever return.
I have not returned because in losing Dylan, I lost myself too. But I have retrieved, ever so slowly, bits and pieces of myself, a self who has learned to smile again, laugh again, play music, write poems and this blog, and take photographs of my gardens. Yet still and always, I carry both love and ache for my son.
Resources and Strategies for Coping with Suicide Loss
Read More: Help, Hope, Healing After Suicide Loss: Support, Books, Resources
Read More: Surviving the Suicide of Your Child: Support, Resources, Hope
Read More: Find Hope Here: Poems About Losing a Child to Suicide
Read More: What to Say to Parents Who Lose a Child to Suicide
Resources About Coping with the Heaviness of Guilt in Suicide Grief
Read More: Navigating Grief: Finding Solace After Losing a Child to Suicide
Read More: The Burden in Grief: Navigating Guilt After Losing a Child to Suicide
Read More: Coping with Guilt After Losing a Child to Suicide: Strategies and Support
Read More: Self Blame and Guilt: I Couldn’t Save My Son
A Poem About Being Haunted by Guilt in Grief After Suicide Loss
A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: I wrote A Poem About Being Haunted by Guilt After Losing My Son to Suicide: Still From Sky I’m Falling because as the holidays approach, I can feel grief awakening from its mighty slumber. The poem expresses both how lost I am without my son, and how much I’ve come to terms with realizing I couldn’t save my son.
Releasing Guilt and Finding Forgiveness
I continue to work through guilt and self-blame, letting go of grueling self-reflection and pain. Healing this part of grief after losing my son to suicide is ongoing. Realizing I had no control over my son’s suicide means feeling powerless as his mother.
Read more about guilt in grief at The American Association of Suicidology.
Ultimately, A Poem About Being Haunted by Guilt After Losing My Son to Suicide: Still From Sky I’m Falling is about healing guilt in grief and finding self-forgiveness after suicide loss. If my love had been enough to save him, Dylan would have lived forever.
Like a mother bird who must leave her nest to find food for her young, only to return to find a hawk circling above and in the act of swooping down to steal her young as food for its own, I couldn’t have been with my son every second of every day of his life.
Read more: Why? After the Suicide of My Son–A Mother Remembers
Have You Lost a Child to Suicide?
Suicide is the anchor point on a continuum of suicidal thoughts & behaviors. This continuum is one that ranges from risk-taking behaviors at one end, extends through different degrees & types of suicidal thinking, & ends with suicide attempts and suicide. Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison, National Library of Medicine
Online Support Group for Parents of Suicides (PoS)
Parents of Suicides (PoS) is a closed online email group that I have found lifesaving after losing Dylan to suicide. Read more about Parents of Suicides here.
From the Parents of Suicides’ Online Site:
We invite you to visit our memorial websites and learn about the people remembered on them: daughters, sons, mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, husbands, wives, friends and others who reached a point of no return, and left.
We have two email support groups for anyone whose life has been affected by the suicide of another person. Both groups are led by volunteers; the groups don’t offer advice, and there is no charge to join them.
Parents of Suicides (POS)
Friends and Families of Suicides (FFOS)
If you’d like to join either support group, click here to read about the groups and to get directions on how to join.
We bereaved are not alone. When it seems that our sorrow is too great to be borne, let us think of the great family of the heavy-hearted into which our grief has given us entrance and inevitably, we will feel about us their arms, their sympathy, their understanding.
Helen Keller (1880-1968) in Peace at Eventide(1929)