This one has taken me a while to be able to put words to. It’s raw and maybe not my tightest writing, but at this point I need to put it out into the world. I wanted to send it weeks ago, but then I got hit with strep, a snowstorm that kept me from getting antibiotics quickly enough, and recovery from all that.

Big Content Note for discussion of suicidal ideation, suicide, and the mental states that make that seem like a good idea. Rest assured, I am safe and not at all a danger to myself. This is me laying to rest for good a habit-pattern that no longer has power over me. If you struggle with this, I am here; I will listen and do what I can. If you are ever in crisis, there are places you can reach out to. If you know anyone who this might help, please share it with them.

All photos are from my birthday woodswalk up Panther Mountain near the end of last year.

Kiddo had something like 18 surgical procedures while he went through cancer treatment. Our running joke was that he wanted to qualify for a second round of “after 10 procedures, you get 1 free”; we braced ourselves with that kind of dark humor. For most of the surgeries I was with him during surgery prep and recovery. I took that on because his mom was his full-time caretaker and that was a way of giving her space to take care of herself. If you haven’t had surgery it goes like this, you show up and register. You fill out some forms and wait. Eventually, they call your name and walk you to a curtained or maybe walled-off space in the surgical prep area. You put your things in a clothes bag that they take away to return after the surgery and get into a gown. There’s more forms to fill out, like “can you sign off that the surgeon is going to do the correct surgery on the correct part of your body?” Nurses take vitals. The doctors come by to check in. The anesthesiologist comes by to check in. For pediatric oncology patients, there was a team that would come by to play with kids while they were getting chemo or before a surgery. Kiddo loved the folks on that team and they’d play Uno Attack together; he was absurdly good at games (luck had to go somewhere) and would get really amped up and competitive when playing. They’d bring me a bunny suit, like a clean room suit but lighter material with little slippers to wear over my shoes and a goofy elastic hat, and I’d walk back to the operating room with him. I’d later learn that adults don’t get to have someone come back to the operating room with you.

When you get anesthesia, they ask you to count down from 100, and you’re pretty much out somewhere in the 90s. He played a game with the surgical team where everyone in the operating room had to guess how long it’d be before he was out, and he really worked at outlasting their guesses (like I said, really competitive kid). I think his best was getting to the mid-80s before going under. As he was fading out, I'd say “I love you”, give him a kiss on the forehead, and tell him I’d see him on the other side. Then I’d wait, often working remotely to pass the time and keep myself focused on something other than worry. During the first procedure to remove the original tumor, which took around fourteen hours, I coded an entire framework, complete with automated tests, deep focus otherwise I’d have gone crazy with worry. A nurse would either text updates or call me with updates. When everything was done, I’d go up to the recovery area and sit with him while he came out from under anesthesia. I’ll say this... he was a cranky little monster when he came back to the surface. They’d monitor his pain and vitals and eventually we’d be taken to an in-patient room to stay however many nights he needed before he could go home. I’d stay with him on a foldout chair/bed and keep him company.

Kiddo loved anesthesia and being under. Asking him why was like hearing an addict talking about their favorite substance. I couldn’t relate at all until I had my own gender-affirming surgeries in 2023 and 2024, surgeries that I’d never have been able to do had I not become so comfortable with hospitals and surgical procedures from being with him through so many. For a period of time, you shut off and time passes and things happen to you. You feel none of it. You aren’t aware of any of it. You wake up and everything is different. You’ve been changed. There’s pain. There’s discomfort. There’s stitched incisions. There’s bandages and IV tubes. There’s fluids and blood. But for that time when it was all happening... nothing. You’re alive and completely free from suffering — unfortunately unable to appreciate it — but for a short time, completely free. When I asked him what he thought happened when we died, he mostly thought we just turned off, like anesthesia forever. I don’t know if he found anesthesia comforting because he hoped that’s how easy dying would be or if he found the idea of dying easy because he’d experienced anesthesia. Either way, when his time came, he did go easily.

When I started thinking about how to talk about suicide, that experience is what came to me.

Some of you know that I’ve struggled with depression and various mental health difficulties for much of my life. From around junior high school until I finally figured out I am transgender/transsexual, depression and suicidal ideation was the air I breathed a lot of the time. When I finally did figure it out, it was like going from midtown NYC on a humid August day to my beloved Catskills woods... clean, rejuvenating air and genuine joy. Habits of depression linger because habits have powerful energy, and energy can be hard to observe, harder to understand, and even harder to shift. As understanding comes, redirecting that energy into more skillful, more healthy habits is a whole other work, sometimes a life’s work. It takes energy to do that and one thing that depression (and caretaking) do is consume your energy. Before coming out, suicidal ideation was a daily presence. Later in life, I was surprised to meet people who never had suicidal ideation. I didn’t even know that was possible.

The idea that there’s a way out of suffering that I had control over is a compelling one. It’s a form of taking power, of having agency when things feel completely out of control. It’s also a small, tight place, a path that cannot see the world with a spacious awareness, cannot see possibilities or choices. The constriction is comforting in a way; the whole of your possibilities are so small that they feel manageable, even as those possibilities point to something terrible. It can be really hard to change, even when changing could mean being happy, or at least not being in whatever situation feels so bad that taking your own life seems like the best option. The unknown is scary, even when there’s examples around you that maybe it's not so scary or not so unknown. Sometimes, it seems impossible to find a way to the change. Sometimes, because of circumstances, it really might be impossible to find a way to the change. Sometimes, even seeing the necessary change, the leap feels like too much. Sometimes, it feels impossible to bear the discomfort and unmet desire any longer.

I can remember standing on subway platforms, going to work, making sure that I stood away from the platform edge, that I had a vertical steel girder between me and the platform edge, just in case the impulse hit me and I couldn’t stop it. I can remember easing myself to sleep with stories of how I could take my life and finally quiet the noise in my head, the discomfort in my body.

I have made three attempts on my life.

April 1997... I laid out my all of my anti-depressants and ADHD pills in little clusters of three on my kitchen table. In desperation, I called a friend in San Francisco; he wasn’t home and I left a message. And then I tried to summon the courage to take the pills. He called me back minutes later before I did. He flew me down so my friends there could take care of me. Nobody in Seattle knew where I was because I wasn’t in the right state of mind to let them know. I wished the plane would crash. I wished the car I was in would crash. I wished a car would lose control and hit me as I walked on the sidewalks around town. I wanted someone else to do what I could not. When I returned to Seattle, my friends there would not let me stay by myself. They brought me to someone’s house and looked after me. I resented them for caring. They pushed me to get into outpatient therapy, which introduced me to cognitive behavioral therapy and maybe the first time I really understood that it was possible to reroute a downward spiral, that I had more agency than I realized even if I couldn’t always see it.

December 2017... I hiked the Bogachiel Trail on the Olympic Peninsula, planning to be out in the wilderness for a few nights at least, but without the kind of gear needed for the weather at that time of year. This is not the way I approach the wilderness. I take it seriously and come prepared. And, in my depression, I lied to myself and to my friends in Seattle. I pretended I was okay. I was so dissociated that I don’t even know if I consciously knew I was going to put myself in a situation that would likely kill me. When I stopped for the night, I had a tarp, no sleeping bag, and a foil emergency blanket; the temperatures were around freezing. If I had laid down on the ground, I probably would not have woken up. Even if I had slept with my back against the big tree behind me, I probably would not have woken up. I sat upright in zazen all night, wrapped in the emergency blanket, doing my best not to nod off. I wrestled with the voices, with the temptations, saying we could end it here, we could be done. Why was is taking so long for the sun to rise? Why wasn’t I hiking out in the middle of the night? Maybe I can keep hiking to the next lean-to in the morning? Yes! surely we don't need to end our trip, we can keep going tomorrow, right? How could I have been so detached from reality? When the sun finally did rise, I hiked back to the rental car, found a hotel and stayed there, doing day hikes to the coastal beaches for the rest of my days on the peninsula. I thought that was me putting to rest the idea of taking my life. I thought that was me deciding I wanted to live. I thought I was done with this notion of having an out.

April 2020... in COVID isolation, I was living in a cabin in the woods in the Catskills. I had friends that I saw in Zoom meetings. I was already working remotely before the pandemic started so that didn't change. I lost contact with my Zen community as the monastery where I practiced closed off in quarantine to protect the residents. The isolation was getting to me. A breakup was getting to me. I was a year into transition. In January, I had changed my name legally and then later watched my former self die while sitting zazen at silent retreat. I asked myself if a trans person transitions in the woods, do they make a gender? What is transition when there’s nobody to witness? My mental state was slipping. I was losing coherence. I felt like nobody cared about me. One day, I picked up a length of network cable, tied it in a noose tightly around my neck to see if it would hold, and then planned on how I could secure it to a crossbeam on the deck overhang behind the cabin. I can still feel the comforting sensation of it around my neck and the way it pressed. And then, a moment of clarity came through. I removed the cable noose from my neck and it sat on the floor reminding me for quite a while after.

I don’t really know what stopped me. Years later I would realize that if I had followed through, I wouldn’t have been with Kiddo when he first started having pain in his leg, or when I took him to an urgent care and the doc told me that the worst case for what he was seeing in the x-rays was cancer, or through any of the treatments, through palliative care, through end of life decline. I would have failed my basic responsibility for taking care of the life that I caused. I like to think that, even thought it was three months before cancer was detected – time happening all at once – that is what stopped me from taking my life that April. Not wanting to hurt him like that certainly kept me going through a lot of hard times when things seemed hopeless or too painful to go on. Often, the only thing that stopped me was a promise to other people. The ideation didn’t stop. The desire didn’t go away. But the intention to follow through was redirected by that commitment.

A friend killed themself last year. They were very close to my core partner. I watched what he went through, how much that hurt him. Knowing I never want to hurt him and having this raw experience of his hurt kept me from taking my own life as I experienced the storm of grief after Kiddo passed. I knew that this depression was not the old depression, but the orienting force of my life was gone and I was lost at sea in the sorrow and loss and absence and all the ways I did not know how to go on and find the strength to be my own orienting force. I don’t know if it ever even occurred to me to be my own orienting force, not looking for direction from another person or an idea or a goal, to keep going just to keep going, just to see what happens next.

Grief destroyed my curiosity and enjoyment of the world, my capacity for activity, my ability to be around people. I was on auto-pilot as I drove west. When I walked through even quiet neighborhoods of Seattle, I’d have panic attacks from life going on as if the world had not just ended, because their worlds had not and I didn’t know how to be in this grief in the continuing world. I tried to get further from people, leaving Seattle in the van for the Oregon coast. I mostly wandered in silence – listening to music or audiobooks while I drove was too much – driving quietly with the thoughts and the feelings swirling. Even then, there were too many people around, so I went into Siuslaw National Forest thinking I’d spend a couple of days absolutely alone, just with the trees. After the first night, I knew that if I kept driving deeper into the forest, where the roads got narrower and rougher, I would get myself into trouble that I was not in a state of mind to get out of. I didn’t want to get myself into trouble. I cared because the friend I was staying with in Seattle cared. We had hard conversations about that, and at the time, it just could not take in the way she cared about me or why. But, because she cared, I was starting to care about myself again. I came back to the coast. I stayed in a hotel by the ocean. I didn’t leave for 3 days except to walk for take-out. I took three baths a day in a bathtub by windows overlooking the beach, listening to the waves and the wind.

Returning to Seattle briefly, I sought more solitude on the Olympic Peninsula (this time safely housed – thank you S&S). From there, in an extremely compressed accounting of a couple of months, I continued to Vancouver Island, returned east, and settled back into my hearthome, the Catskills. All of that is stories for other postings, but the grief and depression remained heavy through it all.

And then, things began to shift. There were conversations with friends that let some light in. Sitting zazen around the winter solstice, I had a moment of insight. Sometimes it happens that everything about a stuck place becomes clear in a moment. The stuck place hurts; it is energetically charged but unable to move. When insight like that comes, it is a flash of complete understanding. The words and explanations come later, as the thinking mind tries to make sense of the moment, but in the moment, there is an unbinding, where the things that were stuck are able to move, where fluidity and change become possible again, often in radically new ways.

I saw the decades of pattern-forming that went into “there’s a way out”, that went into “you can take your own life.” And, even though it sounds simplistic (and also makes me think of this classic scene from Trainspotting), I saw that, equally, I could choose to live. Just that. No reason. Just live. Be curious about the strangeness of being alive. All along, I’ve known that the best way to honor Kiddo’s life is to live mine fully, but that didn't live in my body; it was superficial and aspirational more than heartfelt. Now, that feeling was deep in my bones, coming from the spaces within where the cosmos enters the body, not reliant on any person or institution or idea.

This was sealed on the day I walked up Panther Mountain. I scattered some ashes at the top of the mountain, chanting the Daihishin Dharani and Mourner’s Kaddish, and speaking with Kiddo. Up until then, those conversations had mostly been filled with tears and the heartache of missing him every day. This time, though, I had another moment of revelation. I was filled with gratitude for all the moments I had with him, for being able to take care of him, for being able to teach him and learn from him, for all our shared laughter and tears and anger and fears, for his birth, for his life, and for his death. When I say filled with gratitude, this goes beyond “thank you” or “I appreciate.” This was a transcendent gratitude. This extended to everything and everyone. It is still settling into my body and my ways of moving through the world, but it has become a true comfort to see the exquisite and fleeting glorious beauty of moments, rather than being focused on the losses and absences.

Words don’t do justice to the experience. It is deeper than a decision.

This is a form of rebirth.

Yesterday was 6 months since Kiddo passed. I snowshoed one of my favorite trails, which follows Kanape Brook, eventually climbing Ashokan High Point, though I didn't go quite that far. I only intended to walk a short distance in to scatter ashes in the stream, and ended up walking much further. Kiddo and I walked this trail in July 2019, almost exactly one year before he was diagnosed with osteosarcoma. I remembered that there was a place further along where I’d taken a picture of him on a rickety wooden bridge. My short walk turned into a roughly five mile walk. After, I had dinner with him at one of our favorite diners. When we did our West Coast road trip in 2024, he joked to me that he would know I was a skinwalker if he ever asked me to go to a diner and I said no.

I don’t think I'll ever say no to a diner.

May you find gratitude,
ease, and joy in all your moments.

And when you cannot,
May you find patience and perseverance,
support and comfort.

May you reach out for help when you need it –
You are not alone.

We are never alone.
We’re all in this together.

xo
daisy
river
miryam

What I've been listening to these days...

• Tragic Magic, Mary Lattimore and Julianna Barwick's new album
• Automatic Noodle
• The Mars Room
• Atmosphere
• She Is a Haunting
• There Is No Antimemetics Division
• The Laundry Files (8 of them! from The Rhesus Chart to Quantum of Nightmares)