Your Child’s Birthday After Suicide Loss: We Remember

Author’s Note: This reflection grew out of a personal Facebook post I wrote on March 6, 2017, on my son John’s 25th birthday. We lost John to suicide just after his 17th birthday. I’ve expanded it here with what these additional years have taught me about memory, continuing bonds, and the particular grace of a birthday that still comes around every spring, even now. If your child’s birthday after suicide loss is approaching, or if it just passed, I hope something in here reaches you.

The morning of your child’s birthday arrives whether you’re ready or not.

You might wake up already carrying it. Some years, the date has been pulling at you for days or weeks before it gets here. Other years, it lands without warning. You’re making coffee, and then the full weight of the day settles over you before you’ve said a word. Either way, the birthday comes.

For those of us who have lost a child to suicide, a birthday is not simply a day of grief. It is something more complicated than that, and harder to explain to someone who hasn’t lived it. It is a day of grief and a day of celebration pressed together. A day of longing and a day of love. A day when the memories come flooding back not as a burden but as a kind of gift, because at least you have them. At least you had him.

As a co-facilitator of SOS Madison, our New Jersey suicide loss support group, I’ve sat with many parents over the years who struggle to put words to what their child’s birthday feels like. The word that comes up again and again is this: bittersweet. And that’s right, as far as it goes. But it doesn’t go far enough.

What I’ve come to call them (after seventeen years of carrying John’s March birthday forward) is: heartbreaking smiles.

We Remember: A Celebration of 6,244 Days

John Edward Klingert was born on March 6, 1992. He was named in honor of both of his grandfathers. He was, from his very first days, more than we could have imagined.

On his 25th birthday, I wrote the following on Facebook. I’ve kept it here almost exactly as I wrote it then, because the memories belong to him, not to editing.

Today we remember it is our son John’s birthday. It is a celebration of one of the most precious days in our lives. When you lose a child, all you are left with are memories. So here are a few of them.

• We remember the day we found out his mom was pregnant with him. He was our miracle baby.
• We remember the day he was born and naming him John Edward, in honor of both of his grandfathers.
• We remember bringing him home to meet his big sister, probably his closest friend in life.
• We remember his Baptism, when family and friends joined us at the church and later for his first party.
• We remember his first words and his first steps. He was always outgoing and ready to go somewhere.
• We remember him riding his Big Wheels trike all over the driveway, doing spinouts.
• We remember him drawing all over the driveway with chalk. That was the beginning of numerous art projects we always loved.
• We remember dropping him off for preschool and feeling like our baby had grown up.
• We remember him getting dressed up as a Pilgrim for his preschool play.
• We remember him getting on his first school bus, and sitting there missing him.
• We remember renting a Christopher Columbus costume for a school presentation. He was always ready to stand in front of a crowd.
• We remember taking the training wheels off his first two-wheeler. A few skinned knees were not a problem for him.
• We remember hiking the trails around Nova Scotia with him. He led the pack, dragging us down trails so steep there were safety ropes.
• We remember teaching him to swim and boogie board in the ocean. He never wanted to come out.
• We remember him doing a Taekwondo demo at his school talent fair. He broke a few boards for the other students.
• We remember that no matter where we moved, he always had friends within the first week.
• We remember him getting his first black belt and going to regional Taekwondo competitions. We still have his medals and his black belt.
• We remember him spending countless hours digging in the sand with his younger cousins at the beach. He was the Pied Piper to them all.
• We remember him going off to high school for the first day. Even though we had just moved back after two years away, he fit right back in.
• We remember his 16th birthday party and all the Monster drinks we went through.
• We remember him having a minor part in the school play. We were proud parents to see him walk out on that stage.
• We remember him trying out for and playing on the high school football team. He showed such dedication.
• We remember him getting his driver’s license, even if he did bang up the car.
• We remember skiing with him on mountains across the country. I still have the lift pass from our last trip together.
• We remember so many holidays, birthdays, and special occasions with him. He was always the first one to sing and the first one to give a homemade present.
• We remember so many other moments in the 6,244 days he was with us. He was bigger than life in so many ways.

And we remember the day he died, and our hearts were broken forever.

In the years since, we have learned to live with that fracture. We have integrated it into who we are and carried it forward into our lives.

What a Birthday After Suicide Loss Feels Like

When you lose a child, your mind drifts back to every amazing memory you shared. You could go on and on. I could and I do.

My wife Teri and I have survived. More than that, I dare to say we have thrived in the years since John died. We have found joy. We have found happiness. We have moved beyond his death to go forward with our future.

But that doesn’t mean birthdays are easy. They are not.

If you are in the first year after suicide loss or navigating one of your first birthdays without your child, please understand that the anticipation is often harder than the day itself. The days leading up to it, the dread, the counting down; many parents say those are the worst. The grief ambushes that catch you off guard in the parking lot, at a restaurant, at a birthday display in a card store, in the weeks before the date; those can be more relentless than the birthday itself.

That doesn’t mean the day is easy. It isn’t. But you will get through it. You have gotten through harder days than this one.

I’ve written more about why a child’s birthday after suicide loss hits the way it does, and what some survivors have found helps, in a companion piece: Birthday After Suicide Loss: Why It Hits So Hard and What Helps.

Some parents plan something intentional. A visit to a place that mattered to him. A small gathering with people who knew him. A private ritual that belongs only to the family.

Others need the day to pass quietly, without marking it at all, because any ceremony is more than they can carry right now.

Some feel guilty for not doing enough. Others feel guilty for doing anything that looks like celebration. Both reactions make sense. Both are normal.

You are allowed to spend this day however you need to spend it. And what that looks like this year does not have to match what it looked like last year, or what it will look like next. In fact, you don’t have to do anything.

If this day feels like more than you can carry, please reach out. The 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available around the clock. Call or text 988.

Your Child’s Birthday Is Not Just a Day of Grief

Something shifts over time. It doesn’t happen on a schedule. It’s not the same for every parent, and I won’t pretend it is.

Not the absence of him. Not just the ache of missing him. The day holds the actual memory of who he was: the Big Wheels and the board-breaking Taekwondo demo and the ski lift pass I still have and the way he was always the first one to start singing.

His birthday stopped being only a hard day somewhere around the seven or eight year mark, and started becoming something I’d describe as sacred. It belongs to him. It belongs to his life, not just his death. Building intentional rituals of remembrance around a birthday is one way to hold that quality, to claim the day as something that honors who they were.

If you’re not there yet, that’s completely okay. You don’t have to be. Grief is not linear, and no one heals on the same timetable. Losing a child to suicide is a grief that is entirely its own. It doesn’t move the way other grief moves. Be patient with yourself on birthdays, especially in the early years.

The Age He Would Have Turned

A birthday after child loss is not only about the person who died. It is about every age they never reached.

When I wrote the original version of this piece, on John’s 25th birthday, I could only imagine the young man he might have become by then. Now he would be thirty-four. I’ve watched his high school classmates move through their twenties and into their thirties. Some are married. Some have children. Some have changed careers two or three times. Some live nowhere near where they grew up.

I cannot do that math for John. I only have him at forever seventeen.

I don’t know what thirty-four-year-old John would have looked like, what he would have chosen to do, whether the artist in him or the athlete in him would have taken the lead. He had always said he would like to join the FBI since his grandfather was in law enforcement.

Many parents describe this as a second grief living inside the first. Not only the grief for the child who died, but for all the versions of them that will never exist. The thirty-year-old. The fifty-year-old. The one who might have called on a random Tuesday just to check in.

That grief doesn’t have a clean name. But it is real, and a birthday is often when it surfaces most clearly. Many parents carry it. You are not alone in that particular weight.

I have shed many tears on his birthdays.

Time Passes. He Does Not Fade.

One of the things I hear from newer parents at our support group meetings is a fear they don’t always say out loud, but that I’ve learned to hear beneath other things they do say. The fear is this: what if I forget him? What if, as more time passes, he fades?

I want to speak directly to that fear, because it is one I’ve carried and slowly put down.

John has not faded. He has been gone from our physical lives since April 10, 2009. He would be 34 this spring. He never got to 18. He missed everything that a 25-year-old, or a 30-year-old, or a 34-year-old would have known and done and become.

And yet he is woven into who we are.

That is not a metaphor. It is the literal truth of what grief researchers call continuing bonds, the idea that our connection to the person we lost does not end when they die. It changes form. It integrates.

I’ve thought about this a lot over the years, and I think the fear of forgetting comes from a misunderstanding of how memory and love actually work. We don’t love people less as time passes. We learn to carry them differently. John is not farther from me than he was in 2009. If anything, he’s more deeply embedded in who I am, in this work Teri and I do at SOS Madison, in this blog, in the way I see young men his age and think of what he might have been doing.

He continues in us. We have integrated this loss into our lives. We have not moved on from him. We have moved forward, and we’ve brought him with us.

We Are Still His Parents

This is something I say to parents at our support group meetings sometimes, when I can see someone sitting across the room in that particular silence that comes from not knowing who you are anymore.

The relationship did not end. Your identity did not end. If anything, I believe the love deepens over time, because it can no longer be complicated by ordinary daily friction. What remains is the core of it. The pride. The tenderness. The knowledge of who he was at his best and his worst and his most human.

John was bigger than life. He was a Taekwondo 2nd degree black belt and a football player and an artist and the kid who dragged his parents down roped mountain trails in Nova Scotia. He was named after two men we wanted him to become. He was closer to his sister than to almost anyone. He was, in 6,244 days, fully and completely himself.

I’ve thought often about what happens when the days of absence begin to outnumber the days he was with us. That milestone carries its own particular weight.

Marriage after losing a child to suicide changes you; Teri and I will tell you it changed us. But one thing that has never changed is that we are John’s parents. Both of us. Always.

What the Birthdays Are Now

I want to be honest about something, for the parents who are reading this in their first year or two and wondering what the years ahead look like.

The weight does not disappear. I won’t tell you it does. For some parents, the weight stays heavier longer, or reshapes more slowly. That is not a failure of grief. It is grief on its own timeline.

But it changes. The weight you carry on your child’s birthday in year three is different from the weight in year one. And the weight in year ten is different again. Not lighter, necessarily, but shaped differently. More settled. Less like something crushing you and more like something you have learned to carry without losing your footing.

In the early years, people remember. A text arrives. A card comes. Someone calls. They hold the date alongside you, at least a little. Then, gradually, they don’t. Not because they have forgotten him. But because the date does not live in them the way it lives in you. For them it has become knowledge. For you it remains a full-body experience.

That silence is not cruelty. But it can feel like one more loss stacked on top of the original one.

If you have felt this, you are not imagining it. It is one of the things I hear most consistently from parents at our support group meetings after the first few years have passed. The world moves on from dates that still stop yours. That is a real and legitimate hurt, and it deserves to be mentioned. What I can tell you from our support group is this: the people there remember. They remember the dates, year after year. That is one of the things peer community offers that the broader world often cannot.

March 6 comes around every year. I wake up that morning knowing what day it is. I think about the 6,244 days. I think about the Big Wheels and the lift pass and the first birthday party and his voice starting a song before anyone else was ready. I think about Teri and our daughter and what John meant to all of us.

And then I think about who he still is to us. Not who he was. Who he still is.

He is our son. He is in our hearts and our thoughts, every single day. That has never dimmed, not once, in seventeen years.

Happy birthday, John.

If you’re carrying a birthday this season that belongs to someone you lost to suicide, you’re not alone in what you’re feeling. Consider connecting with others who have lived this specific grief through a peer suicide loss support group near you, or by reading what finding your people after suicide loss can offer. The SOS Madison support group meets twice monthly in Madison, NJ, and is open to all suicide loss survivors. You can find us at sosmadison.com.

If you’ve never read about continuing bonds and want a deeper look at why the people we lose don’t simply disappear from our lives, I wrote more about that in Physics = Love: Continuing Bonds After Suicide Loss.

We carry them forward. They are still with us.

And when you are thinking about your child’s birthday, know that we remember them too.

Posts You May Also Like

• Losing a Child to Suicide: The Grief No One Prepares You For – A deeper look at the particular shape of grief that comes with losing a son or daughter to suicide, and what makes it different from other losses.
• Birthday After Suicide Loss: Why It Hits So Hard and What Helps – A companion piece to this post that goes deeper into why a birthday lands the way it does and what some survivors have found helps them through it.
• Ritual and Remembrance – How intentional rituals of remembrance help survivors hold the people they lost, including on birthdays and other significant dates.
• Physics = Love: Continuing Bonds After Suicide Loss – How the relationships we had with the people we lost continue and evolve, and why that is not the same as being stuck in grief.
• Seventeen Years and Still Counting: Long-Term Survival After Suicide Loss – What the long view of surviving suicide loss actually looks and feels like, from someone who has been carrying it for seventeen years.

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