Excerpt: The Hummingbird Prophecy

Editor's note: The following is the prologue from a book written by Lorijane Graham, a Centreville resident and activist for suicide prevention. Graham wrote The Hummingbird Prophecy after her daughter and daughter's boyfriend took their own lives in 2005. It was the second time a loved one had committed suicide.

The book explains how Graham regained the will to live following the deaths. It is available on Amazon.com and a portion of the proceeds benefit The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. The excerpt is reprinted with permission from the author. .    

I look out of my bedroom window to the upscale, suburban street below. Its a pretty picture of the neighborhood edging toward summer: manicured lawns, sweeping driveways, red brick and white siding. The eyebrows of dormer windows pop up from roofs here and there to take a look around. It all appears like a postcard, like perfection caught on paper.

But for me, it's a postcard from a place where I don't live anymore. Even though I stand here with my feet planted in the carpet of my family home, my eyes open to the scene, I do not feel I belong in this familiar place. I wonder if I am actually present in this ghost of a world, or if the world alone exists, with me a ghost within it.

As I watch, the postcard attempts to prove itself real by lurching into motion. A car backs out and heads toward the city. The noise of a lawn mower buzzes somewhere to the right. A mother and two children emerge from a minivan and ring a doorbell, probably right on time for their weekly play date.

I look at the clock. It's 10:30 a.m., and this is what would normally be taking place at 10:30 a.m. The mail will be delivered. The daytime TV schedule will be the same as always. Eventually, kids will emerge from buses, and parents come home from work.

I look at my hands and think, How do they not know? How can this day -- any day from here on -- be the same as the time before?

Before. Before the tragedy. Before the loss of my daughter.

No, I correct myself. Before the theft of my daughter.

The world around me continues somehow, and I sit as at the center of the spinning compass, dizzy. I had tried at first to prop myself up by getting back on the merry-go-round. I climbed forcefully into the daily schedule and used the everyday routine as a crutch, a way of marking time and forcing it to pass.

People do it all the time.

But it's impossible to explain to someone who hasn't experienced such intense loss how the so-called real world is not as real as most people take for granted, that everyday reality is just a mask. Unless you have known firsthand the aftermath of an emotional catastrophe, you cannot know that the inside of your mind is also a physical place, more solid and real than the smiling faces of neighbors or the television news or even the changeable weather. More real than the groceries in the refrigerator or the traffic of the morning commute.

The mind is a warm place, soft and comforting. It offers definable walls, to keep you in and other things away. Tight and sticky, it's also hard to re-emerge once you enter the space of your own mind, with its unstoppable thoughts and surges of intense emotion.

They keep bringing me food and flowers. They keep telling me it will all be okay. One day, some day, it will be all right. They tell me she is in a better place.

A better place? Wouldn't anywhere be better than here?

I close the blinds, turn on the television for background noise and submerge myself again in the bedding. I breathe in the musty but soft scent of the pillows. From deep inside my physical self, where the real me is curled up in pain, she weeps and wails: "They all leave you. They all intentionally and violently leave you. Everyone is in this better place but you."

Then why shouldn't I go, too?

I listen with my ears, with my skin, with my mind, but there is yet no answer.