Stepping Back from the Ledge, page 1
Copyright © 2022 by Laura Trujillo
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
Random House and the House colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Names: Trujillo, Laura, author.
Title: Stepping back from the ledge : a daughter’s search for truth and renewal / Laura Trujillo.
Description: First edition. | New York : Random House, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021006621 (print) | LCCN 2021006622 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593157619 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593157626 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Trujillo, Laura. | Children of suicide victims—United States—Biography. | Sexually abused teenagers—United States—Biography. | Mothers and daughters—United States—Biography.
Classification: LCC HV6545 .T78 2022 (print) | LCC HV6545 (ebook) | DDC 362.28/3092 [B]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021006621
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021006622
Ebook ISBN 9780593157626
randomhousebooks.com
Book design by Diane Hobbing, adapted for ebook
Cover design: Anna Kochman
Cover art: Linnean Society, London, UK/Bridgeman Images (flowers), Malte Mueller/Getty Images (paper)
ep_prh_6.0_139713517_c0_r0
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Chapter 1: Searching for Answers
Chapter 2: A Growing Distance
Chapter 3: A Cruel Summer
Chapter 4: The Fear: I Was Becoming My Mom
Chapter 5: Learning to Understand Suicide
Chapter 6: Finding Hope
Chapter 7: Getting Better
Chapter 8: Hiking with My Mother
Chapter 9: Piecing Together My Mom’s Life
Chapter 10: My Mother’s Daughter
Chapter 11: Moving Forward
Notes
Bibliography
Resources
Dedication
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Chapter 1
Searching for Answers
I stood and looked down into the canyon, at a spot where millions of years ago, a river cut through stone. Everything about the view is awe-inspiring and impossible, a landscape that seems to defy both physics and description. It is a view in a place that dwarfs you, that magnifies the questions in your mind about your place in the world and about the world itself, and that keeps the answers to itself.
It was April 26, 2016—four years since my mom died. Four years to the day since she stood in this same spot and looked out at this same view. I caught my breath here, and felt dizzy and needed to remind myself to breathe in through my nose and out through my mouth, slower, and again. I could say it out loud now: This is where my mom killed herself. She jumped from the edge of the Grand Canyon. From the edge of the earth.
I had come back to the spot because, finally, I was ready—I wanted to know everything. Like a lot of people who lose someone they love to suicide, I had been shocked. Numb. Now I wanted to understand how this could have happened and what I could have done differently, what we all might have done differently to help her. What could have caused this? Was there a tipping point?
My eyes followed a narrow trail down, cutting through layers of red and purple rock that felt as if it were another planet, until the trail disappeared into a patch of green.
I’d been at this spot before, with my mother. My mom brought me here once when I was a child, and we’d walked along the rocky South Rim. She brought me here again when I was in college, this time for a mother-daughter trip where we exhausted ourselves hiking the 7.1 miles down to the canyon’s floor and slept in a cabin: We spent more time together just the two of us than we ever would again. In between, my mom hiked more than a dozen trails at the canyon, finding a sense of adventure and strength, of peace and spirituality. She had watched the sunrise at Easter Mass here and had sat along the edge at night when the canyon disappears into a hole of black, with only the stars visible. For her, it was a place where she rediscovered herself after her divorce from my father, and later where she went to escape the world.
Now, I didn’t just want to know everything. I needed to know it: the latitude and longitude where she fell, the last words she said to the shuttle bus driver who dropped her at the trail overlook, her mood when she met with her priest just four days prior. He had told me my mom went out of her way to say she was good, but he had sensed she was hiding something. I had tracked all of this down to try to piece it together, my mother’s life.
I read over the last letter she had mailed to my children. I looked for clues inside that little card with a cartoon penguin drawn on the front: She wrote in block printing so my five-year-old daughter, Lucy, could read it easily. My mom wrote of riding the light rail to a Diamondbacks baseball game in Phoenix, of planting a cactus garden, of looking forward to summer in the already hot days of spring in the desert.
I also read and re-read her last words, written in cursive in the tiniest composition book, which she had left in her Jeep, as well as the last text she typed, in which she both celebrated life and apologized for it: “Life. My life has been such a gift. I’m so very sorry to disappoint all of you. In my heart I know this is not right but it’s all I can do. Please pray for my soul.”
I zoomed in on the photo she took with her iPhone from the ledge, the photo looking out to the sunrise that lit the canyon on that morning. I wanted to see if the rocks or shadows would reveal anything new. I re-played our last conversation in my mind, and each one before that, and before that, all of them I could remember. None of them seemed to have given any hints of what was to come. I last heard her voice on Easter, which on that year was also my birthday, talking about my children and chocolate bunnies, the irises blooming in our neighbors’ yard, and when she might be able to visit. The conversation ended like thousands before it. I said, “I love you, Mom,” and she said, “Love you, kiddo.”
I wanted to know every fact, every detail, to see everything she saw, because I didn’t have the one thing I wanted—the why. Now, I wondered why we didn’t see it coming somehow, why we didn’t do more, when it all seemed so clear. Looking back over the years, there were signs of depression and sadness, anxiety and regret, but sometimes we didn’t really see, and we were silent about so many things.
I came back to the canyon for answers, or a deeper understanding of life and my mom, of her secrets and mine. But all I could see were the peaks miles away, the trees greener and prettier than I imagined, tiny dots of figures moving slowly up the switchbacks, and the stillness of the world.
I’d been told that suicide is as common and unknowable as the wind that shaped this rock. It’s unspeakable, bewildering, confounding, devastating, sad. Don’t try to figure it out, I had told myself; stop asking questions, assigning blame, looking. Yet I went on trying. How could I not? Now here I stood, looking, searching, suppressing the urge I had to follow her.
The morning she died, she tried to reach me. I saw “Mom” pop up on my phone shortly after ten a.m. I was at my desk on the nineteenth floor of The Cincinnati Enquirer building, working at a new job as the managing editor of the newsroom. I hadn’t quite settled in to my role yet—there was just one photo of my children on my desk. I sat in the middle of an open office, at a desk between the receptionist and one of the digital news producers, a space where privacy was difficult to find.
I declined the call, and quickly texted: “I love you, Mom. Crazy busy workday. Hard to break away to talk. But know I love you.” I had just walked out of one news meeting and sat down for a minute before the next one, trying to edit a sports story in the time between, while worrying about how my four children were adjusting to their new schools and making friends, and whether my husband had agreed to be home by five-thirty that night to start dinner, or I had. The rest of the day was a blur of talking through ideas with reporters and editors, eating a peanut butter sandwich at my desk, reading columns, and analyzing which stories were doing well online.
On my short drive home that night, I noticed the irises were starting to bloom in our neighborhood and I smiled and stopped the car, hopped out and took a photo of a deep purple iris to text to my mom. It was our favorite flower—hers because of the tenacity irises need to grow in the dry, rocky mountainside where she lived in Phoenix, and mine because when I was a kid, the irises always bloomed in early April, signaling it was almost time for my birthday. As I took the photo, I realized it was me who said I would be home that night, meaning I was already late. I would send the photo later; it could wait.
My parents divorced when I was eleven, and my father moved just a few miles away from us in Phoenix. We had stayed close through weekend visits, Wednesday-night dinners that almost always included a stop at an arcade to play Pac-Man, and softball games where he was my coach. I have my dad’s Mexican American olive skin and his eyes that are so dark they are almost black, his look when I was little of quiet disdain for any number of transgressions that I now share with him when I am angry, and things like his need for buttered popcorn at the mov
It was about five years after my dad left when my mom and I moved in with her boyfriend; she would marry him three years later. It was then that one of the corrosive secrets of my life and the life of my family began. The sexual abuse I silenced, the dark stealth entry of my stepfather into my room at night, and how I believe my mom never knew. It was the secret I never told her.
Later, when I was an adult, my mom and I lived 3.3 miles away from each other. Sometimes she would stop on her way home from work to see my kids, and we would rub each other’s hands while we sat on the short wood fence separating our yard from the neighbors’ and talk about the day. Later, when she retired from her job as a hospital administrator, she often came by during the day when I was at work and the kids were home with the nanny. She would drive one of my children to play on the slides at the park, and then return to our house to stay late to read books or do puzzles with the family while I made dinner. When I moved from Phoenix to Ohio for a new job and to be closer to my husband’s family, my mom and I talked on the phone every day. She was always up so early that even with the three-hour time difference, I could call her on my drive to work, sometimes describing the curve of the Ohio River as I drove along it, the way you would often see a barge, and how the trees were most beautiful in the winter because you could see their true shapes without the leaves. It felt as if she were a passenger in my car on my way to work, seeing what I saw along with me. We could make each other laugh, and sometimes it seemed that whatever she felt, I did, too.
That night, when I got home to the too expensive house we rented in Ohio, my husband, John, said he needed to talk to me. From his face, I could tell it was important. He said, “Come upstairs, and let’s sit down.”
I dropped my laptop in the entryway and put a lasagna in the oven and started walking up the stairs, thinking about how I was home late from work, something that had happened too often recently. I figured he wasn’t happy. We’d been arguing. We had moved from my hometown of Phoenix to Cincinnati three months earlier, and it had been a rough transition—a rental house while we hoped to find a house to buy, a new city where we had no family, four kids in new schools, and we seemed to be saying too often about bills, “Can you wait until next Friday?” Was I trying hard enough to make it work?
I kicked off my heels and sat down on the guest bed upstairs, pulling my knees up close to my chin, wrapping my arms around them.
John did not look angry. He looked serious. He was practical and to the point. He wasted no time.
“It’s your mom,” he said. “She’s gone. She was at the Grand Canyon. They found her body in the canyon.”
I realized he used the word body.
I couldn’t think, couldn’t process order or time, yet I had to move, to do something. I took John’s T-shirts out of a drawer and mindlessly began to re-fold them. I had too many feelings to control or even understand; I couldn’t find something to say. There was a pain that made my bones feel like noodles. I walked into the guest bathroom and knelt down on the tile.
I began to cry in a way that sounded like a wounded animal.
“This is my fault,” I said. I stretched my arms out to the floor, almost like the child’s pose in yoga, thinking it would help me breathe. “I did this,” I said, “I did this.”
John walked over to me and knelt down.
“Oh, Laura Kay,” he said, using my middle name that he uses when he is being sweet.
He sat down next to me on the floor, leaning against the bathroom vanity, his hand on my head. He told me what he knew about my mom’s death—my older sister had called him with the details so that he could tell me in person. I felt if I didn’t force myself to get up, I might remain there on the floor forever, crying and trying to catch my breath, trying to breathe through the sobbing. John stood up first, took my hands, and helped pull me up. He wrapped me into a hug.
“We need to tell the kids,” I finally said, trying to move into devising a plan. My mind almost went into Excel spreadsheet mode, trying to find a sense of calm by asserting order and creating tasks. I needed to talk to the kids. I couldn’t work the next day. Someone needed to alert my boss. I needed to figure out which projects were left unfinished in the office. Did anyone have baseball practice that night? I needed to start looking at plane tickets to go home to Phoenix, I needed to figure out how much school the kids could miss. We were supposed to go to Chicago that weekend, and now I was rearranging weekend plans in my head, that we needed to call my mother-in-law and let her know, and the boys would be home for their weekend games, and we should call the coach.
“Slow down,” John said. “One thing now, one thing later.”
Before we went downstairs, John called one of our new friends in Cincinnati who happened to be a child neuropsychologist, and his wife, a family counselor. Their daughter was good friends with our youngest, but they also had come to know our other three children. Our friends joined the call together, and John briefly recounted what had happened and asked for advice on how we should tell the children.
“Be honest,” they said. “Answer the kids’ questions, but don’t tell them more than they ask.” I remembered this advice being similar to the advice we were given when our eldest son had asked about how babies were made. Somehow this situation now seemed much more complicated, but maybe that same answer works for most of life, a script of sorts. Never answer more than you are asked.
Our older sons, Henry and Theo, would understand my mom’s death, our friends told us. The boys were thirteen and eleven, smart and mature. But Luke was only nine and didn’t even want to talk about the fact that we had moved so far away from his grandparents and friends. Lucy was five and missed her grandma so much that every night before bed she looked at a photo book my mom had made for the grandchildren for Christmas just a few months before. After I read Lucy a picture book each night, she would sit in her twin bed and flip through the photo book of her life with her grandma. There were photos of Lucy and her brothers with their grandma, camping at Mormon Lake, riding roller coasters at Disneyland, reading books on the couch, hiking desert trails, zip-lining, and making chocolate chip cookies. My mom had created the twenty-four-page book that held more than one hundred photos, and personalized the book jacket, writing: “A gift from Grandma. Beautiful memories of wonderful times from the birth of all 4 of you, though you will be far away, our visits and phone calls will keep us together. This book is but a snapshot of Grandma, fun times with you of your life in Phoenix. I’ve loved every minute of having you so close and getting to share so many of your life experiences. You are very, very special to me and I am so proud of each of you. Send me pictures of your new home in Cincinnati and all of your fun activities. (No snowballs, though.) Love you, Grandma.” Lucy kept the hardback photo book on the floor next to her bed.
When John and I came downstairs, the kids knew something was up, I could tell. They were quiet and waiting. None of us had our footing yet in our new city. The kids were trying to make friends, and John and I were trying to figure out our new jobs, the politics of the newsroom where we both worked, the quickest route to work, and where we could find good Mexican food. In Phoenix we always threw a huge party for Valentine’s Day—the inaugural party was for families with four children because these couples were less likely to go out that night, and somehow with our four we seemed to attract families with four kids, too. Later, more families came, and in recent years the party had swelled to about eighty parents and children, flowing in and out of our ranch house in the warm February weather in Phoenix. Lucy cried that year when she realized we couldn’t throw a party in Cincinnati—we had just moved a few weeks prior and didn’t know enough people to invite.
“But we always have one,” she argued, in a voice that was very much still five.
I had tried so hard to make everyone miss home a little less in those first few months—throwing a special party for Valentine’s Day, just for the six of us. I decided to make it different so they would make a new memory, rather than miss what they didn’t have. February fourteenth is Arizona’s birthday and that year was the state’s one hundredth birthday. I printed out place cards in the shape of the state to celebrate the centennial, something they had been studying in school back home before the move. I made carne asada tacos, guacamole, and a chocolate cake with white frosting and red sprinkles in the shape of a heart.
