Every Thanksgiving and Christmas we haul the extra table up from the basement: a cheap white pine table, the varnish yellow now, that we used in the kitchen until eventually it became too embarrassing. When we carry it upstairs, we do it in pieces, and once it's in the dining room the tabletop gets flipped over and lowered to the floor so someone- usually my husband or my son Sam--can attach the legs. As one of them works with screws and Allen wrenches, I read the legends inscribed by our kids on the underside of the table when they were little; the one we see first, in large red letters, is "Boo, Sam sucks a lot, by Nick."

Sam is our oldest, now twenty-eight; Nick was our youngest. He died by suicide in 2019, two months before his 20th birthday. On Thanksgiving I find the graffiti funny and charming, a way to remember Nick as one of a cadre of brothers who taunted each other the way brothers will. But it's harder at Christmas. Thanksgiving is hard too, but I can get through it relatively easily as long as I don't think too much. As soon as it ends, though, and we're into the Christmas season, I find myself crying randomly every day: crying in my car at stop lights, crying while I'm driving and not at stop lights, crying as I stand in line at the post office to mail packages, crying while I sit in the pews at church, crying while I'm making myself a sandwich for lunch at work, where I also cry in the solitude of my office.

Nick had bipolar disorder. The day before he died I was, for some reason, afraid he would kill himself, but I called his therapists and they said they had done a suicide evaluation and didn't think he was in danger. My husband, Bruce, told me he wasn't worried. That night Nick told me about his plans for the next day and week, so I joined in Bruce's not-worrying—I tend to worry a lot, usually more than I should—and went to bed, waking suddenly in the middle of the night worried again until I remembered that Nick had been better before I went to bed. I was happy and settled in to sleep until about four in the morning; then Sam got up and went to retrieve some work materials from the basement, where he discovered that Nick had hanged himself. He screamed for Bruce, who ran downstairs. I was unable to move. Sam, who had somehow made his way up from the basement, grabbed the phone from me and called 911.

I don't remember crying that morning. After the screams and after the 911 call, I crep down to our first floor and stood frozen in the hall as Bruce emerged slowly from the basement; we put our arms around each other and Bruce told me oh, honey, you were right, you were right. "I took him down," he said. The police arrived and peppered us with questions; I found out later that a suicide is initially treated as a homicide until all the facts are established. The first responders carried Nick out of the house without my seeing him, on a gurney, through the basement hatchway. I may have sunk to the floor when they told me they were about to take him away, I don't know. I do know that it was muddy that January, and that after the ambulance and the police left, Bruce went outside to cover up the gurney tracks. "Just going to play in the mud," he said. "Don't look."

Other people cried: the medical examiner had tears in her eyes when she emerged from the basement after doing her job; the funeral director wiped away tears as she was asking us what kind of casket spray we wanted her to order from the local florist. I know I sobbed when our friends Joe and Ruth Ann arrived at our house with a huge foil pan full of pasta, Joe and Ruth Ann having lost their grandson Gage—about Nick's age—to suicide a couple of years earlier. It hit me then: all the mourning people had done for Gage they would now be doing for Nick, so it was real, Nick was really dead, oh my God it was real.

But I didn't cry during Nick's wake. Instead I stood steadily beside the casket with Bruce, our middle son Pete, and Sam, and accepted hugs and condolences from the hundreds of people who came through the line: men who had been involved in my kids' youth hockey teams, Nick's high school teachers, our work colleagues, neighbors, friends. Then there were all the kids, Nick's buddies and teammates, murmuring "I'm sorry for your loss" because someone had told them to, because that's what you say. One of the girls had gone to senior prom with Nick; I had met her only briefly but remembered her blonde hair, her delicate features, and her classic black dress with white trim from one of the pictures I took that night. Another of the kids asked me if I was Nick's grandma—I have gray hair and Nick was born when I was almost forty. Nick's hockey teammates assembled at the back of the room, while his other friends gathered around the closed casket, their arms draped around each other and their heads on each others' shoulders. The whole time, I didn't cry, feeling as if it was my job to console and be strong for these people who came to me in the line, all these sad and probably scared people who had come out of kindness or duty or pity or need or love.

I didn't cry at the funeral either. I'd been afraid of the funeral, afraid that it would make me admit to myself that we were sending Nick off, that he was going somewhere else, someplace far away from us where I'd never get to see him again. But I still felt as if I were consoling others, that I needed to be strong for them, so I got up and read an elegy that a friend of mine, a poet, had found for me. A couple of other people gave talks about Nick—I even managed to laugh at some of the stories they told. At the end of the service, following the casket down the aisle behind the youthful pallbearers—Nick's brothers as well as his hockey teammates—was like running a gauntlet. But I did it, and I didn't cry. I don't remember when I started crying again. I think maybe I cried that night.

Later I told myself I'd been on autopilot. And maybe so. And there are different ways to deal with the grief of a child's taking their own life. But moving forward, putting yourself on hold to be there for others in the face of deep grief that alters your very identity, has its costs, and especially at Christmas, I don't know how to stop the crying or the anxiety that accompanies what my friend Theresa (who lost her brother to suicide) calls the dark cloak that falls over everything at the holidays. Engaging in Christmas activities doesn't really help; I have no desire to bake cookies though I usually manage to eke out a batch or two, and all I can think about is how much I used to love Christmas, loved the whole season, the baking and the decorating of the tree and the music and the shopping and the opening of presents. The joy is pretty much gone for me now, though I keep trying to figure out how to get it back. Memories don't help. I haven't been able, almost five years later, to access a lot of memories of when my kids were little, or even somewhat older, because Nick would be there in those memories. It's not as if they don't come up. But I don't dwell on them, don't look at photographs of my kids together that aren't already hanging on my wall or sitting on my shelves. I can't bear to think about how Nick was one of three brothers, because then I'll remember that now there are only two, and the memories of when things were different would hurt too much. And that memory would make me cry.

There are some things, however, that I can't avoid unless I want to avoid all areas of our house:
Downstairs in the basement, Nick's white high school hockey helmet, with the number twenty affixed to the back and another decal with the team name, the Bucks, on the side.

In what had been his room, the big furnished room over the garage that is now my art studio, hangs a self-portrait he had drawn in pencil, in what was probably seventh or eighth grade. It shows him leaning against a brick wall, from the waist up, his arms folded. You can recognize his face, his eyes melancholy, as well as the set and build of his shoulders. The t-shirt on them drapes beautifully. Behind him, looking through a hole in the wall, is a smiling young woman wearing headphones. I have no idea who that's supposed to be. I wish I knew.

Also: several months before we converted the room to an art studio, we hired a company to remove most of Nick's stuff. I took the dogs to the dog park while the move was happening. Before I left the house, though, I noticed a pair of Nick's khakis lying on a chair, bearing the creases from the back of his knees.

So I try to build memories from all these objects, these left-behind things, hoping that eventually they will stop the crying. Some memories are from hockey. Nick was a gifted player—two-time all-state, four-year varsity, always a "player to watch" according to the local papers—but he was also other things. When he was a junior or senior in high school, the mother of a freshman approached me after a game and told me how much she appreciated Nick's attitude toward the younger players—told me that her son had said Nick had every reason to be arrogant, but he wasn't, he was instead a quiet leader who treated everybody as an equal. One of his linemates, when interviewed by one of the local papers after his death, said the same thing. (Nobody said his smile lit up a room, for which I was absurdly grateful.) After he died, the team established an annual award in his honor, given every year to the player who exemplifies the dedication Nick brought to the game and his attitude toward his team. I can never bring myself to go to the award presentation.

But I do go to the alumni game. In March 2019, two months after Nick took his life, Bruce and I used the rest of his college money—the bulk of it was used to pay for his funeral—to establish a memorial fund to support young hockey players. In December of that year, the first alumni game to benefit the memorial fund was held for former members of his high school team: some still boys but others now men, some of whom had played with Nick but many of whom had not. Before the start of the game, Bruce and I shuffled carefully onto the ice with the players as a tribute speech to Nick emerged over the loudspeaker, given by someone I didn't know. Someone else handed me a bouquet of flowers. One overexcited mother told me how much fun the game was, how great it was to see all the kids back together. I didn't respond.

Perhaps understandably, given that feelings were running high, many of us dispersed to a local bar after the game. As we mingled, John, the high school coach, made his way across the room toward me; all I could think of was how, soon after Nick died, John had shown me photos of tributes from rival high school teams. One team had hung a jersey with the number twenty on top of the plexiglass surrounding the ice and left it there for an entire game. Another team had made a patch with the number twenty to sew onto their jerseys; they wore it for the rest of the season. I thanked John for organizing the alumni game. "Rita," he said, "it was never about the hockey." And, with that, I cried. It was, after all, Christmas time, and the table was still sitting in our dining room, ready for another holiday.

-Rita Malenczyk

Rita Malenczyk is a writer, painter, English professor, and occasional printmaker living and working in northeast Connecticut. Her essays, poetry, and visual art have appeared in JMWW, Brevity's Nonfiction Blog, Cathexis Northwest Press, Beyond Words, and elsewhere.