The Day Lucas Died

A guide to what happens the first day when you discover your son has died by suicide.

Like most Thursday mornings, I was in a slight hurry, and I rushed off to work. I got to the classroom and prepared for homeroom as students started entering. I had some music playing over the classroom speakers. I had recently re-discovered U2’s album The Joshua Tree and had been overplaying it like crazy. Suddenly, the soothing tones of “Red Hill Mining Town” were replaced with my jarring ringtone. I mention this only because Bono's take on a mid-80’s mineworker’s strike will forever be associated with what was playing when I learned that my son had died.

I could see that the call, coming right as I was about to start homeroom, was coming from my wife, Mina. She should know I was teaching and not available to talk. What was she thinking? I answered the phone, resisting the urge to tell her off for calling when I was working.

What greeted me sounded like hysterical laughter. This only enraged me further. Why would she call me at a point when I would obviously be busy with students only to laugh into the phone? Then we were cut off. Abandoning my students, I called her back. I couldn’t fathom what was going on. In the 20 seconds or so that it took me to call her and connect to her, my mind was reaching for a rational explanation. Was she in danger? Had she been in an accident? Was she going insane? I knew that this was not normal behavior and that something must be terribly wrong.

Upon her answering the phone I realized that she wasn’t laughing but sobbing, unable to speak. After what seemed like forever, she was able to get the words out, “Lucas is dead!”

I couldn’t even process what she was saying. I attempted to consider how what she had communicated was wrong. I misheard her. Perhaps she meant something else. She must have misjudged the situation. I was in the middle of trying to comprehend the last two minutes when I found the principal, Josh, in the hallway, monitoring students as they rushed to their respective homerooms. “Mina called me. Something happened. I think Lucas is dead.”

His confused reaction was natural, “What do you mean you think he’s dead?”

I couldn’t bring myself to say the actual words. There was such a finality to them. In the seconds after he asked me his question, a part of me wanted to plead with Josh to not make me say the words, to let me have my son for a few minutes longer. Yet, for the sake of clarity and to put a plan into action, I had to say it. “Lucas is dead.”

We ducked into one of the nearest rooms, the school psychologist’s office where I recounted the last several minutes. My principal set things in motion. He would take my classes until a sub could be arranged. The secretary sent a paramedic to my address. The associate principal, Gary, would drive me home. I insisted that I was fine, it was only a five-minute walk. Everyone involved was clear that there was no negotiation on this point: Gary would drive me home. In hindsight, it was so obvious that I needed someone to not only make sure that I didn’t accidentally walk in front of a car on my way home, but that someone had to take charge of a situation that neither Mina nor I were capable of handling.

I still wanted to believe that he was probably only out cold. Once the paramedics got to the house, they would revive him and take him to the hospital for a few days of observation. We went upstairs to Lucas's room. Lucas had tied an extension cord into a noose, fastened it to his loft bed, and had rested, half-seated on one of the stabilizing cross-bars of the loft. Mina had cut the extension cord holding most of Lucas's weight and cut through the noose that had been around his neck. He still had marks from the cord around his neck.

The paramedics arrived shortly after we did. I remember the feeling of hope that Lucas was still all right and that they would check him out and rush him to the hospital and that everything would be back to normal. The paramedic said something in Chinese to Gary, who had taken charge. Gary looked at me and said the thing we all knew already, "I'm sorry, Aaron, he says there's nothing they can do for him."

The next few hours were a blur of waiting for things to happen. I waited for the police to come. We waited for someone to take Lucas away. We had people sit with us. At one point before the police came, I wanted to give Lucas one last hug but was warned by the paramedic that I shouldn't do that. I can only assume because he wanted to protect me from accusations of tampering with evidence.

I called Steve, a good friend of mine in the U.S., less to break the news, but rather for someone to talk through my shock to. I honestly don’t remember much about that conversation. I remember more how I felt. Numb. Steve agreed to take on the burden of telling people the news about Lucas. I asked him to just wait until I had the opportunity to personally phone my parents. I didn’t think that I could stand to phone each person that I knew individually. In hindsight, I now realize the burden that I put on him. I just couldn’t take it on myself. I thought we must have talked for about half an hour before hanging up but after looking at my Skype records, we talked for seven minutes.

There were people milling around my house. I didn’t know why they were there or what, if anything, I should be doing. At some point, our school’s occupational nurse also came over to help. With this being Taiwan, everyone spoke Chinese. She acted as liaison to the paramedics. In addition, she sat on the corner of our small street, waiting for the police while sitting next to me and comforting me.

After they took Lucas’s body away, someone drove Mina and me to the morgue where we had to sit and wait. I didn’t even know what we were waiting for. The progression of the day was completely out of my control. Someone could have told me to get on a boat and taken me to the middle of the ocean and I wouldn’t have even questioned it. At some point I got an email notification saying that Lucas had been withdrawn from classes at Taipei American School. Well at least the school didn’t waste any time opening his spot so they could get another student from the waiting list enrolled. I remember being vaguely annoyed at the insensitivity of it. But I was too numb to even be angry.

It turned out that we were waiting to identify the body as our son. I wanted to ask “Is it the body you took out of our son’s bedroom?” What the fuck? It felt like the system was designed to rub our faces in the fact that our son had just killed himself. Of course, that doesn’t even compare to being questioned by the police to check that we hadn’t murdered him. I suddenly became aware that it was very important that we answer these questions correctly.

I got a hint of the possibility that the police would treat us as suspects back at our house when the paramedic told me not to give Lucas’s body one last hug. I wasn’t seriously worried that we would be charged with a crime, but I was dreading the scrutiny that we were about to face. The police officer asked a series of questions through a translator which I can only assume were designed with the intent on forcing my wife and me to verbalize the worst moments of our lives in order to drive home what truly terrible people we were.

Then came the next ordeal, we needed to tell our daughter that her brother died by suicide. At that point in the day, she was sitting in class at her high school, blissfully unaware that her older brother and rival for her parents’ attention was lying in a box at the morgue.

Mina and I had to decide on the messaging we wanted to present to the parents, teachers, and students in our community. Mina and I were brought to a well-lit office with a conference table at school. The high school principal and the middle school principal were there. We were presented with two possible email messages that were to be sent out to all community members. I don’t remember exactly what they contained, but they can be summed up as follows. Message one:

"There has been the tragic death of a student by suicide earlier today. We as a community are doing what we can to support the family during this trying time. Please be respectful of the family’s need for privacy."

And message two:

"There has been an accident which has resulted in the death of a student. You may hear rumors about how he died. Rumors and speculation are not helpful. We ask you to respect the privacy of the family and not to repeat these rumors."

I thought that it was a trick question. The answer seemed so obvious to me. I realized that some people have a huge stigma with suicide and may feel more comfortable in the initial stages of dealing with grief to approach the spreading of the news more cautiously. Yet, I also have witnessed how a lack of honesty can distort the truth into something worse. Mina and I quickly and unanimously decided to go with message one.

Now that the messaging was set, it was time to go into another office with another conference table and wait for someone to pull our daughter Tia out of class so we could tell her that Lucas was dead.

When Tia was pulled from class, she had assumed that she was in trouble. She even joked with her friends, “Shirl wants to talk to me…must be in trouble,” casually referring to her grade’s academic counselor. Tia was led down to the central administration part of our school where Mina and I gravely sat along with the upper school principal and a number of other people she vaguely knew. This only verified her belief that she was in deep trouble.

I was glad to have my friend Tim there. He was Lucas’s academic counselor and the person to break the news of Lucas’s death to her. Tim has since told me his feelings on the job he had to do, “Tia will always remember me as the person who told her that her brother died.”

I don’t remember the actual words that Tim used, but Tia’s reaction was what a person would expect under the circumstances: she began crying. “But when I opened his door this morning, he was sitting on his loft listening to music…” While Mina was the first person to find Lucas’s body and realize that he was dead, Tia was the first to see his dead body. This was a point that caused some confusion at first. For a while, I believed that he had been alive at some point after I left for work. For a few agonizing weeks, I believed that I could have saved him and that this was a deliberate cry for help to get our attention, one that we failed to see and resulted in his death when we could have prevented it.

After a certain amount of crying and hugs, we left the office and went home. Mineko and I went back to the office of the funeral home to plan Lucas’s funeral while Tia went home. We needed to make other decisions that I would barely have been able to make under the best circumstances. So much of that day is a blur, that at this point, I don’t even remember how we got there or who took us. Did someone drive us? Did we take a taxi? I couldn’t tell you.

We were led into a tastefully decorated room and seated at a table and offered tea by a nicely dressed woman. Time to plan the funeral! We needed to be acutely aware of how many people would show so we could order the room size. My wife wanted the small room that would seat 30. I argued that we should at least get the medium room that seated 60 so we could have some attempt at social distancing. We balked at the thought of getting the big room that seated over 100. I mentally made a list of who might be there to support us and came up with a list of under 60. The thought of a mostly empty hall was unbearable. Within the next couple of days, my principal Josh had to say, “Get the big room, there are a lot of people who would like to attend.”

At some point while we were at the funeral home making arrangements, the associate principal contacted me and asked me about something I had been vaguely aware that I should care about. “Is someone with Tia right now?” I admitted that she was at home alone so Gary messaged a friend of ours, Vani, to go to our house to sit with Tia to make sure that she didn’t do anything drastic. While Tia was obviously shocked by Lucas’s death, I didn’t believe that she was so broken up that she would take her own life. Then again, I hadn’t imagined that Lucas would have ended his life either so it goes to show that you don’t always know what people will do.

The nicely dressed woman and husband drove Mina and me home in their fully-loaded BMW SUV. Vani was at our house waiting for us when we got home. We sat with Vani in between us, her holding each of our hands with our eyes closed for what was probably a half an hour. That act of tenderness meant so much to me. We were so exhausted from crying all day that it felt good to be done with everything on the list and to be able to just sit on the sofa with nothing that we had to do.

After Vani eventually left, I arranged to meet some other friends in the park near my house to just sit with. It was good to have friends to lend an ear and I was grateful for the support.

It was getting late in Taipei, but it was morning in Wisconsin where family and friends were. I had a few phone calls that I had to make. I called both my mother and father to tell them. Apparently, when my mother told my step-father that Lucas had died, he began crying, something that I still have a hard time imagining coming from this emotionally steady person. I tried calling my siblings, but was only able to get ahold of my sister. I can still hear the gasp of shock that she gave when I told her. She agreed to pass on the news. I was ready to go to bed, but there was one more phone call that I felt I needed to make.

I called my friend Mark, who was Lucas’s godfather and someone I had known since I was six. This was probably the hardest of the calls for a couple of reasons, but mainly because he refused to believe me.

Recognizing my phone number, he answered with a cheery, “Good morning, Taipei!” Not wanting to prolong the inevitable, I responded with, “I have some terrible news. Lucas died by suicide earlier today.”

While pretending that my son had committed suicide was way outside the bounds of taste than I would ever have done, Mark and I liked to prank each other. In talking with him in the years since, he told me that initially he thought that my response was in juxtaposition to his cheery greeting. When I would not relent in my insistence that Lucas had died, his attitude switched to incredulous, then eventually to almost pleading. “You have to be joking. There’s no way that’s true, right?”

Eventually, I had mostly convinced him that I was telling the truth to which he exclaimed, “I can’t believe that you can even speak right now!” He later admitted that he didn’t fully accept what I had said was real until Steve called him and broke the news. Steve later told me that at the time of our phone call, there was a part of him that in the back of his mind was thinking, “This is a really sick joke, Aaron.” Let’s face it, when given the possibilities that your friend’s son died or that your friend is an asshole making a terribly inappropriate joke, who wouldn’t choose the latter?After the endless meetings, being dragged all over Taipei, all the crying and the phone calls, I went to bed exhausted. Things could only get better from there, right?

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