LAURA TRUJILLO’s Stepping Back from the Ledge begins with the author visiting the spot on the rim of Arizona’s Grand Canyon where her mother took her own life, four years prior to that day. “I wanted to know every fact, every detail, to see everything she saw, because I didn’t have the one thing I […]
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LAURA TRUJILLO’s Stepping Back from the Ledge begins with the author visiting the spot on the rim of Arizona’s Grand Canyon where her mother took her own life, four years prior to that day. “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,” she writes.
But the whys of suicide are usually elusive. There is rarely a single cause. The etiology is confusing and the reasons multifactorial. “I’d been told that suicide is as common and unknowable as the wind that shaped this rock,” writes Trujillo. “It’s unspeakable, bewildering, confounding, devastating, and 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?”
Stepping Back from the Ledge does not unfold in the typical didactic chronological sense. Trujillo interviews former neighbors, friends, and family to solicit memories and theories, even while knowing “the only person who can explain is gone.” She describes the bond she shared with her mother who lived a mere 3.3 miles away in Phoenix and often stopped by: “[W]e 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.” Even after moving her family to Ohio for work, Laura and her mom called each other often.
But she felt an intense depression. “I didn’t know what was making me so sad, what was making me feel so lost and so not like myself. I didn’t know how to fix it on my own. I felt broken, but I didn’t understand why.” In coming to terms with her history of childhood sexual abuse by her stepfather, and at her therapist’s suggestion, Trujillo wrote a letter to her mother asking about her reluctance to acknowledge her daughter’s pain. She brought up her eating disorder and incidents of self-harm in high school. Days later, her mother traveled by bus to the Grand Canyon and took her own life. Trujillo struggles with guilt, wondering what if she had picked up the phone that morning, what if she had not sent the letter, what if she had not moved thousands of miles away?
The author wrestles with her own thoughts of suicide as she learns more about her mother’s lifelong struggle with mental health:
Her suicide wasn’t a secret, but it was a wound, and talking about it allowed people dangerously close to the darkest parts of myself, the parts where we felt like the same person. Me, my mom, myself. I didn’t want to tell people that I had decided I didn’t belong here anymore either.
When her husband suddenly faces a medical crisis, and one of her young children intercedes with a note that interrupts her plan, Trujillo writes that it was “a reminder that I mattered, that I was needed. […] I carried the note in my wallet. I returned to therapy, deciding I didn’t want to die, but I hadn’t quite decided I wanted to live, either. […] [I]f I was going to stay here on earth and live, I needed to do something more.”
Trujillo compares the reporting she has previously done on suicide with her personal perspective on seeing coverage of her mother’s death; she struggles with the notion that it is “not their story to tell.” She interviews park rangers and reads police and autopsy reports, poring over details of her mother’s death and looking for any clue to help find that missing piece of the puzzle. Some aspects are comforting; others lead to more questions. “[S]uicide is frustrating in that way: Only one person ‘gets’ an ending; the rest of us are left with a story abandoned mid-sentence.”
Though I’ve spent years working in the field of suicidology and suicide prevention, I was reluctant to read this book — I had read painful accounts of loss so many times before. But Trujillo presents a powerful multidimensional perspective on a difficult subject, and she does so with strength, grace, and courage. As she remarks about the writing process, “[Y]ou don’t understand the gift of telling your story until you do. The pain could have a purpose.” We are fortunate that Trujillo shares her story: each day in the United States, roughly 125 families join her in their own excruciating search for why.
Initially, the nonsequential plot feels frustratingly circular and confusing. But Trujillo deliberately designed it this way to mirror the rolling wake of grief and loss after a loved one takes their own life. Grief is always nonlinear, but a suicide brings added complexity as families seek answers.
In 2020, 45,979 individuals in the United States died by suicide. The interpersonal theory of suicide postulates that thwarted belonginess, a sense of loneliness, or absence of meaningful connections converges with perceived burdensomeness to generate an individual’s desire for suicide. Access to means and the capacity for suicide transforms intent into attempt. As Trujillo outlines in her own story, each of these factors is highly complex and unique to an individual, yet there are simple ways we can engage. Those simple conversations and messages might be what an individual carries in their own wallet as they decide to step back from the ledge.
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