Hibiscus Falling
A Daughter's Meditation on Life and Loss for Suicide Prevention Month
The following piece was originally performed as a spoken word and song at the Infecting the City Public Art Festival in 2021. A soundscape that details the artistic process of writing a song in the months and weeks that led up to, and followed, the death of my mother by suicide. With September marking suicide prevention month and the four year anniversary of my mother’s death, I’m publishing it in the form of an Essay.
Hibiscus Falling
I’ve been gifted with a body that really feels. It is the biggest indicator of my emotional state. It offers me a connection to the unexplainable tethers of life.
A few months before my mother died, I started waking up with a terrible energetic pain coursing through my arms in the middle of the night. A pain I'll term ‘the knowing’. The pain was far more than physical, it felt to be the embodiment of fear, a deep knowing that something bad was coming.
I often chalked it up to the general anxiety of living through a global pandemic. The existential dread that comes from being fully present with the fact that we are living in a world in environmental and social crisis.
When my mother got Covid in South Africa’s first wave, I panicked and cried. Many thought my reaction to be extreme and unwarranted. I tried to convince myself that they were right. That I shouldn’t catastrophize the situation. My mom seemed fine. But the knowing, that same energetic pulse of pain that woke me often in the night, was now coursing through me in my waking hours.
And then she got better. I called and messaged often. She’d recount the dwindling physical symptoms and how glad she was that her taste was coming back. “But how are you doing emotionally?” I’d ask. “Fine, love”. She’d eventually say.
When I told my friends my mom was doing better, the knowing started to become hard to ignore. It transformed into a buzzing sensation - and a strong, undeniable sense that sat on my chest. One that told me I was lying.
I’d been privileged enough to buy a new music keyboard, together with my hard-earned savings and some birthday money from my parents. I was so excited to start making the music in my head with less limitations. To be able to loop, stack and layer.
At the same time, I'd been reintroduced to hibiscus tea. Often, I'd sit outside in my favourite spot. Slowly sipping at it, sometimes with a cigarette, staring at the hibiscus tree towering over the wall into our own garden. I’d watch the flowers fall - sometimes slowly, sometimes abruptly - onto the ground where they would start to decay. I’d ponder how nature, even in her dying, would give back to us in the form of sustenance. In this case, in the form of a tea high in vitamin c.
When it came to writing the first song on my new piece of equipment, I found a sound which reminded me of the feeling of floating. And when I started to sing over it, I just imagined the hibiscus leaves falling in slow motion through the breeze. I thought of how deeply personal, and undeniably systemic, our country - and our world’s- problems are. Yet how, the hibiscus flowers continue to grow, and fall and decay, and start anew.
The knowing also found itself flowing through the song — often bringing me to a state of what I can only describe as preemptive grief. It emanated from my vocal folds and sat in the pauses of the melodies and lyrics. This knowing felt immensely personal. But it also felt connected to a pain reverberating around the world. This great sickness, whether physical or mental (or both) reflecting the sickness and lack of nutrients in our life-giving soils.
A few weeks passed and I found the first (there have since been many) studies talking about the physiological and psychological impacts of Covid-19 on brain health. Strokes, psychosis, and in some cases even suicidality.
The knowing returned as a lump in my throat, a pound in my heart and a slow sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach (Mom)!
A few days before my mom died, it was my nan’s birthday. We had gathered as a family via zoom - and I had been asked to sing for them. My dad wanted to hear my latest piece of music I had created with my new equipment. “The lyrics are a little sad, dad,” I said. “Well what’s it about?” he asked.
“It’s about dying. Accepting that death is part of life both in nature and in our own lives. But that in the process of dying we can learn from the earth and give back in the same way that she does. That even in times of despair and crisis, we can choose to mirror the earth in how we choose to act”.
My mom was unusually quiet.
And so I sang, and I cried, and I didn’t really understand why. I thought it must just be that I miss my family. This time is hard on everyone.
But the knowing knew differently.
Looking back, we can all see from our different vantage point how Covid slowly took away my mom’s last fighting spirit. It changed something in her brain, changed her behaviour and compounded her traumas beyond what she could manage. My mom didn’t die of Covid. But Covid took my mom away.
In the weeks proceeding her death it arose that she died mere days before world suicide prevention day, and weeks before world mental health awareness month. A cruel irony at worst. An opportunity to live my mother's values of honesty and compassion at best.
Some believed we should say it was an accident. But suicide is nothing to be ashamed of, and Covid taught my family that suicide is more complex than we can begin to understand.
Our honesty in what had taken place inspired others to speak of their pain, and to speak of the suicide of their own loved ones without shame. Some even admitted to us that they needed help — and finally got it before it was too late.
Thousands of messages poured in. People from far and wide recounted how my mom had touched their lives in both her life and her death. Incredible experiences they had had, and how she had helped them in this way or that. I knew then that I didn’t even know half of the person my mom was when she was still alive.
In this way, my mother embodied the very essence of what I was trying to sing about. In her living and her death, she helped others as best she could. She gave nourishment and sustenance back to the world in the only ways she knew how. In fact, just hours after I learned of her death, a package of vitamins had arrived for me from her. Her last living way to keep me healthy.
Just as I sang to look to the earth on how to be in times of dying, so too could I look to my own mom.
I used to hate the way my body told stories of my emotional pain, and the state of our world. But now I feel blessed to have a body connected to our material reality. Our earth, and our space on it as human animals. Our bodies are of this earth, and so they can act as our guides if we just deeply listen and lean in to heal the stories of trauma that they tell.
Covid-19 was one symptom of a sick world where the interrelated rot of capitalism, industrialization and white supremacy is a collective legacy. But it is just one legacy. We can be part of another. Like nature, even in times of sickness and dying, we can sit with honesty and presence at the state of the world — and we can still choose to give back. To heal, sustain, regenerate and learn new ways of being.
Thank you for reading the latest essay in my big Little heart. Please check in on your loved ones. There is no shame in depression. Suicide is preventable. The link to the song that inspired this essay and spoken word is below. Take care.