Finn barked early at the front hall window. Someone passing by? It woke me. I thought it was a man’s voice calling out, “Where are you?”

Danny checked all three of these factors. The first two he named outright in his suicide notes (there were two, recall) and the third he acquired by making a first suicide attempt (which is why, I now understand, that the three weeks following a planned and serious suicide attempt are so high risk). Danny killed himself two weeks and five days after the first attempt.

There’s more to say about all of this but I don’t have the stomach for it right now. Thank you to those readers who took the time to look up the theory yesterday.

Ken and I see an energetic healer this morning. She is absolutely wonderful. We’ve been working on forgiveness.

As for the issue of blame, I have come to a new resting place. Maybe, just maybe, it would be relieving and true to accept that I could have saved my younger son. I’m sitting with this.

The protestations of others, the standard notions of agency, the suicide magnet theory, the statements about him being a man not a boy, the ideas of treatment-resistant mental illness, none serve either alone or collectively to eradicate my deep sense that I failed Danny.

This could change. But I need to consider that it might not.