A Lexicon for Mothers of the Suicidal (Quantum Version)

Galactic Bulge, n.The brightest spot in the galaxy where stars swarm around a supermassive black hole.See also a young man pacing around the dining room table for hours—literally. He must be dizzy in this orbit, this gravitational pull. He calls the mother as he paces, enumerating the ways he stalls his suicide—attention on a dating app, new followers on social media, new boyfriend, new haircut, new pill, anything to stall being sucked into that black hole. He's burning through fuel, losing energy. Is this fusion or fission? See fusion, n.: the joining of nuclei with the release of energy. All stars are nuclear fusion.Antonym: nuclear fission, in which atoms split apart, as in the atom bomb.As in the mother who explodes when a friend telling a story shouts out “Boom.” Because the mother's body trembles at loud noises. Because the mother knows she is as far from understanding how to save her son as she is from understanding how supernovas can exist for millions of years, but in less than a quarter of a second their core can collapse.Time Dilation, n.The more quickly an object moves through space, the slower time passes.Synonym: suicide threats.Spec. The mother's mind in response to each threat.The son speed talks about killing himself if he doesn't qualify for a loan and if she doesn't send him $4,000 for cosmetic surgery to pin his ear because he cannot look in the mirror without screaming. He's cut himself punching his image in the mirror. He will hang on for five days until he consults with the surgeon and applies for a loan. Then, if denied the loan . . . Myopic spec.: The mother's next 7,200 minutes dilate into years,into her mind so warped she clicks from meeting to meetingaddressing questions such as how AI will transform academia.Her mouth opens and the words come out and people understand, and they don't knowshe has several windows open with chats to Mobile Crisis Response teams (MCR).She composes statements about plagiarism, then the person at the Suicide Hotline assures her theircrisis teams would never call the police. Unless someone was under threat.She sends an email welcoming a new team member, asking if she can do anything to assistwith their transition, smiley face. She explains in the chat that he is nineteen and 6’4” buthe's never hurt anyone. Except himself. But the police . . . what if he was screaming orhysterical and they thought he was dangerous? No, she cannot call the police, thoughhe threatens to kill himself more frequently. She toggles over to another meeting; someonescreen-shares a demographic analysis of Gen Z: They have grown up with a sense of catastrophe due to climate crisis.The son texts that he can't stop thinking about all that's wrongwith his face. The mother toggles over to another screen and types his diagnoses—obsessive-compulsive disorder, ADHD, major depressive disorder—his history of hospitalizations, his refusal to return to therapy. They grew up with active shooter drills.The son sends one line texts listing all that's wrong: bulging ear, weaker jaw lineleft side . . . Pedro, a peer engagement specialist in crisis chat,tells the mother he will be the one to knock on her son's door. On average, they spend up to nine hours a day on screens.. . . bump in his nose, lower lip fuller than upper, brows too thick . . . Pedro tells her the son, living 350 miles from the mother, justneeds to consent that they can come to his apartment. They expect to have multiple options for gender on a form.The son texts the mother that he hates all men.A colleague asks for volunteers to work on an official statement.The mother lowers her virtual hand. They are the loneliest generation.The mother ignores a text from a friendwho invites her to dinner because the mother is sick of saying, fine,everything is just fine. The son texts that everyone at work is so mean to him. They are more stressed at work and take more sick days than other generations.The mother smiles at someone in the academic meetingas she copies and pastes the phone numbers for MCRinto a file titled suicide-prevent. The son texts that no crisis team can come. They struggle with ambiguity. They confuse information with knowledge. They have an average attention span of eight seconds.The mother has hunchedover a computer for years. They are poised to be the most educated generation.The son's message indicators stop. Her shouldersand neck are landmines of trigger pointsthe size of marbles. The mother is poised— Fewer of them drive, fewer of them date than in any previous generation. They are delaying marriage, children, the future . . . at the edge of Sagittarius A, the black hole at the center of the galactic bulge,where one minute contains seven hundred earth years.Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, n.We can know an object's speed but not location OR can know location but not speed.Example Problem: By the time the mother determines how to respond, instead of threatening to slit his wrist, he plans a move to Boston, then begs her for a trip to Cancun, then he reveals that he's been stockpiling meds and his only fear is brain damage from a nonfatal overdose. The only constant is change, though no matter how much he changes his hair color, his style, his major, his job . . . the suicidal thoughts return, of that the mother can be certain.The experts are certain that when the son threatens suicide, she is not to send him the money he demands; when the son threatens suicide, she is not to test him, not to ever suggest he wouldn't do it. The latter wouldn't occur to the mother. She has heard how his brain races like a ticker tape with strings of what ifs—what if he can't find a job, what if he can't buy food, what if he studies nursing instead of art, what if he becomes an accountant instead of a designer, what if the psychic was right about him being chased by demons, what if the demons left his door unlocked, what if they put an invisible anvil on his chest while he slept, what if the only way to silence his brain is to lock himself in the bathroom with a bottle of vodka and a razor blade. To stop the racing mind, he shops at thrift stores located in trendy neighborhoods until the uncertainty about his beauty wells up so intensely, he obsesses about plastic surgery.And is his threat a manipulative attempt to procure money? Or sincere? Why is it one or the other? If manipulation and sincerity are points on a graph, isn't it possible that he could travel from one to the other?Figurative: A woman checking the mother out at the grocery store chatters about her own sons, saying, “I learned a long time ago to be the steady boulder in the stream. The waters rush around me, but I stay rooted in the mud. And they know where to find me.” The mother returns home and meditates on being the boulder rooted in the mud, rapid currents loosening the silt around her into sludge.Redshiftn. The action of sound and light waves moving further away and therefore stretching out, so the pitch of the sound is lower and the color of the light is redder.v. transitive. Example: Depression redshifted the sonwho moved hundreds of miles away from the mother,where he relies on radio waves to send her signals—his cell ring, like a siren blaring, hurts her ears. Just like his infant cries did—those piercing wailsthat once jolted the mother out of sleep. She didn't consciouslythink of that when she chose his ringtone. Recently,his calls drop, and his voice on the other endhas become quieter, even when he yells. It's as if the ocean carried his voice to her on wavesthat tug him further away.Compound word. Words are like atoms joining—they do not change, but the bonds between them do. Bonds break and reform. Red, for example, is a color associated with emergencies. Shift means to change, to transfer, to remove. Compounded to mean emergencies require one to change their actions or transfer their calm or remove a threat. Think fast.Example from Subspace: When the son calls at one a.m. crying about how painful it is to continue living when 95% of the time he feels like he's stuck to a glue trap, no more than a mouse left to squeal and squirm and gnaw his own flesh, the mother halts as if at a stop sign. She turns on the reading lamp and prays for the right words. He speaks rapidly. He asks for money, he asks for a vacation, he says “a bottle of Abilify and a bottle of Klonopin washed down with a pint of vodka will do the trick.” When he lived with her, she locked up all meds and doled them out. She kept the key on a chain behind her shirt where it scratched at her chest. She fumbles over her words saying “Why” several times before completing the sentence: “don't you wake up your roommate and give them all your meds?”“No.”No matter how she rephrases the question, he says no.“I'm sending an Uber to take you to the emergency room.”He screams so the words create a throbbing pain in the mother's ear. “No fucking hospitals. If you say the word hospital again, I'll kill myself tonight.” While he's screaming about how he's tried hospitals, therapists, medications and nothing has helped, she moves from the bed to the living room where she searches online for mental health urgent care, finds one walking distance from his home, makes an appointment for seven hours later. She says, “I can't make you show up. They'll only hold the appointment if you confirm when they text. Maybe consider going for me.”The line is dead static for about thirty seconds. The mother breathes deeply. The son says, “Fine. I'll go.”A stop sign, a pause. But she knows for seven hours his brain will race with intrusive thoughts of suicide, as it has for the last four and a half years; why to, why not to, how to, how not to, when to, when not to, where to, where not to.This is why, when he doesn't answer his cell and her cell reveals that he's home, she worries that he's lying in bed slipping into an overdose-induced-coma. Or when he's not at home, she worries about where he is and who he is around. Is he courting dangerous men for a passive suicide, to be redshifted into a darkness beyond her?Perturbation Theory, n.Physics:“An elaborate name for making an approximation to try to give a rough answer to a question, and then systematically improving this approximation by paying closer attention to fine details initially ignored.”1Psychology:When a system revolves around crisis care and when those with mental illness are only considered in crisis when they become a danger to themselves (an increasingly common end) or others (an occasional end), then mental health providers only have time to approximate an answer to the question: what is wrong? The provider then refers the patient to more specialized providers, but because there is a dearth of therapists and psychiatrists, the patient will join a waiting list. If insured. Those with abundant wealth can sometimes skip the line. If the patient doesn't degenerate into crisis during the wait, the specialist can pay closer attention to “the fine details initially ignored.”Meanings & Use: The mother suggests he ask the triage mental health doc about bipolar disorder. While close to 4% of the population at large has bipolar disorder, almost 20% of those with OCD have it.2 The physician says it must be diagnosed by a psychiatrist (he already asked his psychiatrist who spends twenty minutes with him on a typical visit. She said she cannot accurately make such a diagnosis in their time together; she did not offer, and he did not ask, for that time). The triage doc puts him back on medicine. Meanwhile the mother calls more doctors; the bipolar clinic has a waiting list so long, they won't accept any more names; the OCD clinic doesn't accept his insurance; another practice not accepting his insurance suggests he see a student clinician for free, to which the mother responds by laughing. “He'll destroy her,” the mother says. The mother has been saving money to bypass insurance; she hopes that if she can find the Isaac Newton, the Marie Curie, the Albert Einstein, or the Stephen Hawking of psychiatry, the son may stop thinking about suicide every day of his life.Deep Space, n.A region of space that is outside earth's atmosphere or beyond the solar system.Synonyms: infinity, void, ether, final frontier, totality.State of:Once the mother lost the son. Entranced by a Breughel painting in a small room in the Musee de Beaux Arts, she instinctively reached her hand for his. He was nowhere near. She whipped her head around, she rushed to the main foyer. So many doorways—how would she know where to begin? She ran to the guard and explained she'd lost her five-year-old. The man spoke French into a walkie-talkie and in seconds they locked the museum down. Uniformed men and women started searching with the mother. They found him skipping through a long room of Rubens's paintings. The mother hugged him to her, the mother longed for the days he lived within her body.Etymology: Birthing a child means releasing the beloved into a space and time beyond her own. Laws are supposed to be like gravity grounding us. But now the son is over eighteen, the mother can't even speak to his insurance company because he is not declared medically incompetent, despite his difficulty sending pics of his insurance card to an office. All the mother's research and phone calls slip into the void where stop nagging me collides with I can't call; you have to do it for me.Frequency: Always present. Like the world waiting outside a theater. When the curtain closes, the audience realizes there is no north, south, east or west in deep space. No up or down. The body is in constant free fall, tumbling in the dark with no surface to touch. The mother would like to tether the son to a doctor or a therapist or a magic pill or magic mushrooms. Each day he floats along and the mother worries about debris left by meds and street drugs that have ruptured memories; what's lost is like screws, cables and cameras dislodged from rockets and satellites.White Hole, n.Hypothetical. Ejects matter and energy, behaves in a manner opposite to that of a black hole.Theoretically connected to a black hole by a worm hole, a tunnel—also hypothetical—in between them.If something enters the white hole, it would immediately spit the object back out. If the object started in the throat of the worm hole, it would cause a choking, a smothering, a tearing apart of the worm hole from the inside. Worm hole and intrusive matter destroyed.Futuristic: If only we could enter the white hole, then we could compress distance and thus travel through time.The mother would risk it; she'd don the space suit, travel at warp speed to its mouth and try to be the force that would pin the mouth of the white hole open, keep it from clamping shut, as she traveled to her naiveté to smack foresight into her younger brain. Then her younger self would cut out the juices and high-sugar snacks, she'd find a sport he'd play without fear. After the pediatrician tells her the four-year-old son's anxieties and rituals are normal, she'd seek a second opinion or a third or fourth if need be. She'd start him in OCD therapy at four instead of eleven, she'd hear his pleas for praise and pride, she'd divorce his father sooner, so soon he wouldn't remember the man who called him lazy, called him evil, called him less and less as the years passed.Factsheet: The second law of thermodynamics does not allow for white holes. The second law says the entropy of the universe will increase over time. A white hole spitting out matter as it collapses entropy within its other what is does not has that cannot be does not atoms in a move closer together; as in the mother and son one another with constant calls and with the mother checking on and and the son in the of the because he's time. He has it for so long, he knows the and to slit his in the he her he only the are now so the mother feels like they are not but in a moving object's is than its See the mother when she the to the son. The of the and the occasional or than the But all an The are the mother who she who mother's body is so she Her her to on the but she does She like a she her around her to and the and the back she can't even one over the other without pain in the she stretching too far is now of The mother to a to to to where people and where people She to through and and a by and therefore the She is with and therefore the Her body hurts so she behind with are never than fine. never than to how much she to just outside the of a black black energy, if they have a of light at the then they are something more than the force of If a of space is a of into and then this must exist and outside a black If such a it The the the is is what the mother when she at the son, to her about the the within his as he says, just no way I could do this for a long I already I'll have to kill myself The son tells the mother that when his intrusive suicidal thoughts he his and on an image of her at his He doesn't to destroy her He to know that when a is so is its its are what they know about this at black but that doesn't mean they can change anything about could not the that the could they free the it and The mother is the searching for the for a way a and its could