Ice Cream is Not an Appropriate Snack at a Suicide-Survivors Support Group Meeting
By: Mary Conroy Almada
Tags: Personal Essay, Memoir, Short Story, Healing, Grief

I don’t know what shoes to wear. White Stans Smiths to state I’m trendy yet casual, practical — but possibly an Influencer. Sleek leather boots that support my Manhattan career woman identity while gracefully keeping secret my imposter syndrome. Grey Uggs, to announce that I don’t care — and can afford to let that be known.

I exhale in frustration, the walls of the tiny walk-in closet that I share with my husband narrowing even more. Lately, every minute decision seems paralyzing, as if the right choice could raise me to an Oprah-level of calm confidence and life mastery and a wrong one could spiral me into someone completely irreparable. This particular decision is especially unworthy of the energy I’m pouring into it. In a meeting where the only attendance requirement is losing a loved one to suicide, sartorial selections do not matter.

The shoes are only for me. I need them to help me reclaim the pieces of my old self, to help me understand who I am now, and to fuse these identities together into someone I can somewhat understand. And once I can understand her, I can love her and nourish her in all the ways she needs, and we can begin the journey forward. But I really need to pick the right pair of shoes. Definitely not Uggs.

This particular suicide-loss support group asks people to wait at least six months after a loss (their preferred word) to attend a meeting, but I called last week and they made an exception. I’m good at sounding like I have my shit together. I returned to work after one week of bereavement leave, even though my company’s leadership offered to give me more time. I hopped back into the yoga teacher training program that I’m doing on the weekends. I go to the gym and cook dinner and wash my hair and put on makeup. I get lots of messages on Facebook and Instagram and via text about how strong I am, how impressed people are.

No one sees my blazing brain, the thoughts and images that pop up like fireworks, exploding behind my eyes then sending shock waves through my bones, down into my stomach, which lurches in protest. No one else rides on the slide that takes me down down down in those awful hours between bedtime and actual sleep, mourning not only the person but everything in my 28 years of life that wasn’t what it could have been or should have been, shining a magnifying glass on every single point of shame so they each appear enormous. My mind does not know how to compartmentalize pain.

I grab the Stan Smiths and run out of the closet before I can change my mind. My white sneakers and I wait on the subway platform, Harlem buzzing below me. McDonald’s burgers mix with the cold, damp winter air. I inhale deeply, keeping the air in my lungs until they scream. This is something I do multiple times per day to shift the focus away from my brain and the thoughts that drummed on it like water from a leaky faucet. Breathing feels so good (and that might be the most obvious statement ever made).

The train’s seat is slick plastic, unbothered by the thousands of people who have occupied it before me. I slide in and stare at the other passengers as if my eyes can bore past their time-worn skin, synthetic fabrics, and thick glasses. Who are they? What’s going on inside? Before my sister died, I’d occasionally wonder about strangers’ histories. But it’s hard to achieve a certain level of empathy when you haven’t actually experienced hard-core loss. Now, it’s all I want to know. I want to be able to look at a stranger and know that they’re like me. I want to know if they’ve been through pain so intense they thought they might die, and then felt simultaneous disdain and reverence for their bodies when they didn’t. We’re this community of involuntary warriors who don’t know the other members exist.

I get off the train and walk a few blocks east. I nearly miss the stone church’s side-door entrance, but at the last minute notice the white sheet of paper taped to the door. As I come down the staircase into a low-ceilinged basement, a man at the bottom looks up at me with watery eyes sitting in puffy sockets, gives a nod of his head in greeting, and waits for me to descend. He looks strikingly like Steve Buscemi.

I freeze. His eyes, like Steve’s, are the level of puppy-dog-sad that actually makes this all seem melodramatic. I hate drama — melo, or any kind. I consider leaving. I could turn around, run back up the stairs, and go get dinner in Hell’s Kitchen. I could have a glass of Cabernet, a bowl of ramen, and listen to a murder podcast. I don’t HAVE to participate. No one is making me do this. The group concept isn’t really me anyways — I’m a dweller, not a sharer.

But now more people are looking at me. It would be awkward and maybe even offensive if I left at this point. My people-pleasing empath self walks the rest of the way down the stairs into the basement. And suddenly everything feels vividly, excruciatingly real. By entering this room, I’ve officially announced: I am a suicide-loss survivor.

I hang up my coat and fill out the first-time attendee form. Name, age, email address, and a signature acknowledging I’m here because I’ve lost someone to suicide (as if I’d come here for entertainment? Or maybe this is to stop people from coming, observing, and then writing about their experience…). There are paper cups on a table, but no coffee or water to be seen. There’s a small plate of mini Oreos and another plate of cough drops, along with blank name tags and sharpies. The absurd second-thought snacks make everything sadder, but also kind of hilarious. Kudos to the set director on the TV show of my life. I scrawl my first name in black sharpie and stick the tag to my chest.

We all sit in a big circle of folding chairs. There are twenty of us, including two facilitators, and boxes of Kleenex have been placed on the floor between every three chairs. “Get ready to cry people!” the evenly-placed boxes shout.

As all of us do in group settings, I do a quick scan of the room to find people I think are like me. There’s a girl around my age — late 20s — in skinny jeans and a Zara sweater. I feel a little better. A few seats down an older woman with pearl earrings holds a quilted Chanel purse in her lap, her arms around it like it’s a teddy bear. This also reassures me, and then makes me ashamed that I’m so easily comforted by status symbols. Before I can start the descent into this particular shame spiral, the Steve Buscemi look-alike leans forward, interlaces his hands, and says “Welcome, everyone. Let’s get started. To begin, we will go around the circle, say our names, the name of the person we lost, and when we lost them.”

Death is a subject that people are never quite sure how to approach. It’s always watered down, as if there’s an unspoken rule that since it is such a tremendous, terrifying, overwhelming concept, we have to reduce the spices in order to make it remotely palatable. Passed, lost, crossed-over — even words like “loved one” create another degree of detachment.

And we definitely don’t like talking about how someone died. If it’s newsworthy and emotionally detached, the cause of death is generally acceptable to discuss — car crashes and freak accidents. Cancer rolls off the tongue and off fingers onto Facebook posts fairly easily as well. People proudly participate in marches. Murder is more complicated; there will definitely be follow-up questions but also maybe articles that share the details. But things like suicide and drug overdoses — good luck confirming those causes. “Passed away” comes in heavily in these obituaries.

A few years ago, a guy from my high school died. He was my age and in apparently good health. I had to know what happened, because how else can we begin to understand and process, but memorial posts and his obituary were vague and my Google searches yielded nothing. I finally learned from a mutual friend it was a drug overdose. Years later, that detail still is not publicly available. Would that knowledge be helpful, or hurtful? Would sharing the type of drug, the quantity he took, if he suffered from addiction or just liked to party, and what actually caused his body to stop functioning prevent other deaths — or would that raw exposure just hurt his family and friends even more? How do we decide, and how do we balance these things?

As Steve talks through the guidelines of the support group, I continue to scrutinize the rest of the participants. The lady across from me with short spiky hair and combat boots seems worn down, like she’s been fighting with life for a long time. There’s an older man with gentle eyes and a walker, which just seems cruel, and a mellow-looking guy with glasses and puffy hair.

A twitchy, wiry man catches my eye and I’m shocked I didn’t notice him right off the bat. He’s wearing stained clothes and can’t weigh more than 120 pounds. In his sun-aged left hand is a pint of strawberry Haagen-Daz ice cream. His right hand grips a silver spoon. As I look at him, he brings a gooey, pink spoonful to his mouth and swallows it with a single chomp.

“Just a reminder — please say both the name of the person you lost and the date you lost them,” says Steve the facilitator. I tune back in time to hear that word again: lost. As if they’ve been misplaced, or they don’t pop up in our brains in life’s banal moments, like when we’re waiting in the checkout line at Trader Joe’s or walking our dog down Riverside Drive.

I miss the second person’s answer because I’m focused on Haagen-Daz again. Did he bring the pint all the way from home? Maybe he bought it on impulse at a bodega — but then where did the silver spoon come from? Of all the to-go snacks one could choose from to eat in a church basement at 5pm on a freezing day while talking about death, strawberry ice cream seems like it should be pretty far down on the list.

I realize the lady next to me is speaking, and then it’s my turn. “My name is Mary. I lost my sister Laura a month ago.” And I instantly go from detached to crying. I didn’t expect that. My tears are quick and sloppy, as though something about saying those words aloud broke a barrier. Steve gives a sad nod, as do several other people, and then all eyes shift to Glasses next to me. Zara’s gaze lingers on me a few extra moments.

Introductions are done. Now, it’s open circle time — Steve poses a broad question, something along the lines of “how ARE you doing?” and anyone can answer. There are rules though — you can’t give unsolicited advice, or any advice really. And while there’s not an official time limit, Steve and his fellow facilitators gently warn that if someone starts to ramble on, they will intervene.

Though all the stories are different, the teller’s tone either revolves around shaky disbelief or worn acceptance — sometimes both. A few people seem to have their minds more securely wrapped around what happened, and they can touch peace with the tip of their finger.

“I had lunch with her the day before. She seemed fine, distant, but fine. We ate salads and drank tea. We made plans to host our annual Christmas party. Naturally, I could not believe what happened the next day, we were planning a party …”

“I was in the car, and a song came on that my daughter loved. She would always play it when we rode in the car together, and I used to get so sick of it. I would always gripe about it. When it came on today, I started to cry. But then I started to laugh, because I think that was her idea of a little joke.”

“He was depressed. We all knew it. We tried to get him help, but he kept telling us he was fine, he had it under control. And we felt like we had to believe him, because we trusted him, and he was so convincing. I got the call when I was on vacation. I shouldn’t have gone on vacation, I keep thinking, what if I hadn’t gone.”

“He was chronically ill. He always talked about ending the pain. I was waiting for it, but I still thought there was something I could do to prevent it. Convince him otherwise or something. I’m sad, but I’m not surprised. I don’t know what else any of us could have done.”

A few people seem close to acceptance, like they can touch peace with the tip of their finger. The facilitators are skillful, intervening when participants start to dole out advice or when someone gets lost in the weeds of their story, trying to untangle the threads that led to where they are now. We should all know this by now — don’t ever follow the thread, because all that does is tangle you up as well.

Häagen-Dazs sits slouched in his folding chair, arms crossed over his chest, protecting his thin body. He unwinds himself, digs his spoon into what’s now pink soup, and slurps it with satisfaction. Then he pulls his attention from the ice cream and looks up at the group. “We were married thirty years,” he says. “Thirty years. Her bouts of sadness came and went. It was just part of who she was. I thought she had a handle on it. I thought it was just a part of both our lives. She took medicine and saw a therapist. I never expected this. Never.”

I know the talk-track. I will defend the talk-track and if you say something to me that counters it, I will fight you on it tooth and nail (more realistically, silently stew then write a passionate Instagram post that will rack up the likes). Suicide is not a selfish act. Many people who attempt or complete suicide have significantly altered perceptions at the time and think the world would be better without them there. One article compares it to someone with anorexia looking in the mirror and seeing a warped reflection. Some survivors of suicide attempts report feeling complete detachment at the time, or the conviction that they’re actually sparing their loved ones pain. Suicide isn’t selfish.

But as Häagen-Dazs’s eyes fill with tears and he pushes his small body deeper into the folding chair, that conviction starts to slip through my fingers like dry sand. She left him behind, alone, wilting in a church basement. He’s old and awkward and probably won’t find, or want to find, anyone else. If she could see him right now, in this very moment, would she have done what she did? If my sister could see me screaming into my pillow, my dad weeping over baby pictures, my mom’s gray face and hunched shoulder, the family dog sniffing one of her shirts and getting excited, would she have done what she did? And if the answer is yes — would I still believe it wasn’t selfish? I don’t know.

After the meeting, as I put on my coat to leave, Chanel puts her hand on my arm. “I can’t imagine what you’re going through,” she says. I look at her in confusion.

“Oh, I mean, your loss is worse than mine!” She clarifies. “Your sister…and only twenty-five!” She shakes her head. My wiser, more articulate self that always has a response two hours too late would have told her that there aren’t rankings for the pain assigned to each experience. There is no pain “worse” than someone else’s, just different. The differences should be acknowledged and respected, not measured. But that self isn’t available right now, so I closed-mouth smile and thank her.

“She’s your angel in heaven,” she pulls me back to her. In my mind I see Laura laugh and roll her eyes. “You wish,” she says. It’s the first time I’ve imagined her and felt a sense of warmth, not anguish, since she died.

I head up the stairs and out the door, leaving the basement behind me. The cold air smacks me in the face, stinging and refreshing. There is excitement outside the Lincoln Center as I pass; lines of eager people and paparazzi crowd around someone. Normally I love seeing celebrities but this time I quickly walk by with my head down.

Even though I have a fridge full of food with quickly-approaching expiration dates, I order sushi on my way home and pick it up before heading to my apartment, justifying it as my reward for enduring the evening, for taking another step forward. Anything that brings an ounce of happiness, a shot of separation from reality, even for a few moments is worth it. If happiness presents itself as salmon nigiri and a spicy tuna roll, I’ll still gladly welcome it in. Sure, it’s temporary happiness, minor and shallow, but maybe that’s what healing is: little patches here and there that prevent all the water from flooding out while the real structural work is being completed. Sushi, ice cream, bad TV, whatever it takes…I think Häagen-Dazs is onto something.

As soon as I get home, sushi in hand, I kick off the Stan Smiths and settle in barefoot on the couch. My toenails are painted a bright red. I relax in the warmth and comfort of my home, dog by my side, husband doing his thing at the gym. The sushi has the perfect ratio of rice and seaweed and rice. With my bra off and feet bare, I’m comfortable in my skin, able to reconnect my core. I call it Alignment. Deep breath in, long sigh out. I’m still here and I’m still me. I don’t need shoes to help me remember that.

Mary is a photographer, writer, marketing professional, occasional yoga teacher, and new mom. See more of her work on and follow her on Instagram .