The nine weeks nobody talks about
Neal Tricarico · · 9 min read
Living in the weeks between the worst phone call of your life and the funeral is like entering a country no map describes -- time bends, hope fractures, and your family reorganizes itself around a hospital room without anyone giving the order.
TL;DR
The in-between -- the stretch from crisis to outcome -- is a disorienting, sacred, and largely undiscussed experience that reshapes a family's sense of time, hope, and identity, and the people who have walked it hold knowledge worth passing on.
What are the nine weeks?
On March 24, I got a call that fractured the world I knew. My son Anthony was in a hospital after a suicide attempt, and for the next nine weeks, until May 25, my family lived in a suspended space between what had been and whatever was coming.
Those nine weeks were not the acute crisis of the first night. They were not the funeral. They were the long, strange middle where everything was urgent and nothing was resolved. I woke up each morning inside the same question, went to sleep still carrying it, and woke up to carry it again. The outside world kept spinning -- bills arrived, people asked how work was going, the sun rose and set -- but inside our family, time had collapsed into a single room, a single monitor, a single hope we were afraid to name out loud.
Nobody told me there would be this stretch. The literature on suicide loss focuses heavily on the aftermath of a death, and rightfully so. But for families whose loved one is hospitalized after an attempt, there is a distinct and consuming period of waiting that clinical research has not given enough language to. Research on suicide bereavement confirms that the experience carries unique psychological burdens -- guilt, confusion, stigma, and trauma -- but the waiting itself is its own category of pain PMC.
How did the in-between bend time and hope?
Time in a vigil does not move the way time moves anywhere else. An hour in the waiting room is nothing like an hour at work. Five minutes waiting for a doctor to walk through the door can feel longer than an entire afternoon on a normal Tuesday.
I learned quickly that hope, in those weeks, is not a steady flame. It flickers with every shift change, every test result, every small movement Anthony made or did not make. You learn to hold hope lightly -- not because you are giving up, but because gripping it too tightly exhausts you before noon. The clinicians who have spent decades working with suicide loss survivors note that rebuilding a shattered "assumptive world" -- the basic framework of beliefs you held about life being predictable and fair -- is one of the core tasks survivors face Frontiers. In the in-between, that world is not yet fully shattered, but it is cracking, and you can hear it.
What I did not expect was how hope would shift its shape. At first I hoped for a full recovery, for Anthony to walk out of the hospital and for life to resume. Over time, hope became smaller and more specific: I hoped he would open his eyes today. I hoped he would squeeze my hand. I hoped the nurse would give us a smile instead of a careful look. Hope did not disappear -- it narrowed, focused, became granular. And somehow that made it more bearable.
What did the body and faith do in that stretch?
My body ran on adrenaline for the first week and then simply ran out. I would forget to eat until my hands shook. I would realize at 3 a.m. that I had not slept more than two hours in days, and still I could not sleep. The body in crisis is a machine burning fuel it does not have, and the crash, when it comes, arrives without warning.
Faith was the one thing I did not have to manufacture. I did not pray for a specific outcome as much as I prayed for the capacity to stay present, to not run from the room, to be the father Anthony needed whether or not he knew I was there. Prayer became less about words and more about breathing. I would sit in the hospital chapel -- a room I had never been in before March 24 -- and I would not ask for anything. I would just be still. That stillness, in a season defined by chaos, became its own kind of medicine.
For our family, faith was not a set of answers. It was the ground beneath us when everything else gave way. My wife and I leaned on it differently -- she found comfort in scripture; I found it in silence and in the chaplain who would sit with me without needing to fill the quiet. Neither way was wrong. Both were survival.
How did family roles shift?
A crisis reorganizes a family without permission. My wife became the primary communicator -- the one who updated relatives, took calls, managed the flood of concern from people who meant well but did not know what to ask. I became the sentinel, the one who stayed at the bedside, who tracked medications and vitals, who learned to read nurses' faces the way I used to read spreadsheets.
Our other relationships bent under the weight. Friends pulled close; some friends pulled away, unsure what to say and so saying nothing. Research confirms what survivors already know: suicide frequently alters the quantity and quality of social connections in a family's life Frontiers. People you thought would show up disappear. People you barely knew become lifelines. The in-between reveals the true architecture of your community -- which beams are load-bearing and which were decoration.
We learned to give each other grace for handling things differently. There were moments when one of us needed to cry and the other needed to be practical, and we took turns without negotiating it. That unspoken rhythm, developed in those nine weeks, became something we still rely on.
Why does no one prepare you for the in-between?
Because the in-between is hard to talk about, and harder to write a pamphlet for. It is not clinical enough for medical literature -- it is too raw, too subjective, too much a story and not enough a symptom. And it is not processed enough for grief literature, which tends to begin after the death has occurred.
But the in-between is where you actually live. It is the country between the phone call and the funeral, and millions of families have crossed it. The posttraumatic growth research framework tells us that growth after trauma is possible and measurable, a genuine rebuilding rather than a return to "before" Boulder Crest. Growth and grief coexist -- the two are not a trade, and closure is not the goal PTG is not closure. What the framework does not always capture is that the seeds of that growth are often planted in the waiting room, not after the loss.
I do not have a tidy lesson from those nine weeks. What I have is the knowledge that they mattered -- that they were sacred, in their own terrible way, and that families walking through their own in-between right now deserve to know they are not doing it wrong. Time will bend. Hope will flicker. Your body will fail and your faith will hold and your family will reorganize. None of this means you are breaking. It means you are human, in the hardest stretch, and that stretch does not last forever.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does "the in-between" mean here?
It is the stretch between a catastrophic event -- in our case, Anthony's suicide attempt and hospitalization -- and the resolution. For us, nine weeks from March 24 to May 25. It is the waiting, the vigil, the suspended life that happens after the crisis but before the funeral.
How do you live day to day in a vigil?
One hour at a time. You eat when you remember. You sleep when your body forces you. You lean on whoever shows up and you release whoever does not. You let hope become small and specific -- open eyes, a squeezed hand, a kind nurse -- rather than demanding it carry the weight of a full recovery.
Where can a suicide-loss survivor find help during a crisis?
The 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline is available 24 hours a day by calling or texting 988, and they have dedicated resources for loss survivors 988 Lifeline. The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention offers peer support programs and a directory of loss survivor resources including support groups and Healing Conversations with trained volunteers who have also lost someone to suicide AFSP. You do not have to walk this alone.
Is posttraumatic growth possible after a suicide loss?
Yes. Research on posttraumatic growth documents that some people experience meaningful positive change in the aftermath of trauma, including deeper relationships, a greater sense of personal strength, and a changed sense of life priorities Boulder Crest. That growth is not a feeling you wait for but a practice you build -- and the first steps of that practice look very different than most people expect Finding a way forward after suicide loss. Growth does not erase the loss or make it "worth it" -- it coexists with grief rather than replacing it.
Does faith help or just add pressure?
It helped, but not as a set of tidy answers. Faith was the ground beneath us -- a place to be still when everything else was chaos. My wife and I experienced it differently, and both ways were real. If your faith feels heavy right now, that does not mean you are doing it wrong. Sometimes faith carries you; sometimes you just sit next to it and breathe.