Suicidal Ideation

Suicidal ideation in the novel is not a single crisis but a recurring pressure shaped by abandonment, bereavement, and the belief that life has become unbearable. Jensen Brick McCall and Janae Morrison each contemplate death; their stories connect those thoughts to concrete histories of rejection and pain, while later scenes show how honesty, support, and a sense of purpose can interrupt—but do not erase—that history.

Emergence and Early Pattern

Jensen’s account reaches back to an attempted abortion at 26 weeks: after he survived, he was left on a table in a dark room to die, until the nurse Grace McCall intervened. He understands his mother’s instruction to let him die as an origin wound and calls her his murderer. His later account of childhood adds homelessness, sexual violence, foster care, and sleeping on library steps to the history behind his question of why he survived. He recalls repeatedly expecting his mother to rescue him at Christmas, and repeatedly being left to wait. Death therefore appears in Jensen’s story both as an early threat to his life and as an imagined escape from a life he feels has offered him no home or dependable love.

Janae’s first self-harm episode begins with an insult from her grandmother about her appearance and worth. Alone before a mirror, she smashes her hairbrush, picks up the broken glass, and considers killing herself; then she uses a razor on her wrist, hoping to purge what she has been taught to regard as badness within her. The bleeding becomes a physical release from pain and a way to avoid crying. The scene establishes the painful gap between wanting to die and using injury to manage feelings that seem otherwise unmanageable, a pattern that recurs later in her story.

Recurrence, Bereavement, and the Body

For Jensen, thoughts of death recur alongside the deaths of people he loves and the violence that has surrounded his life. He remembers friends who once welcomed him with dry clothes and food after he had been put out of a house; they played basketball, ran up hills, and joked together, with a shared rule against insulting one another’s mothers because so many of them had lost theirs or been rejected by them. After those friends were killed, Jensen says he had warned them to leave the gang alone. Grief turns into anger at their choice and guilt that he could not prevent the outcome, while his repeated sense that everyone dies except him makes survival feel less like safety than isolation.

His history also contains near-death episodes that make suicidal thinking part of a longer struggle over whether he is meant to remain alive. A bullet once missed his head by an inch, and he recalls wanting drugs to numb the emptiness before an unexpected Bible or prayer interrupted his movement toward self-destruction. At other times, homelessness and the absence of anyone to love him led him to imagine jumping from a building. These memories sit beside the attempted killing at birth and his childhood expectation that his mother would come for him at Christmas: Jensen’s question is not only why he might die, but why he has survived when death repeatedly seemed close and care repeatedly failed to arrive.

Janae’s suicidal distress also returns under the pressure of loss, and her self-harm becomes visible again when she learns that Robert Walters has been killed. She feels ashamed about their affair and fixates on what he may have given his wife, despite the precautions she and Robert took to avoid pregnancy. Her heart races; she bites her nails, cuts her legs and thighs, and longs to get high to escape the pain. She showers despite the cuts burning under the water, then dresses in a blue sundress that hides her scars. The sequence connects emotional shock to bodily injury and concealment: the urge to die or disappear is not presented as a resolved past episode, but as a danger that can return when grief and shame overwhelm her.

Witness, Treatment, and an Unfinished Recovery

Janae’s suicidal thoughts become speakable when she begins meeting with Inya, but disclosure does not arrive as easy trust. Inya introduces herself as someone who can help and asks whether Janae wants that help; Janae’s first condition is that she not be judged or criticized. That exchange gives the crisis a setting beyond private injury: Janae must risk naming her pain before another person, while fearing that disclosure will bring the same condemnation she has already absorbed from her family and from Robert Walters’s rejection.

That risk becomes concrete when Janae tells Jensen Brick McCall that she cuts herself because she wants to die. She also says that she hates her life, cannot see a purpose in being alive, and doubts that he can understand her. Jensen does not answer by denying the severity of what she has said. Instead, he describes the people he has watched die through drugs, murder, or suicide; the bullet that missed his head by an inch; and the times he considered jumping from a building because he had no home or anyone to love him. His history makes him a witness rather than an untouched rescuer. He connects his own survival to the possibility that a purpose may still be waiting, even when it cannot yet be seen. After this exchange, Janae moves closer and kisses him, making intimacy one immediate consequence of being heard, not proof that her suicidal distress has vanished.

Jensen’s support also takes the form of challenging the labels that have helped make Janae’s suffering feel like an identity. When she agrees that she is bad energy, he tells her she is not and asks her to repeat that she is not bad energy until she believes it. The repeated affirmation counters the family judgment and rejection that have attached shame to her sense of self; its force lies in repetition, because a single reassurance cannot undo a belief reinforced over time.

The relationship remains vulnerable to the same cycles of pain and concealment. Janae later admits that she uses cocaine to forget that her mother does not love her and to forget her mistakes, and that she does not know how to stop. Jensen leaves after discovering that she has hidden her drug use, explaining that the lie violates the trust created when he first shared his past with her. His departure marks a limit to what love and shared trauma can accomplish: his presence has offered Janae recognition, but it cannot substitute for her own honesty or recovery. The novel thus treats suicidal ideation as a recurring danger that may be interrupted by witnessing and support, yet remains entangled with addiction, abandonment, and the difficulty of asking for help.

Survival Reframed as Purpose

In his retrospective account, Jensen Brick McCall turns survival into a reason to speak to someone still asking why death has not taken him. He presents his life as more than a sequence of near-deaths and losses: what once seemed to mark him as a dead man walking becomes, in his understanding, a mission to help another young man grow, live, and pursue happiness and freedom. Finding the woman he calls his murderer does not, by itself, resolve the question of his existence; the deeper discovery is that he has also found himself. His account gives suicidal ideation a changed, though not erased, place in the story: it remains part of the past he must face, while survival becomes an opening toward purpose.

The novel’s final family scene makes that change tangible. On Christmas Day, Janae gives birth to their daughter, Grace Pearl McCall, and Jensen sits at the head of a table surrounded by family. The woman he once understood only as the mother who tried to end his life is now his mother; he has also donated a kidney so she can live to watch his younger brother and sister grow up. The scene does not cancel his earlier abandonment or the deaths and dangers that shaped him. Instead, it places those wounds beside acts of care and a future shared with Janae and their child, recasting continued life not as mere endurance but as participation in a family he once could not imagine having.