Charlotte Maya on Surviving Suicide Loss and Loving Again

When Charlotte Maya's husband died by suicide in 2007, she assumed her community would pull away. What she found was the opposite.

"I was terrified that I would be ostracized from my community because of how Sam had died," Charlotte says. "What I found was actually the opposite. Because I was just very honest and transparent about the fact that Sam had died by suicide, people were really drawn to having those conversations. It is stunning to me how many people have a very close connection to having lost someone to suicide, but we don't talk about it."

That honesty became the foundation for everything that came next: raising two young sons alone, writing a memoir she never planned to write, and eventually rebuilding a life and a family she couldn't have predicted.

Who Is Charlotte Maya?

Charlotte Maya is an attorney, author, and suicide loss survivor. Her memoir, Sushi Tuesdays, tells the story of her husband Sam's death by suicide, raising her two sons on her own, and falling in love again with her now husband, Tim. She joins this episode of Success, Rewritten to talk about grief, honesty, and what it actually looks like to rebuild after the life you planned falls apart.

The Day Everything Changed

Charlotte and Sam met in law school and had been married fifteen years. He coached their kids' T-ball games, left work early for parent-teacher conferences, and was, in Charlotte's words, "funny and kind." Their sons were six and eight. Life, as she describes it, was "clipping along in what I thought was a beautiful, and WAS a beautiful little life."

Then, on an ordinary Saturday, Charlotte came home from soccer practice to find a police car in the driveway. A policeman, a policewoman, and a priest were standing outside. Sam had died by suicide.

The first responders on scene gave her one piece of advice that shaped everything after: "We will tell the children that their father died, but you have to tell them how. And we recommend that you tell them the truth because you do not want them to find out from somebody else." Charlotte gathered her little sons on one chair together and told them.

"It's the hardest thing I've ever done," she says. "But I am grateful for that advice from those first responders, because my kids know they can count on me for honest answers to really hard questions, and sometimes the honest answer is, 'I don't know.'"

Writing Sushi Tuesdays

Charlotte didn't set out to write a memoir. Years after Sam's death, she started a blog as a form of self-care, posting every Tuesday, the day she'd carved out for therapy, yoga, or lunch alone. "No plans. No coffee. No one expecting you," she says of that day. "Just me and whatever I needed for my own healing."

The blog's name, Sushi Tuesdays, came from those weekly outings. It wasn't until a friend pointed out that the word "shit" sits right in the middle of the phrase (Sushi Tuesdays) that Charlotte found the title fitting on purpose. "Grief is messy," she says, "and the blog was about dealing with the real mess of what life post a suicide looks like."

Years of blog posts eventually became a book, though turning them into one required a different kind of craft. Rather than naming every person who showed up for her family, Charlotte grouped them into a collective she calls "the Janes," Engineer Jane, Entrepreneur Jane, Artist Jane, Dr. Jane, so readers could see the many different ways people helped without getting lost in a cast of characters.

Parenting Through Grief, and Rethinking How We Talk About Suicide

Charlotte is candid that grief with two young children didn't follow any predictable shape. One son wanted to talk about his dad constantly. The other wouldn't say the words "dead" or "Daddy" for years. She learned to follow their lead, even when that meant letting a Lego spaceship get destroyed rather than enforcing calm. "If they're safe, who gives a shit?" became her working philosophy.

She's also spent years thinking about how differently we should talk about suicide as a culture. I shared with her my frustration around the common question "were there signs?". I feel like it puts the onus or the pressure on the family to have noticed something. The assumption of that question is, 'Why didn't you save them?'.

Her alternative is simpler than a checklist of warning signs. "I feel like suicide literacy is something that we as a culture can do better," she says. "It's okay to ask, because what the research shows is that if you ask somebody if they are thinking about suicide, that doesn't plant the idea in their head that wasn't already there. What that does instead is it opens up a space for you to have a conversation."

One line from her therapist has stayed with her since: "You're 100% responsible for your 50%. You don't get to own his 50%. You just get to own your own 50%."

Falling in Love Again

Charlotte had no intention of dating again. Then a friend set her up with Tim, a widower raising two kids of his own after his first wife, Debbie, died of colon cancer. Their first phone call lasted an hour. Their first lunch turned into a relationship neither of them expected to want.

Blending two families that had each already survived a death wasn't simple. Charlotte and Tim describe operating at "a 12.5% approval rating" from their four kids in the early days. But the honesty that shaped Charlotte's parenting shaped the marriage too. And neither Charlotte or Tim wanted to forget the past. "We joke that we don't keep the skeletons in the closets. Sam and Debbie's pictures are up on the piano and above the fireplace. They're how we got here."

She describes it this way for her kids: "There's a Daddy-shaped space in your heart that will be there forever. No one is ever gonna take over that space because nobody else fits. But the thing about love is that if we do meet somebody special, there will be a new place just for him. It doesn't take over the Daddy space. It will be its own thing."

What Success Looks Like Now

Nineteen years out, Charlotte doesn't describe grief as something that resolves. "It's important to think about grief as nonlinear," she says. "Sometimes it feels circular, and sometimes it feels up and down." She still has moments of anger, mostly when her now grown sons are struggling. She doesn't believe time heals anything by itself. "What time does do is it gives you the opportunity to do the work," she says.

What changed for Charlotte wasn't the plan she'd had. It was her definition of a life worth having: one built on honesty instead of appearances, on asking the hard question instead of avoiding it, and on making room for new love without erasing what came before. As she puts it, closing out the conversation: "life is a team sport. We're not supposed to do this alone."