Ground Control

A raw and unflinching memoir about a mother’s search for answers after her child’s suicide and what grief looks like when love has nowhere to go. Suicide is a trajectory, one that cofounds those left behind. When Marlo Miazga’s fourteen-year-old child Mars dies by suicide after less than a year of visible mental health struggle, her world fractures overnight. What follows is not only grief but investigation. Miazga begins a relentless search to understand how a bright, sensitive, deeply loved child could slip beyond reach. Her journey takes her through a fragmented healthcare system struggling to support children in crisis, into Mars’s online communities where pain is shared in coded language adults rarely see, and inward to confront guilt, love, anger and the unbearable weight of unanswered questions. Raw, intimate and unsparing, Ground Control lays bare the reality of losing a child to suicide while refusing silence or stigma. Marlo writes with fierce honesty about parenting a curious and complex child, about what was visible and what was hidden and about what remains after unimaginable loss. More than just a memoir about grief, Ground Control is an act of love, a demand for better systems, and a lifeline for anyone trying to understand how tragedy happens and how to continue afterward.