A raw and unflinching memoir about a mother’s search for answers after her child’s suicide.

Suicide is a trajectory, one that confounds 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. While in the throes of unimaginable grief, Miazga begins a relentless investigation to understand how a bright, sensitive, deeply loved child could slip beyond reach.

Her search takes her through a fragmented healthcare system struggling to support children in crisis, into Mars’s online community 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. Miazga writes with fierce honesty about parenting a curious and complex child, about what was visible and what was hidden, and about the questions that remain when a life ends too soon.

More than 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.