Grief After Suicide Blog - Grief after Suicide

SURVEY: SUICIDE BEREAVED MEN NEED HELP -- AND ARE WILLING TO HELP

4/19/2014

A recent survey of men bereaved by suicide suggests that:

• Suicide bereavement is profound and sustained for the majority of men, with 30% reporting that grief remained a constant difficulty in their lives one to three years after their loss and another 30% saying that it was a constant difficulty for longer than three years.
• Men generally believe friends, family, and peers (others who have experienced a loss to suicide) are the most helpful.
• Peer assistance and one-on-one help are especially valued by men, who also say they rely on information from the Internet for assistance.
• Most men believe men and women grieve differently, and plenty of men fit the stereotypes commonly associated with men's handling of emotional matters.
• Many men, on the other hand, believe that stereotypes get in the way of healthy grieving and that societal influences hamper men's grieving.
• Many also see bereavement as very individualistic, reporting that they are as emotionally expressive about their grief as women are.
• Men are interested in being peer helpers for other bereaved men, especially if they are far enough along in their own grief and are trained and supported.

This last finding -- that many men are willing to help each other with grief after suicide -- is of utmost importance, for men themselves likely hold the keys to their own recovery.

Unified Community Solutions (my private consultancy) and the Carson J Spencer Foundation (Sally Spencer-Thomas's nonprofit organization) distributed the survey to help us explore developing more-effective programs and resources for suicide bereaved men. We are hopeful that by this summer, we'll have an idea about how we might begin making new inroads into supporting men bereaved by suicide.

Please see the copy of the slides from the presentation on the survey that Sally and I (and Rick Mogil, who directs suicide grief programs for the Didi Hirsch Community Mental Health Center) delivered at the American Association of Suicidology conference in Los Angeles last Saturday.

FRANKLIN COOK JOINS BOARD OF ALLIANCE OF HOPE FOR SUICIDE SURVIVORS

4/8/2014

I feel as if believing in a couple of things very strongly has laid the groundwork for an opportunity to come my way. I am referring to my relationship with the Alliance of Hope for Suicide Survivors, an organization I've served as a volunteer for several years and which now has asked me to join its Board of Directors.

I couldn't be more honored and excited -- because AOH and I share a number of fundamental beliefs regarding grief support for survivors of suicide loss, for example:

• Compassionate peer helpers can deliver effective services to survivors
• Peer helpers should have specialized training and support
• Survivors need access to services 24/7
• A survivor community is a source of healing in its own right
• Hope is a powerful force, even when we feel that we've lost it

AOH proves up on all of the above through ...
• the leadership of its executive director Ronnie Walker, whose story is as inspiring as they come;
• its state-of-the-art website (see it for yourself), which is visited by 20,000 people per month; and
• AOH's Community Forum (6,000 members), which is moderated by no less than 25 skilled peer helpers.

I invite Grief after Suicide readers to explore the Alliance of Hope website, its community forum, and the information and resources to which AOH is connected. In the meantime, I am going to take full advantage of this opportunity that has been provided to me, which is -- hopefully -- to be of service to an organization that I believe is changing the landscape of recovery for survivors of suicide loss.

DEATH MIDWIFE PROBES REGRET, SADNESS IN REFLECTION ON BROTHER'S SUICIDE

3/27/2014

When I saw the title "A Death Midwife's Perspective on Suicide" I did not suspect the post was by someone whose brother had died by suicide only a month before she wrote it, but so it was:

My brother, my best friend in life ... lost his battle with bipolar on February 25th ... My brother was also my hero, and we loved to rib each other. I miss him so much every day.

I was reminded, as I read, how much we who have lost a loved one to suicide have in common, regardless of who we are (or who we think we are); and I am grateful to the author, Rowan MistWalker --

a professional tarot and oracle diviner ... [who] from time to time, when Spirit wishes ... serve[s] as a medium, helping others connect with their departed loved ones

-- for reminding me of that.

Her post is a painfully candid review of her interactions with her brother during the final weeks of his life, in which she explains her regrets as eloquently as I've ever heard a survivor of suicide loss explain them:

I wish I had the compassion, the strength, the courage to confront him as he was, day by day, losing the will to live.

That comes from the kind of soul-searching not circumscribed by a person's religious preference, and the remorse and sadness in it breaks my heart. Other people may have the cosmos arranged a bit differently than I do, but if you prick them, do they not bleed? Suicide has shown me the truth of that again and again, both in how it claims its victims with indifference toward "who they are" and in how its aftermath serves as a great and awful equalizer among the bereaved.

Her post includes a picture of Ms. MistWalker's brother, and he looks like a person who would "rib" his sister (and take a good ribbing from her). No doubt he will be missed every day ...

FJC'S JOURNAL: Having No Choice Is Downside of Starting Over, and its Upside

3/21/2014

"FJC's Journal" is an occasional feature on the Grief after Suicide blog, in which Franklin Cook shares observations about suicide bereavement from his personal experience as a survivor of suicide loss.

"The Wake of Suicide: A Synopsis" is a very brief version of my whole story as a survivor. I wrote it for a friend and colleague who is including it in a book he's working on (I'll post about that when it's published later this year). Here are a few excerpts from the story:

[My father] did not ever -- during the entire course of his life -- receive the help he needed for the problems that killed him, and that's a pity (it is also the answer to "Why?" that points not only to him as an individual but also to his community and our society).

The explanation I would give for being where I am today is that I traversed enough ground to get here, step by step: I grieved by trial-and-error, and my healing turned out to be a holistic experience that I couldn't have caused using a linear strategy.

I do not think in terms of what should or shouldn't have been. My father is dead, he died horrifically, and his death nearly shattered his loved ones in its wake -- and I cannot change that.

I'm posting the story here today in part because, after a bit of a hiatus, I want to return to writing"FJC's Journal" for Grief after Suicide -- and this is a way for me to start over on that. There's a lot to be said for starting over, isn't there? Not only because we have to but because (if we're fortunate and if we're paying attention) we get to, over and over again.

SURVIVOR OUTLOOK: "Your death is the burden to us, not your life"

3/19/2014

"Survivor Outlook" shares the words of survivors of suicide loss whose experiences with grief and recovery have been reported in the news. To learn more about the survivors quoted, follow the links to the complete stories. Also, learn how to suggest a story.

"If you are reading this ... and you are struggling to survive ... do not stop fighting, not only for yourself, but for your parents, children, siblings and friends. None of our lives are better without you ... Your death is the burden to us, not your life." Diane Morrison, Port Caledonia, Nova Scotia, lost her 21-year-old brother to suicide three years ago.

"Every time he's in my dream, he's a little boy, and I'm not sure what that means -- except that Jeffrey will always be my little boy." Steve Boczenowski, Groton, Mass., lost his 21-year-old son to suicide in 2009. (Learn about the foundation created by Steve and his wife, Deb.)

"I have been shocked by some subtle and not-so-subtle comments indicating that perhaps I should be ready to 'move on.'" Kay Warren, California, lost her son Matthew, 27, to suicide almost a year ago. (Kay and her husband, Pastor Rick Warren, are hosts of the Mental Health and the Church Summit later this month.)

"He was the greatest kid in the world, but he would get into these panic spells and deep abysses ... He was wired different than the rest of us." Tommy John, New Jersey, lost his son, Taylor, 28, to suicide in 2010. (Learn about Tommy John's Let's Do It Foundation.)

POWERFUL PERSONAL MOURNING RITUALS MAY BE CLOSE AT HAND

3/15/2014

A story in this month's Atlantic, "In Grief, Try Personal Rituals," persuades me that there is something everyone should consider doing regarding personal mourning rituals. The story is about research that concludes "there is a specific way many people can, no matter what their circumstances may be, transcend despair and distress" over loss. The "way" is through the use of ritual, but "not your typical rituals":

Many of the rituals reported were not ... public ones ... Rather, they were private rituals. Only 15 percent of the described rituals had a social element (and just 5 percent were religious). By far, most of the rituals people did were personal and performed alone.

These are personal rituals, performed alone, rituals that people devise themselves. The examples offered in the article are quite simple:
• One woman plays a Natalie Cole song and thinks of her departed mother.
• A widower keeps his and his wife's formerly joint appointment at the hairdressers the first Saturday of every month.
• Another woman washes her deceased husband's car every week, just as he used to do (although she does not drive it).

Why are these very straightforward practices so powerful? According to the researchers:

[These] rituals help people overcome grief by counteracting the turbulence and chaos that follows loss. Rituals, which are deliberately-controlled gestures, trigger a very specific feeling in mourners -- the feeling of being in control of their lives. After people did a ritual or wrote about doing one, they were ... less likely to feel "helpless," "powerless," and "out of control."

How can the bereaved practice rituals that are simple, straightforward, private, meaningful, and comforting (even if they are also evocative), and how can others help them do so? Perhaps merely by noticing the natural presence of a practice that is already taking place. In other words, by identifying a meaningful activity that is already happening, a bereaved person could explore (or be encouraged to explore) whether it might serve as a healing ritual.

GRIEF, TRAUMA OF SUICIDE TOUCH PEOPLE NEAR AND FAR FROM THE DECEASED

3/13/2014

In "Suicide by Train: Shared Tragedies Upend String of Lives," Orange Country Register reporters Keith Sharon and Greg Hardesty have given us an intimate look at the circle of people affected when someone dies by suicide.

The story -- of a middle-aged man's suicide on a stretch of track in Southern California -- gives voice to those bereaved and shocked and debilitated by the death, the man's wife and friends, a passer-by who witnessed the suicide, train engineers, and a father who faced an irony too horrible for him to comprehend or assimilate.

It is a story that should be read from beginning to end without much of a hint about its details, so I'll share only a glimpse of the man's widow and his father:

"As I was driving in the rain to the hotel [after being told of the suicide], my first thought was that this is more than I will ever be able to handle," she said. "I contemplated slamming my car into the light pole ahead."

A year later, she has taken up "public speaking, going to high schools and anyone who would listen to her talk about mental health and how to handle depression." She reports, though, that her husband's father "has never been the same":

He's fallen twice in recent months, and he was unable to continue tending to his goats, so he sold the farm. He cut off his phone service.

"Sold the farm": What an awful but apt description of bottomless grief.

This story about suicide by train illustrates the long reach of suicide's aftermath in all cases, showing how deeply it touches even those one might not expect, an ex-girlfriend who relapses on alcohol and a stranger who needs trauma therapy -- people who come face-to-face with victims in their final moments. Suicide, we are reminded, wounds people near and far from the center of a deceased person's life, as tragedy reverberates outward from the scene of a person's death.

O'ROURKE ESSAY IS ARTFUL PRIMER ON THE NATURE OF BEREAVEMENT

3/8/2014

I don't know where, with barely half an hour's reading, a person might be able to delve more deeply into the nature of grief's complexities and challenges than in Meghan O'Rourke's 2010 New Yorker essay "Good Grief: Is There a Better Way to Be Bereaved?"

Using the ideas and life (and death) of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross as a reference point, O'Rourke tells the story of "the privatization of grief," testifying insightfully to the cost of grief's displacement from the public sphere. In one of many trenchant examples, she recounts a TV scene in which a bereaved person steels herself against her grief at a time when mourning would be "a luxury":

This model represents an American fantasy of muscling through pain by throwing ourselves into work; it is akin to the dream that if only we show ourselves to be creatures of will (staying in shape, eating organic) we will stave off illness forever. The avoidance of death, Kubler-Ross was right to note, is at the heart of this ethic.

O'Rourke's engaging narrative takes us from Freud's misguided role in mourning's demise as a powerful public rite --

Only two years after Emile Durkheim wrote about mourning as an essential social process, Freud's "Mourning and Melancholia" defined it as something fundamentally private and individual. In a stroke, the work of mourning had become internalized.

-- through a sampling of observations from some of the most astute thinkers who chronicled the West losing track of bereavement and of the bereaved. Again, to give just one example, O'Rourke acknowledges the value of George Bonanno's ideas about resilience among the bereaved in general, then comments on his own experience in particular:

He thrived after his own father died, but, as he relates in his book's [The Other Side of Sadness] autobiographical passages, he became preoccupied, many years later, with performing an Eastern mourning ritual for him. The apostle of resilience is still in the grip of loss: it's hard to avoid a sense of discordance.

I do hope this overly brief review of "Good Grief" presents it as the artful primer on bereavement that I believe it is. And, if you've got less than half an hour to spare, please go straight to the end of the essay, where O'Rourke has left us with a gem from Emily Dickinson ("the supreme poet of grief"), which captures the essence of the thing in a mere handful of words: "It feels so old a pain." Indeed.

GIVING YOURSELF PERMISSION CAN REMEDY SUFFERING 'UNREQUITED GRIEF'

3/5/2014

Paula McCann, an attorney specializing in elder law, gives us a new and useful term in her recent post "Grief Is Not Selfish!":

Unrequited grief is my term for the grief we carry around inside us that is unprocessed, unanalyzed, suppressed and hidden deep inside us, as if we have a subterranean storage compartment for all our sadness from loss.

Regarding unrequited grief, she advises:

Give yourself permission to feel grief, live in it, swim in it if you want to, but acknowledge it and then start the process of healing from it.

And she wisely observes that claiming permission to grieve is not magical but that people let go of grief "when [they] are ready ... little by little" -- and that grieving is often a lifelong journey:

Yes, sometimes grief becomes a companion for life, but it doesn't take over anymore, it has lost its control or intensity because we acknowledge it and keep living. Maybe we don't laugh as loud, act as carefree, or ever give our hearts away again, but we function, we live, we contribute, we find a way to a reconciled life.

I also want to thank Paula for pointing us to a precious one-line story about grief:

"When my husband was dying, I said: 'Moe, how am I supposed to live without you?' He told me: 'Take the love you have for me and spread it around.'"

Paula blogs at On the Way to Dying: Practical Experience and Insight on Dying in America.

"PUTTING A FACE ON SUICIDE" STRENGTHENS CONNECTION, WEAKENS STIGMA

3/2/2014

Putting a Face on Suicide Montage

MARCH NEWSLETTER FEATURE

People involved in suicide prevention and suicide grief support hear a lot about "reducing stigma." In an online course I just finished creating for the National Center for Death Education, I write:

Suicide stigma continues to be a powerful and active force that is woven into the fabric of our communal interactions. Stigma affects people who think about suicide, who attempt it, who die from it, and who are left behind to mourn the dead ... Research shows that stigma negatively affects [survivors of suicide loss's] tendency to seek help, their social connections, and their sense of isolation ... SOSLs consistently report that people often do not know what to do or say to acknowledge or support their mourning, which suggests that suicide stigma continues to influence people's beliefs and behavior.

We also know from research that direct contact with people who are stigmatized reduces negative stereotypes. This indicates how powerful Mike Purcell's "Putting a Face on Suicide" project might be, for PAFOS provides the next closest experience to "direct contact" with people affected by suicide stigma. The project shares thousands of pictures in a simple format that is breathtaking in how it captures the beauty and diversity of people who die by suicide and heartbreaking in how starkly it portrays the tragedy of suicide.

The simple format is a plain frame containing each person's picture, name, and age. The pictures are broadcast one suicide victim after another in a seemingly unending stream on the PAFOS Facebook page. The pictures of each unique -- and very alive -- human being connect us all to one another, hopefully in a way that weakens the influence of suicide stigma.

Here are instructions for submitting information about a loved one for inclusion in "Putting a Face on Suicide."

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