I recently encountered a post from the blog of author Linda Sienkiewicz, titled "Derek's Black Hill Spruce," in which she recounts a struggle well known to survivors of suicide loss:

As a mother, no matter how many counselors, doctors and friends tell you suicide isn’t the parent’s fault, you can’t help but wonder what you did wrong.

In the aftermath of her son's death, in 2011, the family planted a Black Hill Spruce in his honor, but three years later, the once-thriving little tree "looked severely distressed, with brown needles and brittle branches, as if parched." And it is not difficult to imagine Linda's own distress over the tree's health:

I was shocked ... I watered it every day, but it continued to drop needles, and every day I felt more distraught. I had neglected Derek’s memorial tree. I had failed to take care of it properly and now it was dying. The metaphor was obvious. It seemed almost fitting that the tree would die under my care.

The story does not have a happen ending. The tree dies.

Why, then, is the story worth telling?

Because, as it turns out, the tree had a fatal disease. There was nothing that could be done to keep it alive. Again, the metaphor is obvious -- and telling the story of it was extremely valuable to Linda. She goes on to say that there really isn't a simple conclusion to draw ("there’s no way of knowing if we could have helped") but that, nonetheless ...

... it’s a sad truth that you can’t always prevent everything, and you can’t blame yourself.

I'm grateful for Linda's story because of how it helped her discover a very difficult part of her truth related to her son's death. She encourages us to believe that -- no matter how different our stories are, and no matter how various are the conclusions each of us draws about the suicide of our loved one -- there can be great healing in the very act of telling our stories.

"Survivor Outlook" shares the voices 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. Learn how you can suggest a story.

"Murderers can at least be questioned, but a suicide is a murder in which the killer is also the victim: in which the reason, the motive, dies with the act." Jeremy Gavron, son of Hannah Gavron, who died by suicide in 1965 at age 29 (The Guardian, U.K. -- also see A Woman on the Edge of Time)

"Connor, Will [Trautwein], Robin Williams -- they died of an illness, just as people die of cancer and heart disease ... It is common. It is treatable. It is curable. And it is ok. The stigma needs to go away. People need to talk about it." Erin Ball, mother of Connor, who died by suicide in 2011 when was 14 (WMUR, Manchester, N.H.)

"Suicide grief is so complicated. It's a very physical pain. It affects every cell in your body." Grace Young, mother of Jack Young Jr., who died by suicide in 2007 at age 27. (Hartford Courant, Conn.)

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.

I could begin everything I write about grief after suicide with this: "Everybody's journey is different. Each of us is trying to find our own way to carry our grief." (To carry our grief: I'm holding on to that idea.)

A post from Anne Thorn of Cornwall, England -- "Will I Ever Get Over the Guilt?" -- reminded me of the singular path that each of us follows, and I am thankful to her for describing a part of her journey. In brief, three things helped her reconcile her feelings of guilt after her son, Toby, died by suicide: (1) something the author of this little booklet wrote on the topic (see pp. 16-20), (2) this handout from LaRita Archibald, and (3) this advice from her physician:

When I went to my GP and I told him that I would have found it easier to cope with losing Toby if he had died of an illness ... he said to me "Your son did die of an illness, it was called depression."

Now, I might have thought (and you might think, as well), "if those three things helped her deal with her feelings of guilt, maybe they'll help me," which is an altogether reasonable -- and very hopeful -- assumption. In fact, for me, the awareness that my father died from the disease of depression was extraordinarily helpful in coping with my feelings of guilt.

However, when I go to the contents of the booklet and the handout, I find some ideas that do not line up -- for me -- with what is helpful regarding guilt. The booklet gives a prescription (tells me what to do, exactly) that I dont agree with, and the handout makes a bold statement about personal responsibility that I half agree with but half don't.

Even so, those items were obviously helpful to Anne (for she is recommending them to others). Would I recommend them to others? Absolutely, yes I would.

Why? Because if one survivor found them helpful, another might also find them helpful. The booklet was was written for the American Association of Suicidology by Jeffrey Jackson, who is a survivor of suicide loss, and the handout's author, LaRita Archibald, is a survivor and a leading expert in the field. Most of all, I would recommend them because, to come full circle, "Everybody's journey is different."

Nobody's way of grieving is right or wrong. Survivors who share what has been helpful to them, like Anne and Jeffrey and LaRita, are offering an invitation, as 12-Step groups say, to "take what you want and leave the rest." We are strengthened by our diversity -- by our sharing and our conversations about our differences -- as well as by our awareness of all that we have in common.

Jeff Lassater, in nothing more than a two-minute talk with StoryCorp, gives priceless testimony on the complex emotional texture of the aftermath of suicide.

His 14-year-old son, Jeremiah, died by suicide in 2008, and in Jeff's soft, clear voice, he tells us "the grief never goes away ... the guilt, you'll always have." I certainly get that. But even so, I hear in his words evidence of a man who is fighting the good fight, who -- in the very act of saying what he is saying -- is coping with his grief and dealing with his feelings.

"I was Jeremiah's parent," he says. "I was supposed to be his protector, so I'm the one that's responsible for that action." His declaration conjures up -- in the real voice of a real parent -- the tension between what caused his child's death and the responsibility he feels for his child's welfare. In those few words, he touches the heart of countless bereaved parents who struggle with what they did or didn't do. For me, the statement is not about fault or blame -- but about identity: I am the boy's father.

Jeff's closing lines reject the passage of time as a simple balm for grief:

You know, people say, "Well time heals everything." Not when it comes to this.

I understand his rejection of that trite saying, but it also makes me wonder how Jeff sees time now: What does the passage of time mean to him? Some measure of healing is evident in his work on the foundation he started in his son's name. Surely, other forces have healed him -- for he had the courage one day to step in front of a microphone and share a few hundred words of wisdom with the rest of us.

Two very different stories came out this week about parents who lost a child to suicide, and later, the parents themselves died by suicide.

In one -- a news report about a mother who never came back from her grief and killed herself nine months after her son died -- the mother's sister says,

"She talked about suicide every day since Mikey died. We took her to counseling and grief groups but she did not want to get better ... She wanted to be with Mikey."

In the other -- a first-person reflection about a father who broke down mentally and killed himself several years after his daughter died -- his other daughter writes,

Perhaps everyone has a breaking point. An incident or event that cannot be overcome, a moment in time that can never be erased. Most of us might get through life without encountering it, but my father was not so fortunate.

I have blogged several times about the aftermath of Matthew Warren's suicide -- first on how his death stirred fresh discussion about suicide in Christendom and then on how his father, Rick Warren, one of the most well known Christian clergymen in the world, announced upon his return to the pulpit that his "next big ministry push will be to remove the stigma associated with mental illness in the church."

Earlier this week, Rick and his wife, Kay, sat for an hourlong candid interview* with Piers Morgan on CNN. They reaffirmed their commitment to help change the landscape of mental illness in America (and in just a few sentences, Kay courageously made it clear that although Matthew died by suicide, he was killed by mental illness):

If you look at the risk factors of what puts people at risk for suicide, Matthew had almost none of the risk factors. He had a great, as you say, a loving family, he had the access to care, he had friends. He had everything ... The main risk factor for him was mental illness -- and he had that.

As important as their new ministry might be (and, indeed, people of their stature could champion a vital dialogue in the Christian church that might truly make a difference in how mental illness is viewed in the entire society), I am not going to focus on that in this current post -- for the fact is that the Grief after Suicide blog is not about suicide prevention or the mental health system, strictly speaking (although you will not find a more stalwart proponent of suicide prevention or of improving the mental health system than I). The reason this blog exists is to bring attention to a different topic, which is the urgent need -- as a society -- to give more and better support to people bereaved by suicide.

And Rick and Kay Warren's interview offers what I believe is an extraordinarily helpful (albeit painful to watch) and very intimate view of what happens to people when they suffer the death of loved one by suicide.

When I summarized a handful of reflections various representatives of the Christian faith offered about suicide in the wake of the suicide of the son of mega-church pastor Rick Warren, I found great hope in the compassion and understanding that was universally expressed by the commentators I quoted.

So I noted with interest an op-ed in the Houston Chronicle by a leading suicide researcher, Thomas Ellis, who commented on Warren's first sermon after his son's death four months ago. Ellis writes,

[Warren] resisted the urge to explain the unexplainable and instead delivered a sermon with a passionate call to action. His emphatic message was that neither suicide nor mental illness should be cause for shame; and he committed to his global audience to use his public ministry to eradicate the stigma associated with mental illness.

In her story "A Wound that Never Heals," reporter Madeline Novey of the Fort Collins Coloradoan shows how youth suicide affects families and also reverberates throughout a community. (See below for links to Novey's series of related articles.)

The story focuses on the parents of two 16-year-olds, Caroline Phelan-Jones, who died by suicide in 2008, and Antonio Franco, who killed himself just eight months ago.

"I still wake up every morning and think: How is she gone?" [Caroline's] mother, Jane Phelan, said through tears earlier this spring. She had a letter she read at the memorial service clasped between trembling fingers. If something like this could happen to her daughter, "it could happen to anyone."

In his son's absence, [Antonio's father] thinks of pilots trained to rely on their gauges when storms cloud their vision. "In his torrent, in his thunderstorm, in his rainstorm, despite all his instruments, he made a decision that ended his life."

Larimer County has seen 26 suicides by people 18 or younger in the past decade, and a 15-year-old boy from Fort Collins died of suicide in neighboring Jackson County. The losses have touched the entire community.

"It is an incredible ripple effect," said Linda Maher, who started volunteering with the Alliance for Suicide Prevention of Larimer County 15 years ago to help her daughter, then a [Poudre School District] student, cope with the loss of her 12-year-old friend.

If you have any interest at all in teenage boys and grief, this is a must read: Reporter John Faherty takes a rare look at the grief journeys of five boys in "The Rules of Grieving: They Are Still Boys." The teens have all lost parents (none of them died by suicide), and over the span of a school year, Faherty attended the monthly grief group at their high school. His in-depth story highlights 17-year-old Phillip Bryant, whose mother died when he was four years old and whose father died in 2012, as well as:

The Smallwood brothers, Chuck and William, lost their dad to liver disease in 2011. Chuck keeps his hair long. William keeps his short. Both think it is important that people know their father's liver disease was genetic, not because of drinking.

Andrew Kraus lost his father and still doesn't like to hear his name called out over the school intercom because that's how he was summoned to the office in January 2012. His mother was there and the news was bad.

Zach Deck's mother, Jaimie, died in 2010 when she was 32. She died suddenly, at home, after a blood clot broke loose and entered her lungs. Zach woke that night to the sound of a panicked call from his stepfather to 911. He still cringes each time he hears a siren.

Faherty's moving story is accompanied by brief and poignant videos (less than a minute long) from each of the boys, which give voice to a profound truth each has found in his grief. Phillip is also interviewed in a longer video, in which he says,

"I looked at death as a greater thing. It comes and goes as it pleases, and there's no stopping that ... If death comes ... it's for a reason. You leave for an ultimate goal. You don't know what it is, and you question why. You kind of learn to accept it, I guess."

For more information on resources for bereaved teenagers, see the Grief after Suicide post "Teen Resource Focuses on Grief from Teen's Perspective."