SUICIDE THROWS FAMILIES INTO GRIEF, COMMUNITIES INTO SHOCK

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.

Misha Zimmerman, a fellow student of one of the boys who died, wrote "Eulogy for a Young Poet," a stark poem about a loss that was felt throughout the local high school:


Charlie Carter, a local school district administrator, poignantly summarized the impact of suicide on everyone:

"I don't think we ever completely heal, because when part of our community is missing, we always feel that," [he] said ... "It never goes away ... It cycles back. It's not a finite event. It is for the person, but not for those left behind."

Novey (the Coloradoan reporter) digs even deeper into how the after-effects of suicide infiltrate an entire school district in a follow-up article titled "Life-Changing Texts, Empty Desks." And Novey's series on the topics of suicide loss and suicide prevention can be found here.