SURVIVOR OUTLOOK: 'When they say there are no words, there are no words.'

2/15/2014

"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 to suggest a story.

"I'm still trying to process Karen's loss, and move forward ... and now [another student has died by suicide]. I'm numb. When they say there are no words, there are no words." Lila McCain, Massachusetts, lost her daughter, Karen, a high school senior, to suicide last fall.

"In my made-up version of the story, he didn't fake it. He got the zombie virus and did what he had to do to save us all. That's just easier to face than the real-life zombies of the plague that is depression." Mortbane's Miscellany blogger, who lost her father to suicide five-and-a-half years ago.

"It was very hard to take. Back then there was a huge stigma attached to mental illness, and it compounded my mother's grief that nobody would even mention James's name afterwards." Liam Brazil, County Waterford, Ireland, lost his brother, James, 35, to suicide 25 years ago.

"I spent most of my days in a daydream state of mind, believing that every time I saw a shadow or a figure that resembled my son, he would be back home to be with his mum soon." Annie Mitchell, Scotland, lost her son, "Finlay," 26, to suicide in 2000 (see her book Holding Back the Tears).

I will "not be afraid, in Christopher's name, to tell his story and to tell our story ... A man took his life because the pain in his brain was unrelenting." George Smitherman, Ontario, Canada, lost his husband, Christopher, 40, to suicide in December 2013.

"We choose to remember Maggie by the wonderful manner in which she lived and not the tragic way in which she died." Charlotte Moyler, Williamsburg, Va., lost her daughter, Maggie, 17, to suicide two years ago.

"The best thing [my wife Alex and I] found was a support group of people who had suicide in their lives, so it wasn't psychologists but just other people who had experienced the same thing as us." Jim Paterson, Adelaide, Australia, lost his son, Rowan, 18, to suicide in 2010. (See the Patersons' CD with The Borderers).

"We need to look outside of the box and try something new, something different -- like looking at rejection, identity, and suicide together." Robin Theis, Hillsdale County, Mich., lost her 31-year-old son to suicide in 2009. (See her book Surrendered Identity.)

"Please seek therapy if you need it. This is not a weakness, but a struggle." James Holleran, Allendale, N.J., lost his daughter, Madison, 19, to suicide on Jan. 17.

"Mental illness is a disease. Addiction is a disease. And losing someone to it is tragic, but it does not make them, or us, weak. All we can do is rest in the knowledge that their fight is over and try to leave room in our hearts for the knowledge that whatever length of time they managed to fight this disease was heroic." Tresa Edmunds, Modesto, Calif., lost someone close to her to suicide last month.

2 Comments

Gabrielle Maxworthy

2/16/2014 09:21:11

It has take 16 months to get to this point, of being able to talk or write it down. Not a day goes by where he isn't in my thoughts. I understand depression, as it had a nasty grip on me, through lossing him ive found the strengh to save me. This is hard for me to understand as I feel like this had to happen for me to start to fight for myself again. I wished he had of known just how much he was truely loved and that he wasn't alone with this.
I lost my dear Uncle to sucide on 10/10/2011. I saw him, i keep seeing him but i will never forgot the lesson that is to be learned here - never feel alone, cause your not & be brave enough to say how your feeling, it just might help where you least expect it too.

Mortbane link

3/20/2014 02:19:52

Thank you for the snippet. I just noticed one of my accounts had an anniversary today and did a search for my far-flung Miscellany pages. I found this and I appreciate that somebody found it relevant and useful. Yeah, it's a pretty messed up thought, zombies and such. It was hard to be around my usual friends for a while. We were always grim and liked things like zombies, vampires, horror movies... It wasn't that the topics were hard for me to face, but when one of them would realize that something they said, or something on a movie, might have been insensitive, I could feel them tense up to see if I was going to be okay. You don't realize how often our culture makes suicide jokes until it's a part of your life. Cartoons where the character is bored to tears and puts two fingers to their head like a gun. It's everywhere. My boyfriend at the time of the ordeal had lost his mother to leukemia about a month before we met. He sought me out as a friend because his friends were sort of walking on eggshells with him. Definitely makes you wary of "yo mama" jokes, but eventually these things become biographical fact and we find ways to cope so that we can laugh again. There will always be a part of us that is reminded of our loved one, but we understand that our history isn't at the forefront of every person's mind when they are saying these things. It gets easier.

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SURVIVOR OUTLOOK: 'When they say there are no words, there are no words.'

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