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Comforting the Suicide Bereaved (part two)

June 14, 2013 by Marjorie Antus

After a painful divorce, Val Walker thought moving back to her hometown would be a warm return to family and friends. After settling in, though, she soon realized how “disappointingly unforthcoming” people were acting toward her. “I was not automatically invited to parties, reunions, and gatherings . . . . But I was offered plenty of advice, platitudes, opinions and cheer about how to move forward with my new life.”

By the time an old friend came to visit for several days, Val had learned to hide her neediness. But it came out one morning when, burning herself in the kitchen, she dropped a frying pan full of grease, threw the spatula against a wall, kicked sausages all over the floor, and finally collapsed in tears.

Her friend, a psychotherapist, sat down on the floor with her and listened for an hour before they moved to a sofa and talked “nonstop” into the night. It was a turning point. “[My friend] offered me something that few professionals or laypeople are willing or even able to offer: She allowed me to fall apart in her presence. She didn’t judge me, diagnose me, hire me or fire me, fix me, bill me, instruct me, save me, or heal me. . . . She just sat with me amid the mess in my kitchen, the mess in my life, and the mess in my heart and allowed me to be in my pain . . . she just sat and held it all together with her mere presence.”

How to comfort the suicide bereaved is an ongoing concern for almost everyone I’ve spoken to over the years about my daughter Mary’s suicide. People tell me they truly don’t know what to say. That’s just as well, because comfort isn’t a matter of saying anything. It’s a matter of being present to the person in distress. Sitting on a greasy kitchen floor and listening to someone fall apart requires a depth of presence most of us could not offer. But it remains possible for us to hold it together for the suicide bereaved by offering our listening presence in whatever way we can, even if only for a moment. (Val Walker.The Art of Comforting: What to Say and Do for People in Distress. New York: Jeremy Tarcher/Penguin, 2010, viii, x, xiii.)

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Suicide Grief as Gift

June 7, 2013 by Marjorie Antus

Within hours of their son Mitch’s suicide, a psychiatrist friend told Iris and Jack Bolton, “There is a gift for you in your son’s death. You may not believe it at this bitter moment, but it is authentic and it can be yours if you are willing to search for it.”

“I gasped,” writes Iris. “[Dr. Maholic] was saying that my pain was a gift, that the dislocation of so many lives . . . was a gift.” Considering her emotional state at that moment–“numb, devastated, embarrassed, and wishing for my own death”–it’s remarkable Iris remembered anything her psychiatrist friend told her that afternoon.

“This gift will not jump out at you or thrust itself into your life,” the doctor added. “You must search for it. As time passes, you will be amazed at unanticipated opportunities for helping yourself and others that will come your way, all because of Mitch. Today you need to condemn him . . . but one day you will be able to acknowledge his gift.”

At the time, Iris was director of The Link Counseling Center in Atlanta, a private, non-profit headquarters for family therapy. Eventually, she began speaking locally about suicide beareavement and then enrolled in graduate school at Emory University to study suicidology. One outcome was her book, My Son, My Son: A Guide to Healing After Death, Loss, or Suicide.

In that work, Iris describes what she finally recognized as Mitch’s gift to his family. “For one thing, we all value each other more. . . . We are not always efficient or perfect. Nor do we always do well or wisely. Yet, despite all our blunders, failures, and mistakes, we manage to cope. And to cope–with love.”

“The meaning I have found in my son’s suicide,” she writes, “is to realize that life is tenuous for us all, so I have the choice of making every minute count with my family from now on and valuing them and friends and life in a way I never did before.”

When my daughter Mary died by suicide in 1995, no one dared mention the possibility of gift. I would have rejected the idea as tasteless bordering on cruel. But “suicide” and “gift” can inhabit the same sentence, I now see, even if seeing takes hope, work, and years to become clear (Atlanta: Bolton Press, 1996, 16-17, 95, 102-103).

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Suicide Grief as Medicine

May 31, 2013 by Marjorie Antus

On the day their son died by self-inflicted gunshot, Iris Bolton and her husband Jack received a visitor who gave them unforgettable advice. That is to say, on a day of emotional chaos with phone and doorbell ringing, neighbors overflowing couches and sitting on the floor, someone offering Iris a stiff drink–on that day, a psychiatrist friend took the Boltons into a quiet room and offered wisdom.

In her classic work called My Son, My Son, Iris writes about Dr. Maholick first describing the grief stages she and Jack were bound to experience–the shock, denial, guilt, anger and depression that “come with the territory” of grief. “And then he added an extra dimension to his counseling that seemed at that moment utterly beyond belief: ‘. . . this crisis can be used to bring your family closer together than ever,’ he said. ‘If you use this opportunity wisely, you can survive and be a stronger unit than before.'”

When Iris asked how such a result could be brought about, the doctor provided a formula. “Make every decision together throughout this crisis. Hear every voice. Work for consensus. Never exclude your children during these next few days. . . . Discuss each problem openly, treating each individual equally regardless of age or experience. . . Grief of itself is a medicine when you are open about it. Only secret grief is harmful. Through mutual helping, you will all heal more rapidly . . .” (My Son, My Son: A Guide to Healing After Death, Loss, or Suicide. Atlanta: Bolton Press, 1996, 16)

My daughter Mary’s suicide in 1995 left a family of four–my husband John and I along with a 21-year-old son and an 11-year-old daughter. While I subscribe to the doctor’s counsel about a family pulling together after devastation, and while I agree that openness is one remedy for devastation, I think Dr. Maholick understates the effect of shock following suicide. My kids were at a loss for words; John and I were at a loss for words. There were no words after Mary died.

Still, John and I knew we had to put ourselves and our kids in a room with a therapist each week for many months and allow pain and bewilderment to surface. We didn’t ask our kids ahead of time if they thought this togetherness would be helpful. But to their everlasting credit, they went along with it. I’d like to think that, taking the medicine together, we helped each other through the crisis and healed more rapidly. As with most aspects of suicide bereavement, I accept not knowing for sure. But I do know my family survived. We’re in touch; we vacation together as often as we can.

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Walking Out of the Darkness

May 22, 2013 by Marjorie Antus

Among healing rituals for those bereaved by suicide, the most imaginative I’ve heard about is the “Out of the Darkness Walk”–an annual event organized by the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. This year, the walk will take place from sunset June 1 to sunrise June 2 over a course of some eighteen miles in Washington, D.C.

Many participants are either suicide survivors or attempters who walk to emphasize suicide as a national health concern, heighten awareness of the need for suicide prevention, and raise funds for both research and prevention. What makes the event unique–even biblical–is its offer of a communal passage from darkness to light.

“By walking from sunset to sunrise,” says executive director of the foundation Robert Gebbia, “walkers make a powerful statement about suicide–that there is hope, a light at the end of the tunnel for those affected. It’s emotional but also very uplifting. . . and, in some ways, liberating because many people have not talked about this; and all of a sudden they’re with other people who understand because they’ve been through the same thing” (Arlington Catholic Herald. May 16-22, 2013, p. 7).

Regarding the June event, the foundation’s website states, “We’ll prove to the capital and to the nation What a Difference a Night Makes.

Less dramatic but no less essential, three–five mile “Out of the Darkness Walks” take place in communities all across the United States during autumn daylight hours. (www.afsp.org.) It’s customary to form a team that walks in a person’s memory and even, it would seem, to wear a shirt bearing that person’s name.

My daughter Mary left us in the dark of the night after overdosing on her anti-depressant medication when she was a senior in high school. But the mere thought of putting on a “Team Mary” shirt and walking out of darkness in the company of the courageous helps to reverse the damage of that night in 1995.

Truly, I won’t be walking eighteeen miles in D.C. on the first night of June. I honor and thank those who do walk and pledge that, in time, I’ll make a daytime walk on behalf of Mary and the tens of thousands of Americans who die each year by suicide.

Posted in healing, honoring suicide victims, remembering suicide victims, suicide prevention | Leave a Comment »

A Priest Friend Remembers Mary

May 10, 2013 by Marjorie Antus

At the end of Mass one morning about a year ago, our celebrant announced the presence among us of a deacon who was to be ordained a Roman Catholic priest the next weekend in the Diocese of Richmond. Hearing Joe introduced to the faith community, I recognized his name as one my daughter Mary had mentioned occasionally in high school. There was the day she laughed about Joe pulling a harmless prank on the way home from school and the day she happily recounted the exact way he turned his name into a punchline when questioned by the school cafeteria monitor about misbehavior.

At least sometimes, Joe brought lightheartedness to my daughter; and that was reason enough to introduce myself after Mass. We talked about his upcoming ordination and a few of the life events leading to that holy outcome. Mary was in the conversation, too, in her own holy way. “No, I’ve never forgotten Mary,” Joe finally offered. It was a nice thing for him to say.

A few days after his ordination, though, I got a fuller sense of what Joe meant. “I carried Mary with me throughout the ordination,” he said. As the bishop imposed hands on Joe’s head, prayed, and conferred spiritual power and grace upon him, Joe was keeping Mary present in memory. For a Catholic girl ending her life at the age of seventeen–a sublime embrace.

“I’ve never forgotten Mary” took on added richness when Joe and I addressed a roomful of teens about suicide months later at a diocesan youth conference. “We’re here today to give this difficult topic a little air,” he told the high schoolers, “and to hear your concerns.” He added that the motivation was Mary. “People who die by suicide think they’ll be forgotten. When Mary died, I was sixteen years old and dumbfounded. But I pledged never to forget her.”

A priest’s resolution not to forget meant several dozen teens got to hear about mood disorders and suicidal thinking and what to do and where to turn. They paid attention and asked questions, some hesitantly and with tears.

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Looking for Good-bye

April 30, 2013 by Marjorie Antus

Several days ago, a moving van pulled up across the street and men started unloading the home my neighbors had lived in for fifteen years. I thought maybe the neighbors were renovating and would be moving back in a couple months. “No,” said one son with a grin, “we’re moving, but only a few blocks away.” Even while congratulating Jack, I was saddened by the news. “Why is this move so troubling to me? I’ll still see these folks at Mass on Sundays, and it’s not as though they owed me a good-bye.”

It’s just this: someone did once owe me a good-bye she never gave–my teenage daughter Mary who died by suicide in 1995. Watching neighbors move last week was all it took to renew my sense of abandonment that, while attempting to soothe over the years, I continue to have and hold.

“To the extent that survivors construe the suicide as a willful choice on the part of the deceased,” write clinical scholars John Jordan and John McIntosh, “it may engender profound feelings of . . . abandonment in the mourner. . . ” (Grief After Suicide: Understanding the Consequences and Caring for the Survivors. New York: Routledge, 2011, p. 183).

But I’ve spent years pushing back against the notion of willfulness in Mary’s suicide. I now think she had no choice, given her hopelessness. Just the same, I carry the sting of “no good-bye” right beneath the surface, readily activated.

In Blue Genes: A Memoir of Loss and Survival, Christopher Lukas writes about family suicides and the abandonment he felt and still feels after a relative’s suicide. He describes his experience as an adolescent upon learning that his mother’s death was, in fact, a suicide: “Stunned is what I felt–stunned and startled and hurt. I was furious at Mother. She had taken her own life and abandoned me in the process” (New York: Anchor Books, 2008, p. 138).

About his brother’s suicide in 1997, Lukas writes, “He did not kill himself to hurt me and the others who were his friends. . . But I cannot let go of the fact that by leaving without saying good-bye, he left me, once more, all alone” (p. 244).

I will look for a way to say good-bye to my neighbors just as I’ve looked for a way to say good-bye to Mary. It’s what suicide survivors do. It’s something that can be done.

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The Long Shadows of Suicide Grief

April 23, 2013 by Marjorie Antus

“The suicide of a loved one irrevocably transforms us,” wrote Carla Fine after the suicide of her husband. “Our world explodes and we are never the same. Most of us adapt, eventually learning to navigate on ground we no longer trust to be steady. We gradually come to accept that our questions will not be answered. We try not to torture ourselves . . .” (No Time to Say Good-bye: Surviving the Suicide of a Loved One. New York: Broadway Books, 1997, p. 20).

Others, too, characterize suicide bereavement as life-altering. “Being a suicide survivor becomes an integral part of one’s identity,” explains Karen Mueller Bryson. “I feel as though an entire segment of my life was defined by my father’s suicide. It colored everything that followed. The tragedy seemed to be like a musical score always playing underneath the action of my life” (Those They Left Behind. 2006, pp. iii-iv).

Pychiatric professor Kay Redfield Jamison describes suicide bereavement as “a half-stitched scar,” adding this note of clarity: “Time does not heal, / It makes a half-stitched scar / That can be broken and again you feel / Grief as total as in its first hour” (Night Falls Fast: understanding suicide. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999, p.290).

“Suicide,” writes grief educator Harold Ivan Smith, “initiates the long shadow on survivors left to wander across the fragile landscapes of the heart toward a magic kingdom called ‘Answerland.’ Suicide, like a volcano’s lava flow, changes everything in its path” (A Long-Shadowed Grief: Suicide and Its Aftermath. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Cowley Publications, 2006, p. 3.).

Given the profound turbulence following suicide, how does anyone manage? Carla Fine speaks of the “mystery and power” of her will to survive her husband’s suicide as a “testament” to his memory that she wants to honor throughout her life (pp. 222,224). Kay Redfield Jamison offers a single line of poetry to the bereaved: “Look to the living, love them, and hold on” (p. 311).

Harold Ivan Smith extends his “long shadow” metaphor to include divine compassion. “Suicide is the long shadow . . . but a shadow can exist only if somewhere a bright light shines.” He prays, and I with him, that God “sees my wounds, hears my pains, and invades my sorrow with hope” (p. 13).

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The “Whys” of Suicide Bereavement

April 11, 2013 by Marjorie Antus

To those bereaved by suicide, grief educator Harold Ivan Smith sometimes says, “‘I know what you’re looking for–some definite there answer that ends the questioning–but what answer will you settle for?'”

As veteran suicide survivors know, there is no answer to “Why?” that puts an end to questioning. That isn’t to say survivors must therefore give over their lives to constant interrogation.

“I believe there are three levels of why’s,” writes Smith, “Initial, transitional, and transformative. If a survivor will not settle for the first explanation that ‘comes down the pike,’ there is hope, in time, of a fuller explanation.”

For example, initial why’s begin right after the suicide and are usually met with responses, not answers, from kind people who don’t know what to say. “She’s in a better place” and “Maybe she’s found what she was looking for” are responses I received after Mary’s suicide that, well-intended, fell short of answering the question that, in truth, no one could adequately address.

The answers to transitional why’s are, according to Smith, like rough drafts under constant revision that take time and openness to reality. For me, those were the “Aha” moments years in the making which helped me say, “Okay, I understand a little better now.” One “Aha” moment arrived on a country road late one night just after I ran over a cat. Even though seven years had passed since Mary’s suicide, that destructive roadway event made me soften my “why” answer. There were many “Aha” moments like that throughout my years of asking and trying to answer why, most of them coming as a gift in the form of a surprise.

Transformative why’s are those which, because lived each day, have the power to effect profound change. “Some suicide survivors refuse to accept ‘getting over it’ as a spiritual goal,” writes Smith. “They do not resonate with ‘getting beyond this’ or ‘moving on with life.’ Rather . . . the goal becomes to move into the maelstrom, the chaos, like a plane flying into the eye of a hurricane. They ask the Genesis question, ‘Can order come from this chaos?'” and finally, for asking with their lives, do themselves bring about order (A Long-Shadowed Grief: Suicide and Its Aftermath. Cambridge, Mass: Cowley Publications, 2006, pp. 30, 33, 36).

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Clinicians are Suicide Survivors, Too

April 5, 2013 by Marjorie Antus

I recall running into Dr. Matthews, my daughter Mary’s psychiatrist, some months after Mary’s suicide. She was someone I had always admired; and even to this day, my physician husband claims that she (now deceased) was the best psychiatrist he’s ever worked with professionally.

On the day in question, Dr. Matthews was wearing an expensive suit, her hair was nicely styled, and she exuded confidence. Resenting her for all of it, I began asking myself about justice. As in, how could a doctor with direct responsibility for Mary’s welfare go on living in such a nice, orderly way? After all, I wasn’t living in a nice, orderly way. My life was the opposite of nice and orderly, and the contrast was galling.

Years have passed, and now I see how wrong my perception was that day. Just because the severity of her grief makes a mother believe she is suffering at a uniquely profound level doesn’t mean that she is. Other survivors, including clinicians, also undergo unique, profound suffering.

“Twin bereavement” is the term researchers use on behalf of clinicians. “In addition to the personal grief reaction entailed in losing a client with whom there was a therapeutically intense or intimate relationship, this loss is likely to affect clinicians’ professional identities, their relationships with colleagues, and their clinical work” (John R. Jordan and John McIntosh, Eds. Grief After Suicide: Understanding the Consequences and Caring for the Survivors. New York: Routledge, 2011, p. 95).

Other researchers have found that mental health therapists describe losing a client “as the most profoundly disturbing event of their professional careers,” noting that a third of the therapists “experienced severe distress that lasted at least one year beyond the initial loss” (Ibid).

Though seventeen years late, I’m saying, “Sorry, Dr. Matthews.” I finally grasp how hurt we all were, you not least. I finally get that we were all doing our best to survive Mary’s death. I finally realize your way was to put on a nice suit and see your patients hour after hour, same as always.

Posted in anger, forgiveness, suicide bereavement | 2 Comments »

A Catholic Priest on Suicide (part four)

March 30, 2013 by Marjorie Antus

“He descended into hell. On the third day he rose again.” This statement represents the fifth of twelve articles of Christian faith set forth in the Apostles’ Creed written in the early centuries of the Roman Catholic Church.

“Scripture calls the abode of the dead, to which the dead Christ went down, ‘hell’–Sheol in Hebrew or Hades in Greek–because those who are there are deprived of the vision of God,” explains the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

“Jesus did not descend into hell to deliver the damned,” it states, “nor to destroy the hell of damnation, but to free the just who had gone before him,” adding, “The descent into hell brings the Gospel message of salvation to complete fulfillment” (New York: Doubleday, 1995, #633-4).

In one of his 1985 columns, Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI, expanded on Christ’s descent into hell by applying it to the tragedy of suicide. “Jesus still descends into hell, entering closed hearts, to breathe peace and love in places where there is huddling in fear and hurt,” he writes. “Most suicide victims are trapped persons, caught up in a private emotional hell which is an illness and not a sin. Their suicide is a desperate attempt to end unendurable pain, much like a man whose clothing has caught fire might throw himself through a window. They are not, on the other side, met by our human judgments, but by a heart, a companion, a love . . .” (“Suicide, Despair, and Compassion,” http://www.ronrolheiser.com May 1, 1985)

Regarding Christ’s descent into hell, the Catechism offers Easter hope by quoting from a document it calls Ancient Homily for Holy Saturday: “Greatly desiring to visit those who live in darkness and in the shadow of death, [our Lord] has gone to free from sorrow Adam in his bonds and Eve, captive with him–He who is both their God and the son of Eve . . . . ‘I am your God, who for your sake have become your son . . . . I order you, O sleeper, to awake. I did not create you to be a prisoner in hell. Rise from the dead, for I am the life of the dead'” (Catechism, #635).

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