“The white petals will be darkened with sea water. They will float for a moment and then sink. Rolling over the waves will shoulder me under. Everything falls in a tremendous shower, dissolving me.” —Virginia Woolf, 1931
My husband took his life on February 6, 2000. Days go by now when I don’t think about it. Almost two decades ago, I could not have imagined writing these words: that I don’t think of Wayne’s death every day and do not inwardly see—intrusively, continually—the image of him at death. I was so overwhelmed with grief back then, I didn’t want to live. I remember once contemplating the fatal 'accidents' I might manage to bring about for myself. Could I be in a terrible wreck? Could I go late at night to a street corner in a dangerous inner city and wait? (No, I concluded, after some minutes of serious thought. With my luck I’d be beaten and left for dead, but I would survive.) This was my anguish, that I had to live through the horror of this death, that I had no choice. And these feelings did not lessen in a matter of months, as many people seemed to expect.
Eventually I struggled to fit in, laughing when I should laugh, smiling when I should smile. I became so adept at putting on a false front, one of my friends remarked after two years that I was almost back to normal. Trust me; after two years I was not the okay person she imagined. I felt locked in an invisible prison, carrying out a sentence for a crime I did not commit. I found a therapist who gave up trying to do therapy with me. He let me come to his office after his other appointments and just cry, which I sometimes did for hours at the time. This was happening after two years, and none of my friends knew it. This was almost back to normal.
When Wayne died, I tried to find reading materials on suicide, hoping friends and family could understand the huge battle I was fighting just to live. But there wasn’t anything, really, that would help a friend get it. Some friends vanished; a few made jokes about suicide, perhaps to relieve their own awkwardness, or asked questions that left me reeling. Some even participated in the gossip that swirled around me like bats in a cave. But others were there, present and quiet, doing what they could, and these are the friends to whom I owe my life—the ones who did not leave or make an unspeakable circumstance even worse. This website is about how you can be that kind of friend. I’ve posted in a few places the essay on faith (below), in hopes website visitors will easily find it. I wrote it for a journal, Mockingbird, which uses as one of its framing principles a quotation from writer Jack Kerouac, “Nothing else in the world matters but the kindness of grace, God’s gift to suffering mortals.” I think life’s hardest times result almost inevitably in the shaking of our most strongly held beliefs. Either resolving or resigning ourselves to the questions is a challenge at very heart of significant loss.
Click the cover to read.
More Information
American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (afsp.org)—Useful, well-organized, user-friendly website
Columbia Recovery Center Resource Guide—I usually don’t post links to facilities, but this list is truly useful.
Headsupguys.org—Great article about facing the suicide of a friend on this link; helpful website.
Suicide Prevention Lifeline —Network of crisis centers throughout the country
National Alliance on Mental illness (NAMI)
National Institute of Mental Health —Suicide Prevention
Save: Suicide Awareness, Voices of Education
verywellmind —Includes many mental health issues; the link is for the depression page; contains many quick-to-read articles on everything from foods and vitamins that help with depression to finding a therapist
Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance —Link opens to the page on how to help a person in crisis
Students Against Depression —Website that may be more attractive to younger people, "by students for students" started by the families of two young people who took their own lives
Families for Depression Awareness (familyaware.org)—Packed with links, not overwhelming, well designed and organized
Blurt (blurtitout.org)—Believe it or not, an uplifting website on depression
Gregg Zoroya, “40,000 Suicides Annually, Yet America Simply Shrugs, USA Today, 2018 (4-chapter section of a series well worth reading.)
“One fact about suicide that research has firmly established is that reducing access to lethal means reduces suicide. The result has been a national initiative to erect barriers at sites where suicides occur, most prominently a $76 million project to build steel nets along the Golden Gate Bridge. A record 46 suicides occurred there last year.”
Newsletter: How to Help a Teen with Depression, Medical News Today
Marcia Gelman Resnick, “How I Survived the Suicide of My Son,” American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, September 20, 2019
“Many people feel guilty after the loss of a loved one to suicide. You might think, “I should have done more, or done things differently.” Our children did not come with instructions. Know you did the best you could. We would give our own lives to have our children back. It was not within our control. Taking one’s life is not a rational decision.”
Roni Jacobson, “Robin Williams: Depression Alone Rarely Causes Suicide,” Scientific American, August 13, 2014
“A number of other factors can contribute to suicide risk—poverty, for one, family history of suicide, for another. But the tragedy of Williams’s death should remind us that the most debilitating and life-threatening mood disorders can strike anyone, and once they do, it can be awfully hard to find release.”
“Suicide Survivors Face Grief, Questions, Challenges,” Harvard Health Publishing, October 29, 2015
“‘What if’ questions can arise after any death. What if we’d gone to a doctor sooner? What if we hadn’t let her drive to the basketball game? After a suicide, these questions may be extreme and self-punishing — unrealistically condemning the survivor for failing to predict the death or to successfully intervene. In such circumstances, survivors tend to greatly overestimate their own contributing role — and their ability to affect the outcome.”
Karen Kaplan, “Teens Taunted by Bullies Are More Likely to Consider, Attempt Suicide," The Los Angeles Times, March 10, 2014
“Previous studies had reported that cyberbullying could be just as bad as traditional bullying. But this time, the researchers found cyberbullying was actually worse — being bullied in person increased one’s risk for suicidal ideation by a factor of 2.16, while being bullied via email, via text messages or in videos posted on the Internet raised the risk by a factor of 3.12.’ This might be because with cyberbulling, victims may feel they’ve been denigrated in front of a wider audience,’ study leader Mitch van Geel said in an interview posted on the JAMA Pediatrics website. In addition, he said, ‘material can be stored online, which may cause victims to relive the denigrating experience more often.’”
Ian Parker, "The Story of a Suicide," The New Yorker, February 6, 2012 (Also about the link between bullying and suicide)
“They never saw any sign of depression, and can’t even see it retrospectively. ‘As a parent, what it says to me is that what you think you know, you don’t know,’ Joseph Clementi said. ‘And that’s a hard thing, because we all think, I know what my kid’s up to. You don’t.’ ”On the night Jane Clementi learned that Tyler was gay, she said, ‘I told him not to hurt himself.’ Not long before, a girl from his school had committed suicide. ‘We had talked about it briefly that summer, and for some reason that thought came to mind. And all I said was ‘Don’t hurt yourself,’ and he looked me right in the eye and he laughed, and said, ‘I would never do anything like that.’”
Scott Anderson, “The Urge to End It All,” The New York Times Magazine, July 6, 2008
“‘What was immediately apparent,’ Rosen recounted, ‘was that none of them had truly wanted to die. They had wanted their inner pain to stop; they wanted some measure of relief; and this was the only answer they could find. They were in spiritual agony, and they sought a physical solution.’”