After Suicide

A few years ago I sat with a man as he told me a powerful story.

The evening of the day my son died, I felt numb. I felt unreal, only half aware of my surroundings. I have a vague memory that many people came to our house. Our friends and relatives brought food. They hugged us. They tried to think of things to say. It was supportive, but we were in a state of shock. I was in so much pain that frankly, I could not imagine ever functioning again. Part of me kept thinking: it has all been a mistake.

One event of that first night stands out for me. At some point in the evening a friend of mine from work came to our house with his wife. I did not know them well, but I did know that their daughter had killed herself several years earlier. When they came in, my wife and I went over to them and they hugged us. Together the four of us went into our family room, away from the others. We sat and cried and cried and cried. I forget what they said, but looking at them, I could say to myself: these two people went through this experience with their child. Now, several years later, they can manage. Their presence, more than anything they said or did, gave me a small, scant hope that sometime in the future I also might function again. In the midst of our bottomless emotional pain, the tangible presence of two people who appeared to have returned to some kind of normal life helped us.

Over twenty years of ministry, I have officiated at many memorial services. Sometimes these services deal with suicide and I talk with people who are living in the wake of a suicide. I wonder, how will they find comfort and hope? How will they manage over the next day or the next month or the next thirty years? I say to them: "I do not know what this must be like for you. Can you tell me what it is like?"

Then I listen. If I can show that I am listening, and if people are willing to talk, I can learn a great deal. They often tell me the things that have made it easier for them to cope with the suicide of a loved one.

I remember a woman's story.

About three months after her daughter's death she told me that the night after she heard of her daughter's death, she had a dream. In her dream her daughter came back to her and spoke. The daughter told her mother that she was okay, that the mother was not to worry about her. In the dream in a soft and gentle voice she said to the mother, "I am sorry."

When I awoke from the dream, I felt inside me that it was true. My daughter was okay. I was still angry. I still cried. However, I do not cry now for my daughter. My tears are for me, because I miss her. The dream I had the night after she died did help me cope with her death. The dream is not proof of life after death, but I have a feeling that my daughter's soul, her spirit, is not dead.

I remember a son's story.

He wrote that he was six when his mother died of suicide. He remembers that his dad came home and told him that his mother was ill. The father took the boy to a friend's house for a sleep over. The next day an uncle drove the child to a summer camp that his older brother was already attending. Realizing that something was wrong, the six-year-old cried himself to sleep. Ten days later when his father came to pick the two boys up from the camp the father said: "Remember that I told you that your mother was sick? Well, she died." Ten years later, a few moments before he was to get on a train to go to a summer job, the father said to the boy, now sixteen: "You know, don't you, that your mother killed herself."

Forty-five years later, looking back on this experience, this man wrote that for him a key to coping with his mother's suicide has been ending the taboo of silence.

When, at the age of sixteen, my father broke the news to me about my mother's suicide, it began to free all of us from the taboo of talking about death. I could ask questions . . . As the years passed, and I moved into my thirties and forties, I felt freer and freer to do so. Sorting out letters, memoirs, recollections, facts and myths, asking questions, and talking about suicide was all therapeutic . . . I would be dishonest if I said that I am a 'cured' survivor. I still feel strange talking about my mother's suicide. (It is the old taboo against talking: it is the hidden anger at those who abandoned me.) . . . But I am not as angry as I was . . . I do not feel stuck anymore.

I have received several letters and phone calls this week from members of this congregation.

Dear Roger,

My father committed suicide after years of alcoholism, and drug addiction. At first I held everything in -- our family never talked about the fact that there were problems. We did not tell people how he died. This was a typical alcoholic family pattern.

My healing began when I started working with a therapist who helped me deal with my rage, grief, the horror of what happened, and more. I met a woman at an Adult Children of Alcoholics meeting whose father had also committed suicide. It was the first time I met someone who had gone through what I had and it was very helpful.

I found healing and peace through facing my pain (with help) and through the love and support I have gotten from my husband, family and friends. I find it helpful to my healing to support others who have recently experienced suicide in their families.

I remember the story of a man whose elderly father died of suicide. Letting go of guilt was the key to helping this man cope.

The most important help for me was non-judgmental support. I got a call from the police that my father had taken his hunting rifle and gone out in the back yard and killed himself. After the shock, my first thought was that I should not have put off that visit I had been planning to make. The police showed me the note he had left, saying that he did not want to be a burden to his children. I felt sick with guilt. After the funeral my sister told me how sorry my dad was that I did not write or call more often.

One day, a few months after my dad's death, I volunteered to help at a suicide prevention center. I took several evenings of training. I had never done anything like that before in my life. Now once a week I go over and help by answering the phone. I am trying to make amends. In my imagination I say a prayer to my dad. I say "Dad, I love you. I am sorry I did not call or write or visit you more often " In my imagination I ask him to forgive me for not visiting more.

However, most important have been the words of a social worker with whom I work. She reminds me often that in the end I am not responsible for my father's behavior. Reminding myself of this helps me deal with my guilt.

Rituals also help. This week a man talked to me about the death by suicide of a close relative.

I find that it helps to set aside time every day to think about her. If I start to think about her in the morning, or at work during the day, I tell myself to set that thought aside until later. At 10:00 p.m. every evening I light a candle in her memory. I might put on some music, or read a poem, or write a letter to her. For half an hour each day I think about her. Then I blow out the candle and move on. I find this practice of trying to only focus on her and her death for thirty minutes each day has helped me cope.

One important way people have found to cope with suicide concerns this church. This week one of you wrote to me about the role this church has played in your own healing.

Dear Rev. Fritts,

My identical twin took her life nine years ago at the age of thirty-six. Apart from my husband, she was closer to me than anyone else. She showed no signs of serious depression or mental illness until five months before she died, so my family was shocked when the clinical depression and hospitalization set in. Even during the ten days that she was in the hospital, less than one month before her death, we were focused on getting her out of her despondency but not on her actually killing herself. We just did not

imagine that she would do that.

I was numb in grief when I returned to work at the NIH one week after the death. A colleague at work gave the name of the Seasons support group at the Cedar Lane Church. This was just days after that particular month's meeting, so I had to wait three long weeks to attend a Seasons meeting and meet with others who had experienced suicide of a loved one. When I went to the first meeting, I began to feel some comfort for the very first time. I attended monthly for the next sixteen or so months, and I do not know what I would have done without the discussions and sharing that went on there. Until those meetings, I felt that suicide only happens in weird families. However, the survivors at Seasons were not weird. In fact, people I once thought were friends turned weird on me when they found out about my sister. This made the understanding that I found at Seasons even more special.

That was my introduction to the Cedar Lane Church, and I started to attend services occasionally. Over the years I have participated in various discussion groups and events. Cedar Lane will always be very special to me for the comfort it provided me in my time of need. It continues to serve important needs of mine.

These are some ways people cope.

1. A man found it comforting to be in the presence of others who had gone through the same experience and somehow survived.



2. A woman found consolation in a dream in which her dead daughter came to her and told her that she was all right and that she was sorry.

1. A man found solace by breaking the taboo of silence surrounding his mother's death, and talking openly of her suicide.



2. A woman found help by spending time in therapy working through the feelings she felt about the death of her father.



3. A man coped with his guilt by working as a volunteer taking phone calls at a suicide prevention center.



4. A man found help in a daily ritual of remembrance.



5. And a woman found support in the group Seasons, which meets once a month here in our church.

In my own life I have a personal belief, which I cannot prove, that helps me cope with suicide. I believe that the will to live inside each of us is biological. In each of us chemicals cause us to want to stay alive in spite of the stress of life. For reasons we do not understand these chemicals are stronger in some of us than in others.

What we eat influences this will-to-live chemical that is inside us. Many suicide victims have drugs or alcohol in their bloodstream. The time of year may also influence this chemical. More suicides occur in the spring than any other time of year. Age may also influence this will-to-live chemical. The highest suicide rate is among the elderly.

Of course, emotional stress is also a factor in suicide. But why do some people seem able to endure great emotional stress while others are not able to? I believe it is for the same reason some of us are likely to get heart disease and others are not. It relates to the chemical makeup of our bodies.

I believe suicide is a physical disease. We are no more responsible for our friends and relatives having the disease called suicide than we

are for them having cancer or pneumonia. Stressful life events often bring on the impulse of suicide, but the root cause of the suicide is chemical. I hope that some day we will have medication that will greatly reduce the number of persons who die of suicide.

Meanwhile, there are some things we cannot fix. As long as we love, we are never completely free of feelings of loss. Nevertheless, it is possible, I believe, to be aware of the pain of loss and be joyful, be happy, and feel hope and faith. Yet if we can talk and cry and hug, over time we do heal. As Anne Sexton said, "There is joy in all. "

Closing Words

The fact is that when someone you have loved deeply dies you are diminished . . . Life, when fully lived, is always tinged by sadness, by the great hurt, the sense of primordial loss. Perhaps, in part, that is what so many religions have tried to convey with their myths of the fall, of some archaic moment when the ancient harmonies were disturbed, never to be restored. But the same religions also present the myths of salvation, in which the promise is made that by embracing life, with all its hurts and disappointments and sorrows, we are not restored to innocence but are graced with the ability to live richly with the dark realities of existence.

David Bumbaugh

Ideas and examples in this sermon came in part from:

Chance, Sue, Stronger Than Death, When Suicide Touches Your Life, 1992.

Hammer, Signe, By Her Own Hand, Memories of a Suicide's Daughter, 1991.

Lukas, Chris, and Seiden, Henry, Silent Grief, Living in the Wake of Suicide, 1988.

Osmont, Kelly, What Can I Say?, 1988.

Robinson, Rita, Survivors of Suicide, 1989.

Schiff, Harriet, The Bereaved Parent, 1977.

Schiff, Harriet, Living Through Morning, 1986.

Wrobleski, Adina, Suicide: Why?, 1989.

Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church
9601 Cedar Lane, Bethesda, Maryland 20814-4099
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e-mail: office@CedarLane.org
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