My friend Sharon was a survivor of suicide loss herself, and knew I needed to connect with other parents who had lost children to suicide. She also knew that my organizational skills make me a natural coordinator and administrator, the type of person you automatically ask to plan a meeting, or balance a budget, or type up minutes. So, in that second year after Columbine, Sharon put me to work. She invited me to join a small group of women who volunteered for the Suicide Prevention Coalition of Colorado.
Walking into the first meeting, I was scared sick. Would these people judge me? I didn’t dare to hope they’d understand what Dylan had done, let alone what I had experienced. Ten minutes later, I was sitting around a kitchen table with five other mothers of children lost to suicide, tying raffia bows onto flowerpots containing forget-me-not seed packets. There was no discrimination in that room—nothing but love, and compassion, and an all-too-recognizable grief. (Three of the six women at the table—half—would also survive breast cancer, which strengthened my admittedly unscientific theory about what happens when a bomb goes off in your heart.) The tension I usually felt in the company of others melted away. The opportunity to grieve for Dylan as my son, no matter what he had done in the final moments of his life, was valuable beyond description.
I recently read an article in the New York Times by a therapist, Patrick O’Malley. He describes the respite one of his patients found at a support group for bereaved parents, despite her initial resistance. The group was “a place where no acting was required. It was a place where people understood that they didn’t really want to achieve closure after all. To do so would be to lose a piece of a sacred bond.” When I was with other survivors, Dylan was a boy who had died by suicide. Nobody was excusing what he had done, but they weren’t discounting my grief, either, or my right to miss the son I had lost.
The next weekend, I attended a luncheon hosted by the Suicide Prevention Coalition of Colorado, the group Sharon chaired; our forget-me-nots were on the tables. For the first time, I was in a room filled with people who could relate to all my feelings, the ones that made me feel like I was hanging on to sanity by the merest thread.
I didn’t need to tell the people in that room that I hadn’t known what Dylan was thinking or planning. That place was all too familiar to them. “Bottom line: when someone lies to you, you feel like a fool,” a woman said, and I startled myself with a ragged sob. (One thing about a suicide loss survivors’ event? You’re never the only person crying.) They understood the humiliation I felt at being duped, and the shame of knowing that I had not been able to help my child precisely when he had needed me most.
As I’d done with Celia, I scrutinized everyone I met for some indication of the underlying problem that had brought this nightmare upon them. Did this mother seem cold or checked-out? Did this dad seem abusive, or neglectful? Was there some identifying characteristic that would brand these people—and, by extension, myself—as deficient in some way? This was, of course, the way people scrutinized me.
But the people I met there were nice, smart, funny, kind—normal. Their stories poured out of them. They were elementary school teachers, social workers, truck drivers, dentists, pastors, stay-at-home moms. They had been active, attentive parents, sisters, husbands, wives, and children. They had deeply loved the person they lost. Like me, many of them had misread indicators of something drastically amiss.
Suicide is ugly. It’s wreathed in disgrace. It screams to the world that a person’s life ended in failure. Most people don’t even want to hear about it. As a culture, we believe that people who die by suicide are weak, that they lack willpower, that they’ve taken “the coward’s way out.” We believe that they are selfish, and have acted aggressively. If they cared about their families/spouses/work, they would have found a way to think themselves out of the spiral they were in. None of this is true, and yet the taint is pervasive and shared by the surviving families. Bewilderment, guilt, regret, and self-castigation are constant companions for a survivor of suicide loss.
One afternoon, I had lunch with an old friend—not a suicide loss survivor—who asked me, “Can you ever forgive Dylan for what he did?” I sat silent, dumbstruck, seeing how radically our lives had diverged. All I could think of was the scene in Ordinary People where Buck’s wet hand slips out of Conrad’s, and Buck drowns. I composed my thoughts so I could say what I felt without sounding defensive: “Forgive Dylan? My work is to forgive myself.” Like Buck, Dylan had slipped out of my grip. I was the one who let him down, not the other way around.
If suicide is difficult to think and talk about, then murder-suicide is unthinkable. I hadn’t simply failed to protect Dylan from himself, but everyone he killed, too.
In the years I’ve been involved with the suicide loss survivor community, I have seen that education and prevention can save lives. But participating in that first event—and in dozens of others since—solidified a realization that was simultaneously comforting and terrifying: anyone could be here.
Lots of people there hadn’t known there was a problem, or—like me—had underestimated its gravity. Our first inkling that something was seriously wrong slammed into our lives in one catastrophic, irreversible moment. Even professionals didn’t always know when they were dealing with a life-and-death situation. A psychologist spoke about losing her son. Respected, well-trained, she’d known all the right things to do; still, suicide hadn’t even been on her radar. (We should never conclude from these stories that suicide comes without warning; simply that we don’t always recognize behaviors that may be indicative of risk.)
Others were well aware of danger, but hadn’t known how to help. Another woman’s son had been hospitalized repeatedly for his bipolar disorder. After his doctor-recommended release, he continued to be treated. In fact, he saw both the family’s pastor and his own psychiatrist on the day he shot his girlfriend and killed himself.
These stories made me realize the seriousness of the foe we were up against. By lunchtime at the first event I attended, three things had become starkly clear.
One: There is more to suicide prevention than loving someone and telling them so. As bottomless as my love had been, it had not been enough to save Dylan, or his victims, and here was an auditorium filled with people who could say the same.
Two: Many of us had believed there were no signs of trouble on the horizon when we hadn’t recognized indicators of potential risk. In many cases, we hadn’t even known there was cause to be on heightened alert.
Three: I learned that while there are effective interventions for depression and other risk factors for suicide, we cannot yet rely on their effectiveness. I’m hesitant to write that, out of fear that someone who needs help might be discouraged from seeking it. But many of the people I met that day had tried to help someone struggling with ongoing or intermittent illness. They’d persevered through weeks, months, years, or even decades of therapy, through rounds of meds and alternative treatments and hospitalizations. Some of them were success stories, but some were not. Many lived in fear for someone else, or waged a daily struggle with their own suicidal thoughts.
Whether the problem was finding a bed in a good facility (there is little consensus on whether hospitalization is the best treatment for suicidality at all; some recent studies indicate that it may not be), the inadequacy of staff training on brain illness issues in emergency rooms, or a hospital’s failure to raise an alarm about risk levels post-release, I understood for the first time that there were challenges to securing targeted, appropriate treatment for a person in danger.
That first suicide prevention event was the dawning of a new awareness. The problem we were up against was multifaceted and tremendously complex. If something was going to change, there was a great deal to be done.
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Suicide prevention summit. An emotional ride. Got hugged in elevator by people when I finally said who i was. There was lots of crying. I felt at home.
—Journal entry, May 2002