Honoring a Child Who Died by Suicide

HEALING THE GRIEVING HEART
Honoring a Child Who Died by Suicide
Host: Dr. Gloria Horsley
With guest: Carol Loehr
October 6, 2005

G: Hello. I’m Dr. Gloria Horsley, and welcome to Healing the Grieving Heart. Our show today is Honoring a Child Who Died by Suicide. I am pleased to say that our show, along with The Compassionate Friends, has a new sponsor, the www.libraryoflife.org is the way you would pick it up on the Internet. The Library of Life is a wonderful organization dedicated to helping us preserve shared memories forever through the Internet. I myself just used the Library of Life a couple of days ago and created an on-line memorial website for my deceased son, Scott. You know, I’m not that big a computer expert and I was actually able to create the site in under fifteen minutes. It’s a one-time cost of only $55, that’s American dollars. I don’t know, probably about 75 in pounds and I don’t know, you add on the Internet what other currency you’ll be using, but it’s $55 in America and you’ll have a fourteen-day trial to see if you like the Library of Life site. They also guarantee me that Scott’s web page will be on the net forever. Well, that’s not to say I have a full website now, but my family and Scott’s friends can continue to work on the site and save those precious memories and pictures. And another thing happened to me today, on the Internet I received from New York City a picture of a Chinese baby from my daughter in New York City. She’s going to be adopting a Chinese baby and immediately I remembered something on the Library of Life and I went again to their website, www.libraryoflife.org, and there I went to what they call their celebration of life site and I actually created a website for my new granddaughter and was able to email that off to my other daughters and to friends so that they can look at the memories and I was able to tell my new granddaughter from China, log in there and write about how it was to know that I was going to have a little baby granddaughter from China and tell her what we were doing and how we felt about it and really wonderful memories that will go with her forever. Well, you know as bereaved family members, I know as a therapist that we’ve often expressed fear that we will forget our children and that’s one of the really early concerns, but as time goes on, we realize that rather than having our children’s memories fade, events and experiences have become even more precious and vivid. We dream of holding them again, hugging them, kissing bruised knees and hearts. In the beginning as we struggle through the dark days, we’re shocked and stunned and helped by others and served by others, that as time goes on, we begin to gain strength, look for meaning, and find ways to honor and remember our children. My guests and I are here every week to tell you that we have made it and so can you. And you can go on to do things to honor and remember your children. Our guest today has developed a wonderful website at www.thegiftofkeith.org, in order to help other family members and people who are survivors of suicide. Her name is Carol Loehr and she is Keith’s mother. Carol, welcome to the show, Healing the Grieving Heart.
C: Thank you, Gloria, so much for having me. I think this program is really needed for others that suffer a loss to suicide.
G: It’s just great to have you here today and I think you’re up in Maine, right?
C: Right.
G: So the Internet’s a wonderful thing. I’m in London, you’re in Maine, and I think our technicians are in Arizona, so quite a thing for us to be able to have this today. So our topic today is Honoring a Child Who Died by Suicide, and Carol could you talk a little bit about Keith and about how you’ve gotten to where you are with the Internet in developing a website and all these things for families?
C: Yes. When Keith first died, he was 29 years old.
G: And how many years ago was that?
C: That was six years ago. So the loss is not so new anymore.
G: Well, that’s pretty new. I’ve been 22 years and it’s pretty new to me.
C: I can still remember those first days and I understand new grief so this took me awhile to get going on but after Keith died, I started collecting all the information I could about suicide. I really didn’t know very much about suicide. I didn’t know anything about Keith’s depression, but Keith was one of these sons that everyone would want. He was outgoing, vivacious, and fun to be with, and he had just gotten out of graduate school and received a degree in marketing and he had taken his job, which was a very highly stressed job, and he was supposed to come up with a plan for his new job, and he just couldn’t do it. So the morning that he was supposed to present the plan, he didn’t show up for work, and the next morning, he took his life.
G: So sorry to hear that.
C: It is. Even when I talk about it now, I can still remember those first few moments when we found out that he had died and that he had taken his own life. So that word “suicide” hit us so hard because, first of all, we had no understanding of Keith’s depression and we didn’t even know. In our mind, I guess we thought suicide only happened to families that were sort of dysfunctional families. But I found out that that wasn’t true very quickly.
G: Absolutely. We certainly learned that from all the wonderful families that we know have had suicides in them.
C: Yes. That’s so true. So then I decided that I had all this material that I had collected, and I needed to share it with other families that had gone through a loss.
G: Now when did you start feeling that way? How long had it been?
C: It had been a couple years. I had started maybe a year after Keith had died to get all this information together and I put it together in folders for other people from Compassionate Friends that had lost children to suicide.
G: So you were in a group with Compassionate Friends at that time?
C: Yes, I was, in Florida at that time, and the chapter leader asked me if I would put together some folders with all the information that I had collected for other families.
G: What a very wise chapter leader. It’s so wonderful to be able to do the service that you can as time goes on, isn’t it?
C: I admired Vita so much. She was such an inspiration to me. She knew of my grief and I’m sure she knew that this would help me with my grief by sharing it with others.
G: It helps everyone, yes. One of the things I say to people early on is that maybe your child died a week ago and somebody comes to the group whose child died one day ago, and you can open a door for them, or pull up a chair, or get them a drink of water. Service is an amazing thing.
C: That’s so true because like I say to other people, you start in such little ways but you just find that with the support of other people, that you just can get through it. And I tell people all the time that I can never tell anyone how to grieve because I just grieve. I know how I grieve, but all I can do is be there with the information and that information that I basically put together is about how depression is linked to suicide, and by understanding that word “suicide” which is such a frightening word, you’re able to grieve for your child because you have some understanding of the pain that your child experienced due to depression or other neurological disorders.
G: Certainly, that people I’ve had on the show that talk about suicide talk about what pain they know their children were in with the depression.
C: Yes, absolutely, and people that have suffered from depression have also shared with me their insight of depression because I never had that understanding of what it was like until others shared that information with me. So my wonderful daughters one Christmas said, “Mom, you need a website.”
G: And this was about how long ago?
C: That was in 2002. So my son died in 1999 and so in 2002
G: That would be about three years.
C: That’s right.
G: And what did you feel when they said that?
C: I said, “I can’t do this. You expect someone this old to be able to run a website?” And they said, “Mom, you’ve got to.” My daughter, Cindy, is an artist and she is the one that basically helped me construct a website that was easy to use and one that people could go to and not be bombarded with new information, but something that was very easy to go through and find the information that you needed.
G: That’s one thing I think is wonderful about this Library of Life website that it’s all kind of set up probably like she set you up.
C: Right, exactly.
G: Because it is quite a thing to do. I was working on a professional web page myself and it is very involved, in fact, I have to have a webmaster work on it, whereas I find that with these others, I could actually go in and do it. It was all set up.
C: It is very difficult, and I think when you’re dealing with so much technical information and then you’re also dealing with your own grief.
G: When you can’t even add two and two at times.
C: Exactly. To anyone that wants to start, they’re thinking about a website, or they’re thinking about what they can do to honor their child, I say to them, “Start writing. Start writing down your thoughts.” If you can just take a journal out. I remember the first couple of days after Keith died, someone brought me a journal and said, “Just write down all your thoughts.” And so, that’s exactly what I did. I just started putting down every thought that would enter my mind. And if I found something in a book that I thought was pertinent to depression or suicide, I wrote it down and the source, and I just kept this journal. I found that provided me with a wealth of information, and that’s basically where I started with my writing.
G: That’s a great idea because people do enjoy writing. If they don’t enjoy writing, they might even want to put it on a tape recorder and have someone else record it for them or get stories about their child or have other people write stories about them because when you save that information, if you do decide to do a web page, you can then put it on your web page.
C: I think that’s a wonderful idea that recording all your ideas, too, because I know that in those first moments of grief, you just don’t have that concentration and with a tape recorder, you can just put it on when those thoughts come into your mind. I just found that with the word “suicide,” it was such a frightening word and the media picks it up and TV picks it up and everyone starts talking about it and you’re so frightened of the word, but once you have that ammunition that you can go out there and talk to people about suicide, then you start to link and write your articles to the newspapers, to television stations, about your story.
G: I think it’s wonderful. You’ve even had people write articles for you that you put on your website.
C: It’s wonderful. I’m so fortunate to find people that have said yes, you can share their articles on your website, and that is how basically I post my articles and so many people have come to my website and said, “would you put an article, a poem, or a spiritual story about my child?” and I can do that, and that’s what I think is so nice about the Library of Life, too. People always want to see their child. I think those memories, and people don’t talk about your child that much and so when you see their image up on the Internet, it’s just a wonderful experience.
G: Yes, and you can do a whole scrapbook on there with special music. It’s quite an amazing thing. I want to mention your website again for people. It’s thegiftofkeith.org and it’s a wonderful website. Carol has some wonderful articles on there. You’re listening to Healing the Grieving Heart. We’re talking today about Honoring a Child Who Died by Suicide and we’re talking with Carol Loehr who has created a wonderful website for her son, Keith. You can also do a website for your children through the Library of Life. It’s www.libraryoflife.org, and we’re going to come up for break in a few moments. When we come back, we’re going to be joined by Father Ruby who for 26 years has run the LOSS program for Catholic Charities and it’s a loving outreach for suicide survivors. Time for break. Stay tuned.
Welcome back to Healing the Grieving Heart. I’m your host, Dr. Gloria Horsley, and our topic today is Honoring a Child Who Died by Suicide. My guest is Carol Loehr, Keith’s mother and creator of the website, thegiftofkeith.org. We have been discussing how Carol created a website to honor Keith and help others suffering the loss of a child. We’ve also talked about how you can create your own memorial web page using the Library of Life website, that’s thelibraryoflife.org, and in a few minutes, we’ll probably be joined by Father Ruby, who for 26 years has run the LOSS program of Catholic Charities, but until Father Ruby comes on, Carol and I will – oh, is that Father Ruby?
F: Yes it is.
G: Oh, hi. Welcome to Healing the Grieving Heart.
F: I had a little trouble getting on here, but, yes, thank you very much. I’m honored to be a part of this.
G: We’re very happy to have you on the show. I was just saying that Carol Loehr is here, Keith’s mother, who created the wonderful website thegiftofkeith.org and also we have another website that sponsors our show, which is thelibraryoflife.org where families can also create their own website. Well, Father Ruby, for 26 years now you’ve run the LOSS Program of Catholic Charities. Can you tell us about that?
F: In 1979, three couples had met at an organization called Compassionate Friends – that’s a grief group.
G: They help sponsor this show and we’ve had an ad about them already so our audience knows who they are.
F: And three couples had each lost a child of suicide and they formed a natural bond and they approached me.
G: This is in Chicago? Where were you located?
F: In Chicago. They approached me and said that while it was helpful going to Compassionate Friends, they felt their grief was a little different than parents who had lost a child with terminal illness or an accident or some other form of death.
G: What year was this?
F: This was probably the Fall of 1978. We began meeting and the program has evolved over these past 26 plus years. We provide four basic services. We provide a monthly newsletter.
G: And I hear that’s a wonderful newsletter. What is it called and how would we get it?
F: The Obelisk. You can get it by calling us and be put on our mailing list. The phone number is 312-655-7283.
G: Do you have anything on the Internet if they can’t get this number?
F: The Catholic Charities does have its own website and LOSS is listed there also.
G: Oh good. So you might get it there. If you want to get The Obelisk, you might want to dial 312-655-7283.
F: That’s our direct dial LOSS number.
G: Great. So tell us about your other services.
F: We have monthly meetings at eight or ten sites around the Chicago land area? We have individual counseling by licensed clinicians and we offer weekly groups for the newly grieving. They meet for eight consecutive weeks and two follow-up monthly meetings, so there’s a total of ten meetings. These are closed groups. They’re more therapeutic than the monthly group. But it’s all geared towards having people meet other people who are going through the same type of issues as they are going through.
G: That’s great. I think that Carol will probably tell you that Compassionate Friends has come a little more of age since 1978, haven’t they Carol? They are a little more sensitive.
C: I think they’re very much more sensitive than when we first lost Keith in 1999. I had received a call from one compassionate friend that told me that I needed to find another group, but now Compassionate Friends has changed their language and the way they deal with suicide, and they’ve come a long way.
G: And I think Carol, and probably your influence with Carol, Father Ruby, had a lot to do with that. Carol, can you tell us how you got in touch with Father Ruby?
C: Well our daughter, Cindy Loehr, she was in the Chicago Land area, and a counselor had told us that the LOSS program would be a good group for our daughter, Cindy, to get to to give some support.
G: Oh, great, for siblings.
C: And she found much support there through the licensed clinician and she just felt it was a very good program. In that way, I got connected with the Obelisk newsletter, and I’m telling anyone that has lost a child to suicide, you need to sign up to get this newsletter. It is absolutely outstanding. Father Ruby writes an article every month that really deals with suicide and your loss and your grief. And I’ve put up a lot of the articles on my website that he has written and if you go to my website thegiftofkeith.org and you go to resources, you can find all the information about the LOSS program and the Obelisk magazine.
G: That’s great. Well, Father Ruby, could you tell me, what do you think the differences are from suicide versus other losses of children?
F: Okay, I think there’s a lot of similarities but I think some of the unique issues, number one would be in some instances there is this shame or stigma that accompanies a death from suicide. What is wrong with our family? What is wrong with me as a parent? And I don’t think this is a predominant feeling a family goes through if their loved one had died in an automobile accident or terminal illness.
G: Although you do feel that you should have been able to take care of your child. There is some guilt.
F: Oh sure. By all means. But there is a predominant feeling of guilt, especially with parents or spouses, that I should have been able to intervene. That’s not to say it’s not going to be present if the death occurred in other ways but very predominant.
G: It could have been prevented, that idea. How do you deal with that?
F: I think you just allow people to work their way through this feeling and you emphasize that this person who found life so painful, they died from an illness. The illness is called mental illness, depression and other forms of mental illness. The more we can come to grips with the fact that this is an illness that causes death and it’s not because if it’s a child, for example, and the child was disciplined or whatever, but the child had this illness that really caused the death. I think you look at that angle and I think that helps people to re-direct their thinking.
G: Do you identify with this Carol?
C: Absolutely.
G: And how was it for you? Do you remember when you went to Father Ruby or got in touch with him or was it your daughter who moved you in this direction or how did this happen for you? How did you start to deal with your stigma and shame?
C: I think that being a Catholic and feeling this sort of let down from the church, not that they didn’t give Keith a funeral, but they didn’t give me the support I needed and I just felt that some of the comments that people would make to me like, “Your son must be in purgatory because he took his life,” comments that hurt me so badly and me asking myself, “What did I do as a parent to make God so angry with me that he would take my son?”
G: How was your husband with that? Did he have the same kind of feeling or was he helped through Father Ruby, too?
C: I think Dick and I both struggled with our grief in different ways. But I think that Dick felt the same way that I did but he felt it in a different way. I was more emotional and Dick was more stoic. And we both felt that Father Ruby and the Obelisk program was the program that we needed to get involved with.
G: And even though you were how far away?
C: Oh, we were in Ohio at the time so I would make lots of phone calls, wouldn’t I, Father Ruby?
G: Oh, oh, Father Ruby, we may be opening you up for business for mom calls. So you basically talked over the phone but was it Cindy that was in the program?
C: Yes. I think that a lot of people go through this with their faith when something happens and Father Ruby would help me with my faith, which was very much dissolved at that point.
G: Well, Father Ruby, how has suicide been handled in the past by religion?
F: I can speak from our Roman Catholic tradition and I think many of the others followed suit over the centuries. It was considered a sin or crime – a crime in the sense that the survivors would not have the inheritance rights of someone who completed suicide and it all evolved that for centuries a person was denied the right of Christian burial. In the Catholic cemeteries there was a plot of land that was unconsecrated and people who completed suicide would be buried in unconsecrated ground. They would not be given the full funeral rights of another person who had died of other means. So people who completed suicide were further stigmatized by the church by not getting the right of Christian burial.
G: Let’s talk about how it is now when we come back from break. Could you stay on with us?
F: Sure.
G: It’s time for us to go to break now and please stay tuned for more of Honoring a Child Who Died by Suicide with my guest, Carol Loehr, Keith’s mom and creator of the website thegiftofkeith.org. We have been discussing how Carol’s created a website to honor Keith and to help others suffering from the loss of a child and how you can do so by using thelibraryoflife.org to create a website honoring your child. Joining us today is Father Ruby, who for 26 years has run the LOSS program of Catholic Charities, a loving outreach to survivors of suicide. I’m Dr. Gloria Horsley and you can reach me on my email at gchorsley@aol.com and these shows are archived on www.thecompassionatefriends.org as well as www.Health.VoiceAmerica.com websites. Please stay tuned for more.
Welcome back to Healing the Grieving Heart. I’m your host, Dr. Gloria Horsley, and our topic today is Honoring a Child Who Died by Suicide. My guest Carol Loehr is Keith’s mom and creator of the website, thegiftofkeith.org. We have been discussing how Carol’s created a web page to honor Keith and to help others suffering the loss of a child and how you can easily create your own web page using thelibraryoflife.org website. Joining us today is Father Ruby, who for 26 years has run the LOSS program of Catholic Charities, a loving outreach to survivors of suicide loss. If you would like to email me about this show or upcoming shows, my email is gchorsley@aol.com. If you’d like to participate in this show today, our toll free number is 1 866-369-3742. You can listen to archives of this show and other shows on www.Health.VoiceAmerica.com or on www.thecompassionatefriends.org websites. Welcome back, Father Ruby and Carol, and we now have a caller, Ann from Florida. Ann, did you have a question for one of us or a thought? And welcome to the show and thanks for calling in.
A: I did come across the gift of Keith’s website, and I just found it very wonderful. My son died by suicide about a year and a half ago.
G: Sorry to hear that.
A: I’m searching the web, and I just, I don’t know if it’s a question, but the guilt that I have of not knowing is just hampering myself from – I feel like I can’t move on with my life, and I do feel guilty most of the days and I think of my son constantly. I guess my question is, I don’t know if it’s a question, I just would like to know how I could reach – I’d like to be able to somehow get a message across that young people are hiding these feelings from their parents because we just never knew. I never knew he was unhappy but I would never, ever have imagined that he would have done this, and I know he didn’t do it to hurt us. I know that in my heart.
G: Absolutely, Ann, first of all I want to say this to you. All of these feelings that I’m hearing from you are absolutely normal. Absolutely normal for what you’ve gone through. Can you stay on for a minute and let Carol and Father Ruby comment on it?
C: Ann, I just wanted you to know that we never can understand what another person is thinking. We will never be able to understand what another person is thinking, but your son did die of an illness and the pain that he was experiencing he hid probably from you as his mother.
A: I don’t understand why he did that, though.
C: Because he didn’t understand his own illness.
G: Father Ruby do you have a comment for Ann?
F: I think he ran out of steam.
A: Yeah, he did.
F: He just felt I can no longer do this anymore. It was almost like a stroke of the soul, of the mind that they just become paralyzed and their thought process becomes so distorted that for him, your son, suicide made all the sense in the world. He just ran out of steam. It’s an act of desperation.
G: Ann, are you getting together with any other people or do you have any interest in doing that?
A: There was a support group in the area. I’m not really finding it all that helpful, and I realize it’s just going to take time, and I have been – Carol has sent me the cyber list of survivors which I have found helpful but I just feel like I’m spending so much time thinking about this.
C: You are so much. This is so new to you.
G: Yes, it’s very new.
C: It is so new and your pain and your strength, I know you have written to me and you have reached out and that is the most important thing is to reach out and read information, all the information you can about suicide and depression, and try to understand this word because I think it will help you understand your son’s death.
G: Ann, stay in touch with Carol and whatever you need to do, but I want you to realize that time will help. When you reach out, you will get feeling better. I know it’s hard to believe now, but you will.
F: I just want to add one thing. When we hear that, people say time heals all, it’s time and work. It really takes a lot of work in this grieving process because if time healed all, we get calls from people who where the suicide has occurred ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty years in the past and they just never worked at it.
G: But it sounds like Ann certainly is. She’s thinking about it. She’s getting in touch with Carol.
F: Oh, yeah, you’re doing the work.
G: You have to believe that it’s going to get better. It’s so painful. How can we live with this kind of pain?
F: Yes, and as you work your way through it, in time it does get better but time in and of itself is not going to do it. You’ve got to work at it and really come to grips with the enormity of this act. Allow these feelings to wash over you just like you’re sitting at the seaside letting the waves and then in time as you work your way through it, the pain becomes ordinary.
G: And, Ann, one of the things that I want to make sure you’re doing is drinking water, and walking or getting a little exercise for yourself. You’ve also got to take care of yourself. This process and working, as Father Ruby says, is draining. It takes a lot of physical energy.
A: Yeah, it is.
C: Take lots of bubble baths.
G: Do lots of good things for yourself.
F: Yes. Take good care of yourself.
G: Well, thank you so much for calling in to the show and we are so sorry for your loss, and I know there are many people out there who are identifying with you and thank you so much for calling in. Bye.
Did you want to say something, Father Ruby? I’ve got some emails for you.
F: Yeah, okay, I’m ready for the email.
G: I got an email from a woman named Thelma from South Dakota and she said:
I saw Father Ruby from Catholic Charities was going to be on your show and that he runs the suicide program and our daughter Rachel just died of an overdose of pills several years ago right after a priest that didn’t even know her told my husband, Ray, that God would forgive Rachel. My husband was very offended as he doesn’t think she committed a sin. I agree with him but I forgave the priest. Father Ruby, would you say something to Ray that will help him. I’ll make sure he listens to this show.
Thelma from South Dakota.
F: I couldn’t agree more with your husband. Rachel did nothing to be forgiven for. Hers was an act of desperation. God judges us negatively when we act out of malice, and Rachel was not acting out of malice. She was acting out of desperation so she does not have to be forgiven. The church wisely has taken the whole act of suicide out of the moral realm and placed it in the medical realm where it belongs because this is not a moral issue. This is a medical issue. I think we have to almost have our feet in both camps. If someone were to come to me and say, “Is it okay to take my life?” My response would be, “No, it’s not okay. Life is a gift from God.” So if we’re looking at it from that perspective, I think we have to say “No.” We have to foster our lives. We’re looking at it after the fact. These people were not acting maliciously. They were not acting to be mean or bad.
G: Or to punish other people.
F: They just could not handle the pain in their life.
G: Right. Very important. Well, thank you, and yes, Thelma, thanks for your email, and Ray, I hope you’re hearing what Father Ruby says and I don’t know, Father Ruby, are you thinking maybe he might be able to forgive the priest too for some things that were said?
F: I think eventually – I don’t think it’s good from the psychological point of view to foster resentment or hold on to hurt and all that. I think at some stage to say the priest was hopefully, and I don’t know the priest, but hopefully he was acting out of his own ignorance and he was trying to do the right thing or say the right thing, but, I think at some stage it would be important that Ray just say, “Okay, he was acting out of ignorance, and I forgive him.”
G: Carol, do you have any comments or thoughts about that email?
C: I think those are very normal thoughts and I think that we all go through them – not all, but a lot of suicide survivors go through the same feelings that was brought to the attention in the email. I think we all have those feelings but I think the most important thing for others to do is to understand that when we suffer that first loss of a loved one to suicide, we have no understanding of what that word means, and I think the clergy need to play a bigger part in understanding a death by suicide. I think they need to be educated, and they need to understand when someone comes to them and says, “My child or my loved one has died by suicide,” that person can be there to support that loved one.
G: Well, Father Ruby certainly is, we can hear that. And Father Ruby, I want to thank you for being on our show today. It was great to have you on.
F: It was my honor.
G: I hope people will get Obelisk and again I’ll say the number: 312-655-7283 if you want to get the Obelisk magazine. It sounds like Father Ruby is quite a heavy contributor to that and that would be great. And thank you so much for being on our show.
F: It was my honor. Thank you very much.
G: It’s time for our final break and Carol Loehr is on, Keith’s mother and she’s creator of the website, thegiftofkeith.org, and we’ve been discussing how Carol’s created a web page to honor Keith and to help others suffering the loss of a child and how you can create your own website by using thelibraryoflife.org. And Father Ruby has been a great contributor on our show today. Carol, when we come back from break, our final break, if you have any comments or areas that you feel we haven’t covered, would you bring them up? And please stay tuned.
Welcome back to Healing the Grieving Heart. I’m your host, Dr. Gloria Horsley, and my guest today is Carol Loehr, Keith’s mother and creator of the website thegiftofkeith.org. We’ve been discussing how Carol has created a web page in honor of Keith and to help others suffering the loss of a child. We’ve also talked about how you can easily create your own website with thelibraryoflife.org. Carol, before break, I asked if you felt we’ve missed any important points. Do you have any things you want to comment on and then we have a caller.
C: Okay. I wanted just to say that the biggest challenge that I faced after Keith died was understanding the word “suicide.” It’s a very frightening word and I think most people that experience the death by suicide need to understand that in order to grieve, you have to understand that word, “suicide.”
G: Well, I think our next caller is also going to talk about that a little bit, isn’t he, wouldn’t you say? It’s Jimmy Powell from Chattanooga, Tennessee. Are you on Jim? Is it Jimmy?
J: Yes, that’s correct.
G: Okay, Jimmy, hi, welcome to Healing the Grieving Heart. And Carol Loehr was telling me that your son died by suicide.
J: Yes. Our son, Eric, was 27 and he died by suicide in May of 1999. I haven’t heard all of the show but I heard the end part of Father Ruby’s conversation. I’ve tried to study and read as much as I can about suicide, of course after the fact, and one of the biggest problems that we have is with the stigma that’s associated with suicide and trying to help people understand why it happened. I did some research about the word itself and there’s an excellent article written by David Daube, and it’s called The Linguistics of Suicide in 1972.
G: Is that on your site, Carol?
C: I don’t think that is on my site, is it, Jimmy?
J: I don’t believe it is. No.
G: How would you get a hold of that, Jimmy? When we mention things, our audience would love to be able to get them. Maybe they could get a hold of you. Do you have a website?
J: No, I do not, I’m sorry.
C: If Jimmy can give me that information, I could post that on my website.
G: Okay, wonderful. Carol will post it on her website. Okay, tell us a little bit more about The Linguistics of Suicide.
J: I do have the article. It’s about 25 pages long. It’s in a philosophy and public affairs publication. It’s been discontinued. But anyway David Daube did the research on the word “suicide” and actually whenever you apply the rules of Latin, it means the killing of a pig. As suicide is not bad enough,
G: It sounds like we ought to get rid of the word completely.
C: I agree.
J: We have a lot of words that are not used correctly today with “suicide” and the words that are surrounding suicide. It creates such a stigma that whenever something like this happens to a person, they don’t realize that it’s the result of a brain disorder, pure and simple. It’s not a person’s will. It’s just a person doesn’t will to have a heart attack and a person doesn’t will to die by suicide. Everyone that gets depression or any other type of mental disorder does not die, but a lot of people and especially people suffering from unipolar depression, it has fatal consequences just like a heart or any other part of the body that goes wrong, and what I try to do in the support group that I have is I try to explain and try to show them images of the brain because I have several images of the brain that compare a person’s healthy brain with a person that’s depressed and you can clearly see the structural and functional changes in a depressed person’s brain. It’s not working correctly. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that a person that goes out and takes their life that something’s wrong with their thinking, their mood and their behavior. They have no control over this at a point in time. Now, if it’s caught early, which in my case with Eric it wasn’t caught early. I took him to doctor after doctor but I didn’t understand depression, and I was assuming that the doctors would understand depression and give him something or treat him for what he was going through. But unfortunately, a lot of the doctors do not understand depression
G: Yes. There certainly are a lot of people who don’t understand depression. As a therapist I realized that there are some people who might have a little disagreement over the fact that only people who are depressed take their lives. There’s some information on spontaneous things where sometimes something will happen like somebody will break up with a partner or some spontaneous thing may happen. There’s some question of whether or not there might be some spontaneous suicide, so maybe not everyone would agree with you or maybe have a different opinion because I’ll have to say that I think it is important with our children when they have died we have to allow people to do their own grieving and also to have their own opinion about why their child died. So I think that’s important. I respect your’s, I respect Carol’s, I respect Father Ruby’s approach on this whole thing but I also think there can be – if I were a parent whose child died by suicide and I wanted to think it was just a spontaneous thing, I think I should be allowed to do that.
J: Well, you should be allowed to do that, but at the same time, I’m not saying that everyone who dies by suicide dies from depression, I’m just saying that depression is one of the leading causes.
G: Absolutely, I would absolutely totally agree with you on that, completely.
J: A younger person that takes their life, you have to take into consideration, you have to consider the brain development.
G: Yeah, well, as I said again, I have some science background and there are some people who, and I don’t want to get into it on the show particularly, but we do have to allow people to have their own opinions and their own attitudes about why their child died. I think that’s important because that’s part of the grieving process, wouldn’t you say, Carol, that people need to be able to have their grief and if it helps them to, the way they structure it, and sometimes we think kind of crazy things when we’re, and not that any of this is, but that we do have some crazy things. Well, thank you for being on the show. I think that we don’t have time to talk too much about this anymore but thanks for being on the show, Jimmy. Carol, do you have any more comments about anything we’ve been talking about through this show?
C: Basically, I just wanted to state that everyone who experiences the death by suicide needs to get support and they need to find someone that they can talk to about suicide and that they don’t feel guilty and they don’t feel the stigma.
G: If we’re talking about how you cope, what can you remember were some of the major things that helped you?
C: The major things that helped me was finding someone that understood what a death by suicide was all about and it was Father Ruby that basically helped me in understanding what a death by suicide involved and then trying to read all the information I could and talk to other people that had lost children.
G: So you’re saying for you to open up. How about your husband? How did you think he coped, and your children, because people do cope in different ways.
C: Yes. I think our children basically, I know that Cindy got a lot of support and I think as a family we talked about it. I think if you don’t talk about it with your children and you leave it as some deep dark secret that it will haunt you and like Father Ruby said, some people whose children or loved ones have died by suicide have never really talked about it.
G: Yes, right, the family secrets are very difficult around this. Yes, because I think that comes in with the stigma of it and these people are loving, wonderful people, that’s why I love your gift of Keith and having him there with his fish. These are wonderful, wonderful people. They are not with us any more but they were adorable and we love them and we want to remember them and it doesn’t matter why they died, they’re gone.
C: The one important thing about my website and I hope that when people come to it they will always feel that they’re welcome and they’re comforted there. It’s not just factual information. It’s I understand their grief and I’ve been there and if I can help in any way, I’m there for them.
G: Well, Carol, thank you so much for being on the show. It’s been absolutely fantastic and we have to close our show now. Next week Jan Eckles will be on the show. She’s a speaker and author of Trials of Today, Treasures for Tomorrow. She’ll take us on a journey through the fires that forged her blindness, marital infidelity, and the murder of her son, Joe. Adversity has not driven her into depression, but rather has caused her to reach for excellence in every aspect of her life. Her heart’s desire is to share her story with those who suffer. This show is archived on www.Health.VoiceAmerica.com as well as www.thecompassionatefriends.org websites. This is Dr. Gloria Horsley and please stay tuned again next week at 9:00 Pacific Standard Time, 12:00 Eastern, for more of Healing the Grieving Heart, a show of hope and renewal and support. And take a look at the website thelibraryoflife.org and think about putting a remembrance of your child on. Remember that others have been there before you and made it. You can, too. You need not walk alone. Thanks for listening. I’m your host, Dr. Gloria Horsley.