Merryl Maleska first came to Safe Place three weeks after Carl’s death. She hated it. She said nothing, just sat there numb and stone-faced. “I was looking for someone like me, someone young who had lost her husband to suicide but who had come through it,” she says. There was one woman close to Merryl’s age whose husband, a psychology student, had shot himself, but after two years she still couldn’t speak his name without weeping. Merryl left the meeting that night feeling more raw than when she’d arrived. Nevertheless, she continued to attend, even though for many months it seemed only to depress her further. But Merryl had a vague idea it might be good for her someday. And occasionally, lying in her bed or crying at work, she thought of the woman whose husband had shot himself and felt a little less alone. “It helped me to know that this person was going through the same loss, the same torture. In the midst of my pain I would remember her face and think of how she had lost her husband, too. And that communion would somehow help me to make real, tangible, this event that was so unbelievable.” After a while Merryl began to speak at meetings. “It was the only place I could talk about nothing but suicide for two hours and not feel guilty for taking up someone’s time.” Merryl’s calendar, which had once been so full, now had only two appointments marked on it each month—meetings of Safe Place.
When Safe Place began in 1978, members of the Samaritans attended the meetings as observers. One night a survivor said that the presence of the Samaritans, whose work is based on the belief that suicide can be prevented, felt like an unspoken accusation. Since that night no one has been allowed in the room who has not lost a family member or close friend to suicide. (The meeting I witnessed was a special one in which Safe Place members had volunteered to be videotaped for educational purposes.) Otherwise, there are few rules. Safe Place has no agenda, no speakers, no required readings, and, although people come looking for them, no answers. There is just a lot of what Welch calls “unloading”—talk, talk, and more talk. But even that is not required; some survivors attend faithfully for a whole season and never say a word. Safe Place meetings are not counseling sessions. There is no advice given. “People can respond to questions and share what works for them,” Welch told me, “but they can’t suggest that someone else do this, too—it works for me, therefore it works for you.” The goal is to create “an atmosphere in which people can safely grieve.”
Midway through the meeting Welch turned to Rona, a divorced, middle-aged woman whose daughter had killed herself three months earlier. She was perched on her chair, lips tight, hands folded, as quiet and contained as an owl. She hadn’t said a word all night; when someone spoke, she looked not at them but at a point on the floor in their general direction. Welch gently asked whether caring for her remaining children had left her any time for her own grief. Seven words into her answer, Rona began to weep. She could not stop crying but she could not stop talking, and a flood of anxieties gushed out: her children’s fears, her son-in-law’s drinking, her miserable Thanksgiving. “And I tried to go through my daughter’s things, but I couldn’t go through them, so my son went through them and he said it’s sad but he went through them and I just can’t, and every day it’s a different pain I have to face, I try to leave it in God’s hands as much as I can, and that’s helped, and I try to take it one day at a time, and that’s helped with my pain, but it also, it . . . just . . . it doesn’t . . . I just miss her so much.”
As the words and tears poured out, the rest of the group was still. Although it was clear from their faces that they were deeply affected, no one gave her a handkerchief or moved to hug her or even touch her, although Liz Courtney, sitting next to her, unconsciously swung her arm up to rest on the back of Rona’s chair. Later, I questioned Welch about their restraint. “If someone starts crying,” he explained, “and you immediately pass the Kleenex or run over and hug the person, it stops the feeling. It may make the person feel that tears are inappropriate. Nothing should interrupt whatever someone is feeling. That’s why refreshments aren’t served until after the meeting. People need to be able to explore their pain without any interference—which is something they don’t get to do at home.”
Eventually, Rona’s sobbing subsided into weeping, her words slowed, and like an accordion that must be squeezed flat before all the notes can escape, she finally stopped. “And I know it’s going to be even harder at Christmas, but my son said he would come over and put up the tree because my daughter always did that. And I find as time goes on it’s gotten harder instead of easier.” There was a long pause, as if the group were giving the spilled pain a chance to settle, and then Merryl said gently, “But three months is like yesterday, really.” There were murmurs and nods of assent from the others. Bailey gave a wry smile. “In the beginning I thought that every day would make it better, every step would make it better,” she said. “Well, it doesn’t, and we all know that. You never go back to the beginning, but it isn’t just a steady upward progress.” Rona stopped crying. She looked up at the faces of the group, meeting their eyes for the first time.
People feel comfortable at Safe Place talking about things they can’t talk about anywhere else: the nightmares and gory details that friends want to be spared but a survivor can’t shake, the fear that another family member might complete suicide, the sneaking suspicion they might be going crazy, the sense that they’ll never be happy again. “It’s amazing how many times I’ll unravel an incident and people will say, ‘That’s how I feel,’ or ‘That happened to me,’” says a woman whose husband shot himself. A young woman whose lover killed himself a year ago can’t tell friends that sometimes, when the pain is overwhelming, she gets in her car, rolls up the windows, and drives back and forth across a bridge, screaming. “You can say anything you want at Safe Place,” she says, “and no one will ever laugh at you or think you’re a jerk.”
One of the most difficult issues for survivors to talk about is their own suicidal thoughts. “They need reassurance that it’s okay to have those thoughts,” Welch told me. “In the group, people understand those feelings and so it gets said. No one gasps, no one faints.” No Safe Place member has ever killed himself, and although a troubled survivor is occasionally referred to counseling, interventions in the group are minimal. More often the group’s atmosphere encourages honesty on less dramatic questions. “If friends ask me how I’m feeling and I say I’m feeling bad, they don’t know what to say,” says the mother of a boy who hanged himself. “So now I just tell them I’m okay. But in group the other night, someone asked me how I was feeling, and I said, ‘Terrible.’” She smiles. “It felt good to be able to say that.”
At Safe Place comfort comes in peculiar ways. No matter how awful a survivor’s situation seems to be, at Safe Place there’s always someone whose story sounds even worse. A mother plagued with guilt for not taking her son’s suicide threats seriously meets a man who, hoping to shock his wife out of her threats, told her to go ahead and kill herself. A couple whose son shot himself in the heart meets a woman who found her husband shot in the head. A woman angry because her husband left no note meets a woman angry because her husband left a note. A young woman devastated by the suicide of her father meets a woman who lost both her father and her brother to suicide. “Measuring” can also work another way: survivors for whom the wound is unbearably fresh can listen to a survivor whose loss is further in the past and realize that some day their pain may lessen. A woman whose son killed himself four years ago has never told anybody it was a suicide. Sitting in silence at Safe Place is the best she can do for now, but listening to survivors who are able to talk about the suicides in their families gives her a seed of hope. And those survivors are comforted to feel that their pain may be of use.
None of which means that a survivor will ever forget. “After five years I feel a lot better,” Liz Courtney told the group. Her hands cut quick geometric shapes in front of her as she spoke. “But still, it comes back. The waves keep coming.” She looked toward her husband, Peter, who nodded. “
Two weeks ago one of our daughters came home from St. Louis for some job interviews,” she said, “and she was really excited. Our son had just bought a house, and our other daughter was getting along really well with her beau, and I was so happy that everybody was perking. But then when they left, I just dissolved. I couldn’t put my finger on it at first, and then I realized, ‘Lisa isn’t here to be a part of this.’” Liz’s hands folded tightly in her lap as if now that they’d found each other they’d never let go. “I find I can get really upset about something and not have any idea what it’s all about until I analyze it. And always it seems to come back to Lisa.”
Safe Place was born because Liz and Peter Courtney, no matter where they turned, could not find enough room for their grief during the year after their daughter Lisa killed herself on the roof of a five-story building in Newburyport, a small town on the coast north of Boston.
One night, not quite six months after Lisa’s death, Liz and Peter were at Peter’s brother’s house for dinner. Liz had been warned by friends who had been through deaths in their families that she would have six months to “get over” her daughter’s death before people would expect her to “shape up her act.” But Liz was still reeling with grief, and that night at dinner she began talking yet again about Lisa’s suicide. Suddenly her brother-in-law interrupted, “Knock it off. Enough is enough.” Liz was mortified but forced a smile. “Wait!” she said. “It’s only been five and a half months—I still have two weeks!”
Liz and Peter Courtney laughed when they told me the story. They laughed at their naïveté in thinking they could possibly “shape up their act” in five and a half or even six months. “Five years is when we began to feel better,” said Liz, a tall, handsome woman who crafts lampshades. Her husband, Peter, a small, rugged-looking lobsterman, nodded. “After five years the salt started to come out of the wound,” he said. When I first met them, seven years after their daughter’s death, the pain still occasionally struck without warning. For Peter the tears came as suddenly as a summer squall; they rolled down his cheeks until his whole face was wet, and only when he stopped crying did he pull a worn red bandanna from his pocket. Liz dabbed delicately at her tears with a finger before they had a chance to travel far down her face. Recently, she and Peter had been at a friend’s house watching Fanny and Alexander, the film by Ingmar Bergman. In one scene a woman sees the body of her dead husband for the first time and howls like a jungle animal. “How awful,” said one of the Courtneys’ friends. “Who could make such a sound?” Liz didn’t answer. She had flashed back to a moment seven years before, to the day her daughter died, when she had let out a howl exactly like that.
Lisa Courtney was “born with a crayon in her hand,” as her mother said. At an early age she decided she wanted to be an artist; she edited the art quarterly in high school and attended an art school in Philadelphia. A slender girl with long blond hair and milky skin, Lisa was sensitive and shy, though, said Liz, “not painfully so.” Liz and Peter were shocked when on Thanksgiving of her junior year at college they got a call from the school counselor at two in the morning telling them Lisa had been found by a night watchman, curled up and whimpering in a public bathroom cubicle. They took off in their station wagon for Philadelphia, terrified. “Lisa was sitting on a bed looking so pathetic,” recalled Peter. “I felt so sorry for her. I thought, ‘God, if I’d ever known this kid had been this tense . . .’” The doctor, who had given Lisa Thorazine, suggested they take her home for a rest.
Peter and Liz were determined to lick the problem as a family. Each week the three of them went to a husband-and-wife counseling team, and Lisa saw the wife for individual therapy. Over the next few years Lisa gradually seemed to emerge from her shell. She found an apartment, a good job as a jewelry designer, and a few friends. But each fall she went into a funk—a fog, as she called it—that she couldn’t shake until Christmas.
The fall when Lisa turned twenty-three, a number of things went wrong: she felt she deserved more pay at her job but was too shy to ask for a raise; her car wasn’t working; and worst of all, her boyfriend left her for his old girlfriend. One day Peter got a call. Lisa had stabbed herself, but she was going to be all right. Said Liz, “When we got to the hospital, we asked her what happened, and she said she’d gone out to Plum Island and that she just felt all this fog around her. She thought about stabbing herself out there, but she came back to her apartment and stabbed herself in the kitchen, fell to the floor, and thought, ‘Well, this is a dumb thing,’ and then she drove herself to the hospital.” Peter shook his head. “I remember asking her why she’d done it,” he said. “And she said, ‘Well, I’ve never felt real pain, and I had to find out what real pain was about.’” Peter pounded the table with his fist at each word. He looked up, puzzled. “And I think that’s what shook my boots.” Liz spoke quietly: “I think she meant she’d cut herself because she was in such a fog that she needed to feel something sharp.”
Lisa came home to live with her parents and went back to work part-time. Each evening the three of them sat by the fire and had “catch-up time,” telling each other about their day. “It was a very tense time,” remembered Peter, “hoping that Lisa would come out and say, ‘This is what was good about the day, and this is what was lousy.’ And trying to carry on a smooth conversation with somebody you knew was in a lot of pain.” Three times a week they went to their therapists, who taped each session. Afterward, Liz, Peter, and Lisa listened to the tape at home, talking and searching and rehashing, trying to get to the bottom of this, whatever this was. It was an exhausting time for Peter and Liz as they tried to give Lisa enough room but not too much, to be cozy and caring but not suffocating. “It was twenty-four hours a day, it was all for Lisa, trying to help her save her life,” said Liz. “And sometimes when I thought that we had done some good work, I felt so elated. I remember walking down the street one day feeling, ‘My God, maybe we’re really going to get to the root of this problem, maybe we’re going to lift Lisa out of this.’”
But Lisa remained brittle and self-conscious. One day in her mother’s studio, Lisa looked out the window and saw her old boyfriend and his new girlfriend walking down the street licking ice cream cones. “He never bought ice cream for me,” Lisa said in a small voice. Another time she curled up under a table. “I didn’t know the word regression then,” said Liz. “I didn’t see until later it was a step on a long path of making her world smaller and smaller.” Lisa worried that she was behaving peculiarly; one day she was mortified that she had driven out of a parking lot the wrong way. “You could always tell she felt a little raw,” said Liz. “Her biggest problem was getting up in the morning. She was panicky—afraid to face the day. She’d cry and throw up. I’d hug her and say, ‘Come on, let’s go,’ or ‘Don’t get up if you don’t want to.’” But it got worse. “One morning she said, ‘I don’t want to live anymore.’ I said, ‘But, Lisa, just leave it until Friday, until we go back to the therapists.’”
Monday morning it snowed. When Lisa came downstairs, Liz asked her how she felt. “I’m fine,” said Lisa. Liz told her daughter that she was going Christmas shopping and her father would be home at noon. “Is there anything you want to talk about now?” she asked. Lisa said no, she was okay, she was going to work.
“But Lisa never went to work,” said Liz slowly. “She went to the building where I work. Her ex-boyfriend lives there, too, which is pretty heavy.” Liz looked down at the table. “It’s an enormous brick shoe factory that was made into artists’ studios. And you can go all the way up to the fifth floor where there’s a little room with a door that opens out on the roof. People sunbathe out there. Lisa used to go up there at lunchtime with her boyfriend. There’s a beautiful view of the ocean. You can see Gloucester.” Liz paused. “Afterward, her ex-beau remembered hearing someone up on the roof, walking around this funny little room. He didn’t know it was Lisa, he thought it was a kid. She’d gone up to that room where there was a lot of broken glass from kids bust
ing windows over years and years and years, and she did all of this”—Liz made a cutting motion at her wrists—“and this . . . and this”—her hand flashed at her legs, her arms, her neck—“I mean she really wanted out.” Liz looked away and began to cry. “And then we assumed she just must have rolled off the roof.”
In a coma, her skull fractured, her body covered with cuts, Lisa was kept on life-support systems while the family took turns sitting by her bed, talking softly to her, “just to let her know, whether she could hear us or not, that we were there,” said Liz. But the doctors told the Courtneys it was hopeless, and they agreed the machines should be turned off. Friday evening they got a call from the hospital. Lisa was dead. “Saturday we saw her without any of the needles or the support systems, and that was a relief,” said Liz. “I was glad she was at peace.”
After the blur of friends and relatives arriving, the funeral service, friends and relatives departing, there was a sudden lull. Peter and Liz were alone. They talked about Lisa constantly. A sturdy, energetic man, Peter was drained and vulnerable. For weeks he couldn’t finish a sentence without crying. About six weeks after the funeral he was painting the ceiling when he felt dizzy and fell off the sawhorse. He was able to telephone Liz, who rushed him to the doctor. Peter’s heart had fibrillated; he was weak for weeks afterward.
Peter was angry at his daughter. Four weeks before her suicide, when she had stabbed herself in the stomach, Peter had asked Lisa to let him know if she ever felt like that again. “Don’t leave me out of your act,” he had said. Now he felt angry that she had broken her promise. Out on his boat he would suddenly cry, “Goddamn it, Lisa, why didn’t you come to me?” When he was driving a truckload of lobsters into Boston, a sad tune would come over the radio, and he couldn’t stop crying for half an hour. On his boat he would burst into tears, and then, just as quickly, it would be over.
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