Liz turned inward, wrestling with feelings of guilt. She felt she was a failure as a mother. One moment in particular haunted her, the morning before the suicide when Lisa had come downstairs in silence and Liz had said in frustration, “Please, for once, let me know how you’re feeling—don’t make me always have to ask.”
Lisa had fallen from the tallest building in a small town, and her suicide made headlines in the local newspaper. “There wasn’t anybody who didn’t know, so there was no hiding, which made it easier in a way,” said Liz. “But it also meant we were unable to hide if we wanted to. We knew everyone knew, and they knew we knew they knew.” She gave a short, dry laugh. “Our close friends were great. Our medium friends were scared to death of us.” Like many survivors, Liz and Peter often found themselves doing the comforting because their would-be comforters were so uncomfortable. Peter remembered one friend who crossed the street every time he saw him coming. “He could get from one side to another faster than a weasel in a chicken coop,” said Peter, chuckling, shaking his head. “That went on for a long while, until one day there was a true traffic mess, and he couldn’t make it across before I came upon him. I just said, ‘Albert, how are you?’ I knew he wanted to say something, but he just didn’t know what the hell to say. So I said, ‘Time’s gone on and it’s not easy for us, but it’s getting better.’ I just spilled that out to him, and I could see that just by my talking to him, it released some steam from his boiler.”
While friends kept their distance, other survivors, some of whom they hardly knew, seemed to come out of the woodwork. Said Peter, “That spring a fellow fisherman came up to me. ‘You’ve been through a bitch of a winter,’ he said. ‘My wife tried to kill herself so I know what you’re going through, and it’s a son of a bitch. The only difference is your kid didn’t make it, my wife did.’” Peter tapped his fingers on the table. “It was good to know a guy like that could understand.”
Although Peter’s need to talk about the suicide gradually diminished, for Liz the ache was continuous. She could still talk to Peter, to their children, and to Peter’s brother and his wife. But after a while some of her friends grew weary. “People just didn’t want to hear it,” said Liz. “I tried to talk about it less, to be more careful about it.” She chuckled drily. “To grieve right.” But her pain kept spilling over the edges. Years earlier she had been involved in several women’s support groups, and now she kept wishing there were a group for this, a group where she could say what she wanted and people would listen whether it had been six months or six years.
Liz decided to look. A sixty-page notebook she kept that fall documents her exhaustive explorations. First she called the Boston Samaritans and talked to its director, Monica Dickens. Dickens was encouraging but knew of no groups for suicide grief; she suggested Liz try the Compassionate Friends, a support group for parents who have lost a child to death. Liz and Peter drove out to a church in Lynnfield one night for a meeting. It was comforting, but none of the other parents had lost a child to suicide. Suicide, Peter and Liz thought, needed a special group of its own. Liz called Massachusetts General Hospital and was referred back to the Samaritans. She called McLean Hospital and was connected to a psychiatrist researching the biochemistry of suicide. She called a specialist in group therapy at Harvard, who seemed surprised by the idea but wished her luck. She called a rabbi who had written books on suicide; he said if a group got started, he would love to write a book about it. She called an Episcopal minister who told her about Erich Lindemann and the importance of grief work. She called another minister, who offered his church to the group if she ever found or founded one. She called a famous grief specialist, who warned her to be careful because groups could be scary and someone might flip out.
After several months Liz had contacted a veritable who’s who of bereavement. No one knew of anything in the area for suicide survivors, but they all knew of people who could benefit from such a group. Liz’s notebook started filling up with these names—a woman from a farming town whose son had killed himself, a woman from a North Shore village whose son had killed himself. Liz talked to some of these people, and each survivor seemed to lead to another survivor who was looking for help. Then one morning Monica Dickens called and suggested Liz get in touch with Tom Welch, the young priest who had founded Omega, a grief assistance program in Somerville that ran support groups for widows and widowers, and for the terminally ill and their families. Liz called Welch and they arranged to meet. Tom Welch was aware of survivors’ needs to talk about suicide, and he was aware of how often those needs went unmet. When he was in the seminary, a fellow priest had killed himself while on a retreat. It was never announced as a suicide. Welch only found out because word spread quickly. During his years at the seminary, two other priests took their lives. Each time there was no discussion or sharing of grief. “The seminary dealt with it very poorly,” Welch recalls. “In fact, they didn’t deal with it at all.”
After meeting with Liz Courtney, Welch did some research of his own and found that although there were a handful of support groups for suicide survivors in the country, the closest was in Detroit, Michigan. “The groups were set up along the Alcoholics Anonymous model,” Welch says. “In fact, one of them was called Suicides Anonymous. The Anonymous bothered me because it seemed to feed the idea that people need to be anonymous about suicide. It contributes to the conspiracy of silence and to society’s inability to acknowledge that suicide is the way some people die. We didn’t want to be anonymous about it, but we did want to be safe about it.”
On November 9, 1978, almost one year after Lisa Courtney’s death, nine people gathered in a small room at the Omega offices in Somerville. After Tom Welch spoke briefly about his ideas for the group, Liz described the research that had led her there. When she finished, there was an awkward pause. Then one man said that before they went any further, he wanted to know who everybody was and what had brought them there. One by one, people in the room introduced themselves. Then, as if a dam had burst, they began to talk about what it felt like to lose someone to suicide. For some of them it had been many years since the death, and talking about it was painful but freeing. At the end of the meeting, one woman stood. “I’ve said things here tonight that I’ve never been able to say anywhere else,” she said. “This is a safe place.”
By 2005, Safe Place was one of 270 suicide survivor groups meeting in churches, kitchens, living rooms, and suicide prevention centers across the country. (Now run by the Samaritans, Safe Place has four chapters in New England, each led by a trained Samaritan volunteer who is also a survivor.) The first group was started in 1971 in San Diego, and others—with names like LOSS, Heartbeat, Seasons, Life Line, Transition, and Life After Suicide—quickly followed. Many groups have informal roots. Two survivors meet, talk over coffee, invite other survivors, and are soon gathering regularly to share their grief as well as advice on such practical matters as how to tell a child, how to manage anniversaries and holidays, or what to do with the dead person’s possessions. There are survivor conferences, survivor books, and survivor newsletters such as Afterwords, Mayday, and The Ultimate Rejection, which print poems, personal stories, and news about survivor research. The Internet has spawned dozens of survivor-themed Web sites, some of which allow survivors to “chat” directly with other survivors around the world. One survivor organization runs separate e-mail support groups for teenagers, adult children, parents, fathers, spouses, adult siblings, grandparents, and support group facilitators. Its Web site also sponsors “Movies to Miss!” in which survivors rate hundreds of films that have suicide-related scenes survivors may find disturbing. (Best in Show, a mock documentary about dog shows, in which a few passing jokes about suicide are made, earns one frowny face, indicating “no visuals,” while Titanic, in which a ship’s officer shoots himself, gets five frowny faces—the equivalent of an X rating—signifying “shows the act in detail.”)
Because the concept of the “suicide bereaved” as a special p
opulation is new, there is disagreement as to what approach best meets survivors’ needs. While most of the groups, like Safe Place, are based on sharing personal experience, they range from intense weekly therapy sessions to irregular potluck dinners. One group leader runs “guided fantasies” in which she helps survivors reenact the mourning process—the funeral, burial, and so on—in order to complete issues they may not have had a chance to resolve. Most groups meet once or twice a month and are open-ended, while others hold weekly sessions for two months, with agendas and reading lists. Some groups charge a fee, some pass the hat, most are free. While some prefer members to join as soon after the suicide as possible, others suggest they come when the numbness has begun to wear off. One group won’t let survivors join until six months after the death. Some groups are specifically for siblings, others just for mothers. There are a few groups for teenagers only, and at least one for therapists who have lost patients to suicide. Another group sponsors home visits by survivors who hold the same kinship relation to their dead loved one as the survivor to be visited. After being notified of a suicide by the Los Angeles Police Department, the Suicide Prevention Center sends trained survivors to the scene to provide family members with immediate emotional support. And a group in Louisiana brings together survivors with people who have attempted suicide so that survivors may better understand what their loved ones felt, while attempters can see the pain they might cause if they were to complete suicide.
The growth of survivor groups has been so rapid and the variety so wide that in 1984 the American Association of Suicidology, recalling the unsupervised growth of prevention centers in the early seventies, appointed a committee to review survivor groups. The committee found that the main disagreement among groups was over the role of mental health professionals. While about one-third use a therapist or counselor either as coleader or consultant, some are led by survivors with no training. Some professionals worry that these “amateurs” may be in over their head. “A few leaders don’t recognize that they’ll get involved with people who are severely troubled,” says Sam Heilig, the social worker who chaired the AAS committee and for many years led a survivor group at the Los Angeles Suicide Prevention Center. “It’s not uncommon for a suicide to trigger a series of underlying problems. In our group we’ve had people who are mentally ill, psychotic, severely depressed, and suicidal.” Heilig is among those who have worried that survivor leaders may overlook people who need professional help. He feels that groups co-led by a therapist and a survivor offer the best of both worlds: the survivor can draw from personal experience, and the professional can answer questions about medication and statistics and act as a “safety net” so a survivor can feel safe falling apart.
Yet some survivors harbor great anger toward the mental health profession, especially if the person they mourn was in therapy. They may feel the “professionals” let them down. A few survivor-leaders insist there should be no professional involvement in groups. They say that they are capable of spotting problems and, when appropriate, of referring the survivor to professional help. “A lot of the literature writes up the pathological cases of survivors, so a few therapists think we’re all basket cases,” says one survivor-leader. “Many therapists look on us as a big pool of potential clients, but many survivors will never be able to go to a therapist.” Explains one group leader, “The already stigmatized survivor may see needing therapeutic help as bringing them further stigma by labeling them as sick.” At bottom, many survivors feel that no one who is not a survivor himself can understand. An Illinois social worker whose mother killed herself started a group when she realized that many survivors who were already in therapy seemed to need something more. “I feel so safe and warm and understood here,” said a woman at her first meeting of the group. “I feel safe and warm at my shrink’s office, too, but not always understood.”
Whether a group leader is a trained therapist, an untrained survivor running a self-help group, or a counselor-priest like Tom Welch, working with survivors offers a unique perspective on suicide itself. In his years at Safe Place, Welch occasionally got anonymous phone calls from people who were planning to kill themselves and, taking advantage of his reputation as a survivor expert, wanted to know how to make their suicide less painful for their family. What method should they use? Where should they do it? What should they say in their note? Welch listened carefully, suggested some options other than suicide, invited them to call him anytime, but told them their questions were unanswerable. “‘There is no best way,’ I say. I share with them what I learned from the group—that there is really no way to prevent the people who love them from feeling responsible for their death. They could leave them a thousand notes saying they’re blameless, but it will never stop affecting them. Their lives will be forever changed.”
As the Safe Place meeting continued, the ten survivors became progressively more animated, their voices more sure, their bodies leaning farther into the circle. As I watched the videotape, I got an image of them—Peter, Liz, Merryl, Bailey, and the others—driving to Somerville from homes all over eastern Massachusetts, carrying their pain, coming to this room, and pouring it out as if there were an almost palpable communal pile of shards of grief and guilt and anger on the floor in front of them. Each time their load became a little lighter, although they knew that no matter how much they unloaded, there would always be something left.
“We still have a few more moments,” said Tom Welch, “and before we break from the group, I’m wondering if someone has something he’d like to share.”
“Earlier, we were talking about the holidays,” said Jean, whose husband had shot himself three years ago. “One thing that has been helpful to me is to do something different each year. I haven’t had a Christmas in my house or a tree, and that has been helpful. . . . I try to find a totally different scene over the holidays.”
“It’s a reminder of the happiness you can’t participate in,” said Welch.
“I don’t ever want to have Christmas in my house again,” murmured Jean.
“I think one of the things about time is that even though the loss never goes away, other things come up, other things grow,” said Tom Rossi. “It’s like the pictures now of Mount St. Helens. There’s life there, and things fill in some of the spaces that right now are just yawning wounds or huge horrible gaps that it doesn’t look like you’d ever get over. So I try not to say that anything’s forever—that I’ll never celebrate again or that it’ll never get any better.” He paused. “It’ll never be like it was. But new things grow.”
“Every Thanksgiving since Fredi’s death, we’ve visited our cousins in North Carolina,” Stanley said. “It’s always been an escape. But every time we come home, it seems to come right back to that Monday after Thanksgiving when she took her own life.” He looked at his wife. “I don’t know why, but this Thanksgiving seemed to be the least difficult of all. This year I see things replacing the pain.”
Peter nodded. “Lisa’s grave is down on Plum Island, not far from where we live,” he said. “Every so often I go down there with some flowers I might find on the roadside on the way home from the fishing boat.” He looked down at his lap. “For the first three or four years, I couldn’t get to the gate without crying. By the time I spoke to the guard and went through the gate I was a basket case.” He shook his head. “But last time, I got all the way through the gate before I started crying!” He looked up, shaking his head, and smiled, and everyone in the group began to laugh with him.
After the laughter settled, Welch looked at the faces in the semicircle. “I’d like to make an opportunity for us to chat with one another for a while after we break from this group,” he said, “but before that, why don’t we spend a few moments in some quiet.” And he, Peter, Liz, Merryl, Eileen, Rona, Joyce, Bailey, Stanley, Jean, and Tom joined hands, eyes closed, looking down. After a silence, Welch said, “Just feel all the warmth and support and comfort that’s been here in this circle this evening. We can send o
ut our good wishes, our hopes, our concern, our prayers. And remember always to take from this circle what we need for ourselves, to put all of that warmth and support into our own hearts.”
VII
MERRYL:
THE BUILDING BLOCKS
SEVENTEEN MONTHS after Carl’s death Merryl Maleska spoke at an anniversary service held each year to which all Safe Place members, past and present, are invited. “For each of us in this room life has been torn open with such a shock that our deepest sense of trust in the world has been challenged,” said Merryl. “. . . This would all be true of anyone who had lost a loved one in a tragic, sudden, totally unexpected way. For us, though, there are special, unique shadows to the distrust. It is not only the world, after all, that is unpredictable—not only the unforeseeable events of an accident—but the choice, the deliberate, in some sense, actions of our loved one that have so destroyed our sense of the world. Someone we loved terribly has rejected us, has told us we were not enough to stay alive for. Even if we know this was not at all his reason for doing what he did, it still feels like deep, unutterable abandonment. How can we ever trust another human being with our caring? How can we make ourselves vulnerable again?”
Two years after Carl’s death Merryl and Nathan settled into a five-room apartment on the first floor of a three-story frame house on a quiet side street in Cambridge. The furnishings were simple and comfortable; the apartment looked like that of many young professional couples just starting out, building a home. And for Merryl, in many ways, life was just beginning again. Once more she was excited by her work; she had recently been promoted to senior editor at Houghton Mifflin. A social life that had stopped for two years restarted, and her calendar became crowded with entries for movies, birthdays, dinner parties, and concerts. She and Nathan began to invite new friends over for dinner; Merryl began to shop in supermarkets again. “When I walked into Star Market for the first time in two years, I felt like someone from another culture,” says Merryl. She gained back the twenty-five pounds she had lost during her first year of grieving. She began to sew again; she made curtains for every room in the house and even knitted gifts for friends’ babies. She started wearing jewelry again, resumed writing in her diary, and began, gingerly, to pick up “normal books.” War and Peace was first, followed ten months later by Dune. “Both of them are set in other worlds, so they didn’t seem as threatening.” And when she and Nathan drove up through Maine to Quebec, it was her first vacation since Carl’s death.
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