Effects of Suicide on the Families

I have thought long and hard about this section. I have spent much time finding the right words to relate to others and what happens when you lose someone in this way. After we lost our son, we had no answers. We were left with so much pain and confusion. 

I happened across a challenge coin at my place of employment with some words that meant something to my family and me. It said, "suicide does not stop the pain. It just passes it on to someone else". That statement alone helped me understand much of what we were feeling. Beyond that, many thoughtful people asked what they could do to help. To this day, I still do not have an answer to that question. Many people avoided us. The things that happened to us seem to make people uncomfortable. What it feels like is what happened to us scared other people. No one had the correct answer of what to do, and avoidance was, for them, the safest option. We spent so much time in pain, struggling to deal with the sudden loss. We looked for answers and meanings and had none of them. Since we lost our son, we have stepped on landmines every day. I call them landmines simply because there is no better explanation or description. You can be in a great place in your life, and without warning, you see something simple, like a book, a rock, or a picture, and it is like you just stepped on a landmine, and your whole world explodes. You are immediately rocked back to the raw, pure instant feeling of loss and memories. At that point, you are almost frozen in place. 

The best way to define our lives afterward is how many seconds or minutes you are away from tears. This is a club that no one wants to be a part of. But only those who have experienced it genuinely know how it feels. This is part of the ostracization that comes to us. When we need people to be around us the most and have that semblance of normalcy in our lives, people avoid us, walk on eggshells, or try not to talk about it. Our son's school specifically told the student body not to discuss what happened. His name was all but stricken from the record. They acted like it never happened. I can never explain to anyone how that felt. It is a complete kick in the face when you are already down.  We are now and have always been proud of our son. We love him dearly and always will. We will never have the answers, but we will continue to carry his pain and ours for the rest of our lives. 

We built something to honor our son's memory. Someplace that is not a reminder of death but a reminder of his life. This park is a neutral ground emotionally. The goal is to allow the families that have lost their loved ones to come to, cry, scream, love, and honor the ones they lost. You can't genuinely do that in a cemetery. That's not a place where we feel comfortable. Due to the nature of the loss, few of us are even prepared with a plot and are forced to act quickly. That puts us in an even more emotionally vulnerable place. There is no absolute privacy, just reminders of death there. Cemeteries do not offer the memories of their lives to us. 

Suicide is not talked about. Suicide prevention has terrific support. But support for those of us left behind is lacking on many counts. The reality for those left with the aftermath is compounded in many ways. We know the people have no intention of causing more harm. Human nature is to avoid what makes people uncomfortable. We sadly make those around us uncomfortable. Some days all we want or need is a hug with no words said. Somedays, we need to yell at the world. On other days we spend reliving every moment before our loss begging for answers and playing the "what if I had done something" exercise. 

But most of all, we still want to love and honor those we lost. Our worlds are fractured. Our families are in pain. Our friends and coworkers have no idea what to do. We are lost at sea, trying to find the shore. We look for lifelines anywhere that we can find them. The worst part is that people are too uncomfortable to deal with us. We remind them of their insecurities and fears. We feel like a walking billboard that says, "this person needs to have a wide berth around them."  What we are building is a place of neutral ground. Someplace that a family can come to that has no day-to-day memories. Someplace beautiful and surrounded by nature and privacy. A place where they can cry, scream, yell, honor, talk to, come to some terms, and love their lost person. A place with a bench, statue, cross, or whatever they feel helps them do that: a dedicated spot that helps them heal and process. We know the pain will never leave, but we know we can still love them and the life that they had.