Day 1 - National Suicide Awareness Week

*Note: I am going to try to do posts each day this week (no promises) with information that I hope will be helpful concerning the problem of suicide. If you have not already done so, please read my initial introductory post on the topic for my background and a way that you can participate in helping to address this awful problem that devastates so many lives.

Also, if anyone reading this has his or her own blog, I would be grateful if you might be willing to do a post sometime this week mentioning the week (feel free to link to my blog if you want). Most people don't think of suicide beyond the occasional publicized celebrity death, but when it happens to someone you love, you too would wish more was being done to help those who fall into such deep despair. A post this week can be a small step in helping with that cause.

I am far enough removed from the events of last October that I am able to look at things from a bit more balanced perspective than when I was in the throes of the pain and shock closer to the event. I am at the point where I tend to look back at the death of Alfred with just a contemplative sadness rather than the overwhelming uncontrollable sorrow I used to feel. And, I am learning that one of the greatest ways for me to move on and become a stronger person from the experience is to use the insight that I have been given to help others going through similar circumstances.

For in the initial days and weeks after losing someone to suicide, a person feels dazed and confused. Sometimes you burst into tears uncontrollably with no warning and regardless of where you are (as I did in such places as church or walking down Broadway near my home); other times you feel no emotion at all and just sorta sit and stare. But the overwhelming sense during that time is a feeling of being completely lost. Suicide is not generally talked about in "polite company," so those thrust into the experience find themselves without warning in uncharted territory, as if they woke up one morning like Michael Douglas in the movie The Game, buried alive in a tomb somewhere in Mexico but not knowing where you are. You feel as if you want to just stay in the tomb and not go out, because when you do, you don't speak the language of the experience to even know how to ask for help.

It was during that time that I was so grateful for another person, a bit further along in his experience after losing his mother to suicide, who recommended a book that truly became my road map to find my way out of the tomb and back to familiar ground. That book was No Time to Say Goodbye: Surviving the Suicide of a Loved One by Carla Fine (a suicide survivor herself, having lost her husband). As I have continued to learn about suicide (first to help me and now in an effort to be able to help others), I have found that there is a large body of work addressing the topic of suicide (a search of Amazon.com's "Suicide" category brings up 2,103 results), so there are many more resources than I have been able to examine personally. But this book, speaking as one who read it barely a week past the suicide itself happening, is a superb, compassionate, hope-filled book that is very reasonable priced ($10.74 on Amazon), currently in print, and able to be found at the major bookstore chains (I have purchased copies at both Barnes & Nobles and Borders near my house).

Hopefully nobody who reads this will ever have need to read this book yourself, but it is very possible that sometime, someone you know and care for will be faced with this unimaginable situation. Those who have not gone through such a situation often feel awkward and don't know what to do or say. I hope later this week to offer some suggestions for helping a friend who is going through such pain, but here is one very simple way you could be a help in a very tangible and meaningful way and know that you are really making a difference for the person who is still trying to "learn the language" of their new experience.