Day 2 - 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.

One of the difficulties someone who has lost a loved one to suicide faces is dealing with the feeling that nobody else really understands the pain that he or she is feeling. Well-meaning, loving people graciously try to offer comfort by saying, "I know what you're going through" or "It will get better; you just have to give it time." But for the person who is dealing with a suicide particularly, those words often provide little comfort, because as one psychologist put it, you are dealing with two tragedies simultaneously. You are dealing with the most intense, irreconcilable emotions; put into the unimaginable position where you are grieving for the very person who killed your loved one.

Fortunately, today there are more resources and avenues for help than ever before in history for those dealing with surviving a suicide. And one of the resources for which I have been grateful is the Survivors of Suicide website. Started by a person who had gone through this tragedy and wanted to help others in similar circumstances, it is a subscription-membership site (very reasonable price set only to help pay for the cost of running the site) that is limited to only those who have actually lost a loved one to suicide. It is filled with articles, advice, poems, and memorials that can offer comfort in dark moments.

But especially within that site, there are a host of wonderful people who will correspond with someone who is grieving and, from a perspective that cannot be shared except by someone who has survived the same ordeal, offer hope that the newly-bereaved person can make it through this difficult time. I found this site just a couple days after Alfred's death, and I went there often in the initial months following his death. I still go there on occasion to check in, and I have been glad to see that I have now been able to offer comfort and hope to others who are just entering into the process.

Again, as with the book I mentioned yesterday, this is a resource for which I hope nobody reading this ever has need personally. But, if suicide ever impacts someone you know, here is a wonderful, safe place to send the person for comfort and encouragement that they may not know where to find elsewhere.