When my sister Denise died by suicide in 1993, I don’t believe the need to do something for others came instantly. I had a full life at the time of her death– I was getting ready for midterms in my junior year of my undergraduate college degree. It took some time for me to realize that something was missing and I had a skill that could fill that need.
At the time, there wasn’t an internet to connect people and it was mostly by reading books and talking to others (but that meant you had to find others who had lost a loved one to suicide, and in my case it was a sibling which was even more challenging to do) that gave you the connection. What I felt was that there was little available to sibling survivors of suicide and if I were to fulfill a need, it was to write a book and give a voice to what were then called the “forgotten mourners.”
It will be twenty years this coming July since the publication of Do They Have Bad Days in Heaven? Surviving the Suicide Loss of a Sibling was published and sent me on an incredible journey around the world speaking, writing, and advocating for not just the suicide bereaved, but also for suicide prevention.
At some point, I felt as if I had done all that I was supposed to and started to move back to the things that had always been important to me– my writing and then the outgrowth of other aspects of my life, the creation of Chelle Summer. However, I have tried to some little things to raise money and awareness for suicide, not always able to get the results that I would like and I’ve tried to leave that behind.
There has been some good movement in the field of suicidology since I moved onto other things, but I’ve also seen things that make me shake my head and other things that I had started have died because the person I gave the torch to buried it instead. Those stories aren’t for today though. This is about what we encourage people to do after a loss. For so long, it felt like people were encouraged to somehow get involved whether with the bereaved or in suicide prevention efforts.
However, I see that there are many ways we can do things to remember our loved ones, mostly through something that was important to them. Perhaps, if my journey were starting today instead of nearly thirty years ago, and the book had already been written, maybe I would have gone straight to Chelle Summer and using the inspiration of the creativity of my childhood with Denise to build my brand instead.
But I don’t usually look at it that way. If someone were to call me today and tell me that they had lost a loved one and what could they do, I would encourage them to do something that is important to them and/or their loved one. What outwardly might not be helping the bereaved or advocating for suicide prevention could still be helping people, but in a different way.
The important part is that we find a “place” to put the suicide, and remember our loved ones for the lives they lived, not for the way they died.