On the even of National Suicide Prevention Month, I am reminded of the stories I have told through the years since my sister Denise’s suicide, the stories that show how deep the ripples of suicide run. Many times I have not named the people whose stories I am telling to protect the privacy of their grief reactions to my sister’s death, or to another way that suicide had touched their lives. I believe it’s important to let people tell their own stories– if they choose to.
But last week a high school teacher of mine, Mr. Foerch (his first name was Brad but he was always “Mr. Foerch” to me) died. He was 62, not an age at which we expect anyone to die.
I’d had Mr. Foerch for consumer education and economics, but I also had been a sports writer and the sports editor of the school newspaper so I had gotten to know him some time before I had him as a teacher because he was the gymnastics coach. But in the spring of 1993 when she died, my sister Denise was a student of his in his consumer education class, the last class she needed to graduate, all her other requirements having been completed.
At her wake, another teacher, who I have known much longer, told me that Mr. Foerch had been gone from school, that he was taking the day of her funeral off (it was the following morning) and that he wasn’t doing well.
There was nothing I could do at the time, however, at some point I wrote him a letter. The response took a very long time and it was only then that I learned the depth of his grief over Denise’s suicide.
A girlfriend had found my letter to him and asked him if he had responded. When he said no, she had questioned him why not, telling him that he needed to.
It was in that letter that he told me how much pain her death had brought him– how he thought Denise was too smart for her own good how he didn’t want to face the classroom (where she had walked in my steps and become another current events queen). without her.
I have the letter– it’s packed away somewhere. I don’t know how many times I saw Mr. Foerch after Denise’s death– I know the last time was around 2008 when I was there at the high school with a friend who was having his class reunion. We didn’t talk long; he didn’t really have time between classes.
But when you move on from the people in your life, you wish them well, you hope that life has brought them happiness. And you hope the grief they might have experienced has been processed. I hope that for Mr. Foerch and that perhaps he and Denise will get to meet in heaven for coffee. Her pain from this life is gone, any pain over her suicide that he had, is also gone. Maybe they can pick up where they left off before she died.