Sustaining Hope: National Suicide Prevention Week

Sunday was World Suicide Prevention Day and I thought I wrote a really good post on reminding people to seek help and where they could do that (one can call or text 988). The post didn’t go anywhere on Facebook, did a little better on Instagram, did the best on Stimulus. I bring this up because in the United State each day, we lose 132 people, that means a plane full of people dying each day. And yet I find it interesting that Meta, which owns both Facebook and Instagram, clearly kept my post from going anywhere.

Suicide affects us all and the numbers continue to push upwards. There are a lot of reasons to not be happy when one rolls out of bed each morning. Despite all this, I’m here to remind you that there a lot of good things in our lives, but it’s up to use to find them! No one else is going to do it for us. No matter what’s going on around us, we still need to get up, we still need to go through the motions. But in that, we need to add something– seeking what sustains the hope inside us.

I know where I find hope. I have worked hard to cultivate that in my life and I have tried to help others with these blogs and the things that I post on social media. As I write this, I’m getting ready to head up to the high school where Greg teaches and speak to two health classes. Part of my message will be about this very thing I’m writing here– sustaining hope. We can all find hope, but how do we sustain it?

In this National Suicide Prevention Week, my challenge to you is to think about what sustains your hope. Make a list! I hope it’s a long one! Keep it somewhere so that you can refer to it when you feel down (or down on the world at large). Remember that quote and saying, “Happiness is an inside job”? That’s the truth.

Seek it, find it, hold onto it.

Where Hope Resides

It’s hard to believe it’s the start of August and that Greg went back to school yesterday. I’m always reminded, as we head toward fall, that September is the month we put extra effort into suicide prevention with National Suicide Prevention Month and World Suicide Prevention Day.

But there have also been some deaths lately, a death here in New Mexico that no one is saying is a suicide unless one reads between the lines and the death of Sinead O’Connor who couldn’t seem to find peace in herself and then the suicide of her son that made it even more challenging.

All this together started me thinking on what my message September is this year and I realized it’s going to be much different than usual although not a new message for me.

It’s about where we find hope.

I don’t know why, but so often my head the phrase, “where hope resides” travels through and it did last week as I contemplated these deaths and the emotional pain that these people- and so many others– feel.

Life feels so much more challenging these days than ever before- we remain divided and angry. There has been change that makes sense to some and not to others. Even going to a restaurant has come to feel like a chore when you don’t know if they have enough staff to feed you (another topic for another day). Sometimes finding joy feels sucked away with the vacuum cleaner in this change.

When I find myself getting down, the question comes floating through– where does hope reside? In some way, it does in this photo of sunrise in the rice fields in Ubud, Bali. A new day always means a new start. And no matter how difficult the day before was! There is something about darkness giving way to light. After all, it can’t stay dark forever, the sun has to come back.

Perhaps instead of a message this year, a statement of inspiration, I’m issuing my own challenge to everyone (a good challenge, I’d like to think!): where does your hope reside?

A Reminder as Things Begin to Bloom Again

There is a myth, one I continue to hear thrown out there every December, that people are more likely to end their lives during the holiday season.

No no no. While depression might run more rampant during the holiday because of the disappointment with relationships, sadness over loss, or a variety of other reasons, digging into the numbers, one would see that more suicides happen in March than any other time of year.

March– when things start to bloom, when we get teased with warmer weather, when spring break usually takes place. Yes, that March. My tulips are beginning to sprout and this morning it felt much lighter than it has as I began my swim at 6:30.

For most of us, March is a time of hope and renewal; we begin to feel a surge of energy after the dark and cold of winter.

But for some people, including my sister who died 29 years ago this March, I quickly understood that while I saw hope in things blooming, for her it meant the pain of watching things bloom while her own pain felt inescapable.

Take a step back this month– many aspects of our lives are opening up (while we all step tentatively into them, afraid we might lose them again), but there is still much pain around us. That pain is exaggerated by the site of things turning green and then the first flowers beginning to bloom. As many people feel renewal from getting to switch out the winter coat to a spring one, many others can’t get there.

Check on your own mental wellness this month; make sure you’re doing okay. If you’re not, what can you do to help yourself? And check on those around you and whom you care about. Our pain doesn’t all look or feel the same. If something looks out of place to you, it probably is.

There is hope but sometimes people need a little help finding the color in the tulips and the lighter days.

Be Present

Be present.

Seems impossible for many of us, doesn’t it?

How often do we find ourselves distracted from the moment, even a great one, by something else?

But being present is important, it’s a key to life in many ways, or at least to functioning in life. What we often don’t realize, however, is that not being present is the source of much of our pain. We’re always looking one way or another– in the rearview mirror at what we had– or looking forward to what we want but can’t seem to get. Then we find ourselves in a downward spiral of pain.

There is pain in the present, of course, but present moments don’t last forever. The sun always has to come up, light must return.

Whether we have lost someone to suicide and can’t stop looking back at what we didn’t do or what we will never have, or we’re contemplating ending our lives because we can’t bear to face a future, we need to stop walking one way or the other.

Stand still, be present, look around. What’s surrounding you? Life has pain, it’s a reality, Yet by stopping for a moment and just being, we’ll find our perspective changes. By being present.

That Stupid Word

No no no– I’m not referring to believe. We all know I like that word so much that I made t-shirts and stickers from my painting of it.

We’re two weeks from Suicide Prevention Month, Suicide Prevention Week, and Suicide Prevention Day which means it’s time for me to start addressing not just suicide, but the state of where things are. I dusted my soap box off and I’ll be using it for the next few weeks.

Usually, each time this year I have some sort of message that I believe people should know about. This year, probably in light of everything that’s happened, I didn’t feel anything that hasn’t been said before so much as maybe some things that need to be rehashed.

I also thought about something that is getting better, but still needs more work.

The used of the word “committed.”

That’s the stupid word.

I never felt comfortable using that after Denise died by suicide. It never rolled off my tongue and it took me time, processing, to understand that “committed” in that sense means sin or crime, neither of which she had done.

Denise died by suicide. She believed her pain to be insurmountable and I have never tried to judge that because I wasn’t walking in her shoes.

For many reasons- church reasons, law reasons– the word committed has stung the bereaved in a negative way. The good news is that I hear it less often– less on television, less in the newspapers. The bad news is that I still hear it in my orbit.

There are many things you can do for suicide prevention and there are a number of things you can do for the bereaved. One big one is to change your language and those around you.

Died by suicide.

The Building Blocks of Coping Skills

In the last week, I received several messages from friends who were in some way affected by a recent teen suicide and/or attempt. In November I spoke with a reporter The Naperville Sun– the very newspaper for which I wrote a column on good causes several years ago while I was living in my hometown for a short time.

I'm not going into specifics but there have been multiple suicides at my high school over the last year and much as been said about the concern that the students are feeling too much pressure to succeed and feel unable to live up to that.

In the article above (which was then reprinted in the Chicago Tribune a few days before Christmas) I gave my opinions as someone who grew up in Naperville and whose younger sister died in the same town. In my first book about sibling suicide I cited the environment as what I have always believed to be a factor in my sister's death: the pressure wasn't something she coped with well.

Denise and I were two very different beings, beyond the fact that I had blonde hair and she had brown hair (and that by the time I graduated from high school– which was the end of her freshman year– she also was taller than me). I won't say that I did well under pressure because all the pressure came from myself which is another story for another day. But I thrived in the busy environment of having multiple tasks to complete– school, running, writing and editing the school newspaper. I was involved with the activities that interested me and I believed were important to creating the life that I wanted to have.

But this isn't just about Naperville. Our suicide numbers are up. Way up. We have more resources, we have better medications, we have more crisis lines. And yet we are losing more people to suicide.

So once again I'm hopping back on my soap box.

There's a long list I could go down of which I still believe coping skills are missing from the diets of many young people. Couple that with social media and either a self-indulgence of oneself or the feeling of inferiority that one isn't good enough next to what others' lives appear to be. And don't forget to sprinkle in the lack of personal communication– texting has replaced actually sitting down and having a conversation with the people around us. 

My husband who is a high school teacher and coach and I had a conversation last week and he said, "It's not just coping skills but building on coping with challenging situations." 

Something challenging happens in our lives, especially early like maybe we fall off the bike before we finally actually are able to ride it successfully. Learning to do things and learning how to cope with disappointments (we didn't win the essay contest we thought we had surely nailed), help us the next time we are faced with something especially as they get seemingly bigger and more integral to our lives.

I have often said that high school running taught me much about how cope with disappointment. That pressure I put on myself that I mentioned earlier caused a lot of disappointment early in my life. Now that I'm older (and hopefully wiser) I can see how I have used those disappointments as building blocks to each experience I've been faced with since then. 

However, I should also add that my parents allowed me to make mistakes. They didn't run off to the school and fix everything. In fact, they fixed nothing. I would have been embarrassed if they went to the school to complain about a teacher or situation. That was up to me to figure out.

Finally, it's why my social media is filled with what I create, what inspires me, what makes me happy. Many days can be challenges for a variety of reasons (as I type this I have a bag of frozen popcorn resting a hurt knee– I haven't been able to run much in the past three weeks– one of my seemingly life-sustaining activities). 

As I said in the interview, life is hard but it's also great. We have many opportunities and we never know what's around the corner which is every reason why we should hold on for tomorrow. And we all have an obligation not to just to learn that for ourselves but to pass on what we've learned to others particularly people younger than us. That in turn gives us purpose.