I was invited by my husband, Rabbi Fred Greene, to share this message with our congregation, Congregation Har HaShem in Boulder, Colorado. It was incredibly hard to deliver this “sermon” but I am grateful that it was met with much grace, compassion, and support. I’d like to share it here as well.
Survivors of Suicide Loss Shabbat Message 11/19/2021
Shabbat Shalom. In his book, The Body Keeps Score, Bessel Van Der Kolk writes, It is enormously difficult to organize one’s traumatic experiences into a coherent account-a narrative with a beginning, a middle and an end. I have found that to be true. But I know that I’d like to begin by telling you a little bit about my father in life. His name was Lowell Herman. He was born and raised in Brooklyn where he met and married my mother, Sandra. They were married for fifty years. He was a beloved father to my brother Aaron and me, and he was a grandfather of six. He was successful in his professional life, financially secure, well-traveled and he had many friends. He loved to dance. He was a master at Paint by Numbers, and he took his Scrabble game and NY Times crossword puzzles very seriously. And on April 20, 2015, at the age of 72, my father died by suicide.
He had been struggling with anxiety and depression for many months. In truth, I can look back and say that he grappled with both of these throughout my life, though he never had a formal diagnosis back then. In the months before his death, I spent many hours on the phone with my father offering my presence, all of the unconditional love that I could muster and the reassurance that I believed with the right help, things could and would get better for him. I met him in all of his brokenness and vulnerability, and told him that he was enough, that he was loved and that we would accompany him for however long it took to find his way to a better and more balanced place. But it wasn’t enough to save him.
Tomorrow will be the sixth International Survivors of Suicide Loss Day that I will observe as a member of the “survivors” club. It is a club that none of us wanted to join, but one that offers comfort, solace, and a sense of knowing that intimately connects us even as strangers. I have turned to the members of this club often, especially in the early years after my father’s death.
I didn’t know anyone like me in my day-to-day life. There was nobody I could turn to who understood the depths of trauma and deeply complicated grief that I was living through. The father that I loved, had taken the life of the father that I loved. And it was only among my fellow survivors that I could speak my full truth, enveloped in all its pain, with no restraint in my tears, my screams, and my seemingly unending sorrow. I could share my guilt, my questions, every Why? and every What did I miss? without being met with platitudes, shame, silence, or victim blaming.
In her book, It’s OK That You’re Not Ok, Megan Devine writes,
Here’s what I most want you to know: this really is as bad as you think. No matter what anyone else says, this sucks. What has happened cannot be made right. What is lost cannot be restored. There is no beauty here, inside this central fact. Acknowledgement is everything. You’re in pain. It can’t be made better. The reality of grief is far different from what others see from the outside. There is pain in this world that you can’t be cheered out of. You don’t need solutions. You don’t need to move on from your grief. You need someone to hold your hands while you stand there in blinking horror, staring at the hole that was your life. Some things cannot be fixed. They can only be carried.
We live in a society that is uncomfortable with grief. Add to that the unfathomable layers that come with a traumatic loss, and we who are standing in that gaping hole can find ourselves feeling isolated and fending off words and attitudes that do little to help us find healing, and only deepen our hurt.
So, what is it that I want to tell you tonight? What are the lessons that I have learned that might allow you to better meet someone in the pain of suicide loss and to accompany them on their journey?
In the early days of my loss, I endured so many hard questions. Were there signs? How did he do it? Had he tried this before? Repeatedly I encountered variations of these probing questions. And each time that I attempted to answer them, my guilt grew stronger, my anger deepened, and my sense of otherness took root. You see, when we lose someone to a physical illness, the autopsy is left to the medical professionals. When we lose a loved one to suicide, it is we, the survivors of that loss, who get engulfed in the psychological autopsy. Our eyes become fixated on the rearview mirror. We search for every missed sign, we see everything we didn’t do, and it is unbearable enough. As Elizabeth Kubler-Ross said, Guilt is perhaps the most painful companion of death. Probing questions, whether rooted in morbid curiosity or good intentions, do not help us. They ask us to return again and again to a wound that is raw and festering. So, I would implore you not to ask them. Let us tell our stories in our own time and in a manner that allows us to honor our loss and our loved one. The details of their final moments are no less sacred, even if they might be fraught with violence, darkness, and despair.
Do not assign blame. Survivors of suicide loss struggle with guilt already. It is a heavy burden to bear. I have strived to reframe my guilt as regret over the years. One can learn to live with regret, however hard, but guilt has the power to consume us. Those questions I referenced just a few moments ago, the signs that may have been missed, those only solidify our feeling that we somehow failed our loved ones when they needed us most. And that feeling is made even more difficult when well-intentioned people lay judgment on the person we are mourning. We hear words like selfish, cowardly, cruel, and more aimed at them. But they were none of those things. They were sick. Their illness might not have been a physical one, but it was no less real or painful. So, hold your tongue if you feel ready to pass judgement on them. I lost my father to mental illness. And his memory is deserving of respect and compassion, his memory is and always will be an enduring and abiding blessing.
Show up. In his book, Living a Life That Matters, Rabbi Harold Kushner wrote, At some of the darkest moments of my life, some people I thought of as friends deserted me. Some because they cared about me and it hurt them to see me in pain, others because I reminded them of their own vulnerability, and that was more than they could handle. But real friends overcame their discomfort (and in the case of suicide, I’d add their own fear) and came to sit with me. If they had not words to make me feel better, they sat in silence (much better than saying “You’ll get over it.” Or “It’s not so bad, others have it worse.” And I loved them for it.
There is something about suicide loss that keeps people away. It has the power to stop a conversation in its tracks and makes people deeply uncomfortable. Perhaps it goes back to the adage, there but for the grace of God go I. After all, if it could happen to my family then it could happen in anyone’s family. I cannot speak to the reasons people stay away, nor do I want to. What I can say is that I noticed. I noticed who came to sit with me in my pain, and who did not. Who was made uncomfortable by my grief and the way my father died, and who never gave me a hint of that feeling. I remember those who told me they did not know what to say or do, so they saw giving me space as some kind of noble deed. Show up and keep showing up. And when you show up know that we would rather have you sit in loving silence with us and acknowledge that you don’t know what to say, than to have platitudes imparted to us that cannot possibly speak to the enormity of our trauma and grief. I recall the friends who came over and ensured that I ate something, or who offered to stay with me while I tried to get some sleep. And when I moved to Boulder feeling so messy and broken only two months after my father’s death, I recall with such gratitude the new friends who allowed me to share my grief with them, and who gave me space to simply be in it. They did not ask me to contain it, to clean it up or make it more palatable. As Megan Devine writes, The more we are allowed to open up to our pain, the more we can just be with it, the more we can give ourselves the tenderness and care we need to survive this. There isn’t anything we need to do with our pain. There is nothing we need to do about our pain. It simply is. So, accompany us as we give it our attention and care. As we find ways to let it stretch out and exist, sit with us. As we tend to ourselves from the inside of it, be with us. That is so different from trying to get us out of it.
Ask us about our loved ones in life. The thing about suicide loss is that so much of who they were to us becomes encapsulated in the ending of their story. It is as if every chapter that existed prior to that dark day stops mattering. It took me years to be able to touch upon memories of my father in life without the trauma of his death engulfing those tender moments. But when someone would ask me about who he was to me or asked that I share a memory of him that made me smile, for a moment, however brief, I was reminded that even if they were buried beneath layers of traumatic grief, those memories, and the joyful, warm feelings they evoked, remained alive and accessible somewhere inside of me. And that fueled my hope that in time, they would become more attainable. And six years later, I can think of my father on the dance floor or dressed up like a human menorah on Chanukah and I can smile.
Finally, I’d ask you to consider that words matter. I have spent the last six years dodging so many triggers. Plot lines in television shows, movies or books, posts about celebrity suicides can still catch me by off guard and return me to a deeply vulnerable state. But the most frequent and difficult trigger remains the language that trivializes suicide loss. I am certain that I was guilty of this before losing my father. In moments of frustration, I can say without a doubt that I said things like
I’d kill myself if… or
That makes me want to put a hole in my head
I won’t go on here, as I am sure you get the idea, and it is difficult for me to even reference these phrases. But they are hurtful, and I can assure you that in a time when we are growing ever more aware of inclusive language, phrases like these and worse get tossed around regularly. From our television screens to movie scripts and in conversations that surround us, suicide loss survivors hear these phrases with stunning frequency. And most of the time we hear little else of what follows. We all know that there is no truth in that old rhyme that
Sticks and stones may break our bones
But words will never hurt us.
Words or gestures that make light of suicide and self-injurious behavior do hurt.
We can never know who within earshot has been touched by suicide loss unless they choose to divulge that to us. So, guard the words that come out in moments of frustration, do not share jokes or punchlines that trivialize the very real pain we the survivors of suicide loss must carry. And please, when the cause of death is suicide, make the effort to use trauma-informed language. To say that my father “committed” suicide is to reinforce the notion that his death
was a criminal or sinful act. Using neutral language like “died by suicide” helps to chip away at the shame and blame that surrounds the death of our loved ones. It is a small change that can have a big impact. Remember that our language reflects our attitudes and can influence the attitudes of others. The conversation around suicide loss has a long way to go. But we can be a part of changing the dialogue.
Friends, there is so much more that I could share. Bessel Van Der Kolk says, “It takes enormous trust and courage to allow yourself to remember.” Remembering is hard. Writing this was hard. And speaking tonight in front of all of you, some of whom I know and others that I do not, required a great deal of courage. It is all hard. I am a trauma survivor. The trauma I carry is that I lost my father to suicide. I can name the moment my life became divided into the before and after of that loss. I went food shopping on a Monday morning, standing in the produce aisle of Whole Foods I answered the phone and heard the words that altered my world forever. I will never again be the same. I picked up the broken pieces of my life and I continue to work to put them together anew. Some pieces no longer fit, others feel sharper and more defined, still others have taken on new and different dimensions. I carry scars that cannot be seen, but they are ever-present. My brain and body have spent far too much time engaged in fight or flight, imprinted with and altered by the way I lost my father. My faith has been fractured. My relationship with God has found some healing, but my relationship to our liturgy has not. I do not come to services because the prayers are often painful for me, these words that speak of an intervening God do not bring me comfort. And though six years have passed, some moments and milestones can bring me right back to those early days of suffering. What I want most is to be seen in my entirety, fissures, cracks, and all. I will never get over this loss. I have learned to carry it with me, to incorporate it into my very being. Some days the weight of it is barely noticeable and still on other days it has the power to bring me to my knees. I am surviving this loss every day. I will be surviving this loss for a long time to come. But I am finding ways to thrive as well. The pain ebbs and flows, as does my progress through the valley of the shadows. Grief is not linear. The traumatic grief of suicide loss is made even harder to navigate, stacked with stigma, guilt, isolation, the unanswerable question of why, anger at our loved ones, anger at ourselves and the shame of a nation that remains uncomfortable dealing openly and honestly with issues of mental illness.
That is my truth, and it feels so vulnerable to share it with you tonight. But I hope that in doing so, I have imbued my journey and yours with some meaning, so that we may walk it together with a greater sense of knowing and understanding. I’d like to close with an excerpt of a prayer that I wrote and shared on my own blog, Reflecting Out Loud:
Our world, our lives, our souls, our hearts, our family is left with fragments; like the tablets Moses threw upon the ground…
the broken pieces are now a part of us
the aftermath of a suicide we must carry within us
and we will never again be the people we were before.
Help us to honor the fragments; holding them in the tabernacle of our hearts, just as the Hebrew people carried the shattered tablets with them on their journey toward the Promised Land.
They are a part of our story now. A sacred and sad reminder of what was & what will never be.
Adonai our God, like a mosaic comprised of broken glass, help us to rebuild ourselves, our souls
bit by bit, shard by shard, broken piece by broken piece.
Be with us.
Accompany & carry us through the valley of grief.
Stay with us.
Help us to find a new wholeness.
Help us to find peace.
Help us to tell our story.
Because it is in the telling, that we honor their life, their loss and all that they were to us.
Reflecting Out Loud 