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Clergy Corner: Rev. Ron Adams - Finding Our Way

Rev. Ron Adams

by Rev. Ron Adams

I write as both a member of the clergy and as a survivor of suicide. In 1989, my younger brother Jim took his own life. He was not quite 30 years old. 

Once the initial shock receded, I found myself flooded with questions. How come I didn't know? Why didn't he tell me how desperate he was? Why would he do this? Was life really that unbearable? Did I somehow contribute to Jim's misery? Where was God when my brother needed help? Where was my family? Where was I? On and on the questions kept coming, swirling around in my head like leaves in the wind. Questions with no clear answers, as least as far as I could see. Just questions and more questions.

Well-meaning friends tried to provide answers. It was kind of them, I suppose. It just wasn't what I wanted or needed. I needed time and room to wrestle with the questions. I needed time to let them make their way through my head and my heart. While it didn't seem so at the time, in retrospect I believe wrestling with those questions was an essential part of my grieving process. They gave shape to my sorrow; a way to articulate what otherwise left me speechless. And wrestling with them became, I believe, a kind of prayer.

Jim's suicide revealed in harsh terms the basic human fact that we cannot ever really know someone else, not even someone we love. We cannot penetrate to the deepest places of another human spirit, no matter how sophisticated our techniques. There is always something hidden, something known only to that individual and to God. This is not a bad thing. It reflects the fact that we've been made in God's image. God is never fully comprehended by human beings. Neither are we.

Beyond Surviving: Michelle Linn-Gust - When the Journey Changes

"I feel lucky to live in a time where grieving was encouraged along with the concept of continuing bonds. I have known my sister is still with me almost since she died."

by Michelle Linn-Gust, Ph.D.

As I write this, it’s early morning in the United States and I’m on a plane bound for Chicago after a week in England. This trip was significant because hours before I boarded the plane for London, I finished the manuscript of my eighth book, Conversations with the Water: A Memoir of Cultivating Hope.

While some books have taken me years to write, this one morphed and changed over several months and came to completion quickly. It’s a significant book because it marks a huge change in my personal and professional journeys: a year following my divorce and nearly twenty years since the suicide death of my younger sister Denise.

But this trip also was significant because it was my last scheduled talk on suicide. I did the keynote presentation at a forum for professionals who work with the suicide bereaved at the University of Manchester. Over 100 people gathered together to learn how to better support the bereaved and I had the opportunity to start the day, inspiring them with hope of what the journey can be.

I do not completely know where I am headed from here. What I do know is that my work is moving into a larger audience where I can inspire people about more than coping with grief and loss. I have been lucky on this journey; I have been around the world and spent time with people of all walks of life in their suicide grief journeys. This road has taken me places I dreamed of and more. And in that time I have always known that my sister was with me, and she still is. A friend recently wrote to me that she believes that Denise is leading me to joy, to experience all the love and happiness life has to offer because I have spent so much time working through my own losses and helping others navigate theirs.

One Wrong Turn

 

Peter Ratcliffe

By Peter Ratcliffe

Without open, honest discussion, the rate of suicide will continue to climb, so I encourage survivors to talk to each other and help each other heal. We are not alone; there are far too many survivors. We are unique in our experience and understanding of one of life's great tragedies, and perhaps if we talk more openly and publicly about the damage left behind, more of those who contemplate suicide might seek the help they need.

At the very central root of suicide is mental illness. Virtually no one with a healthy mind kills himself or herself. The mental illness that took this person from us may have been a lifelong struggle, or it may have been a single, sudden fit of irrational behavior. We may argue forever about which it was. It was probably somewhere in the middle, and we will never really know. Without question, if you ever contemplate taking your own life, you need to seek immediate professional help.

I eventually came to the conclusion that the man who killed my brother wasn't the gentle, caring Mike we loved as a brother, son, husband, father, and friend. For that one deadly moment, a different Mike took over and destroyed that fine man we knew.

Beyond Surviving: Peter Ratcliffe

Peter Ratcliffe

My name is Peter Ratcliffe. I'm a 12-year survivor of suicide. Without any noticeable prior warning signs or cries for help, my youngest brother Mike killed himself in 2000, leaving behind in complete shock two parents, his wife, two early teen children, three siblings, an extended family, and a community of friends.

The days and months following his suicide were an ugly blur of numbness, searing pain, difficult emotions, and confusing family interactions as we each sought explanation, blame, anger, and comfort in different ways and always at different points in the random cycling of the officially labeled stages of grief. I've often described that part of the journey as being lost at sea alone, swimming night and day towards an island I could see, but never reaching it. Each day brought more exhaustion and hard work and little or no apparent progress, yet somehow I kept swimming and one day found shore and sunshine again.

Book Review: History of a Suicide by Jill Bialosky

By Debra Stang

In 1990, Jill Bialosky was in her early 30s, married, enjoying success as a poet and an editor, and expecting her first baby. Her life seemed idyllic until the night that her 21 year old sister, Kim, sat in her mother's car in an enclosed garage, started the engine, and drifted off to sleep forever.

Bialosky spent the next twenty years trying to understand how her beautiful, gifted, and tender-hearted sister became so desperate that self-destruction was her only solution.