“I’M MERRYL MALESKA. My husband committed suicide a year and a half ago.”
“I’m Peter Courtney. Our daughter Lisa committed suicide six years ago just before Christmas.”
“I’m Liz, Peter’s wife.”
“I’m Eileen Dowcett. My husband and I lost our son Philip five years ago.”
“I’m Rona Marks, and my only daughter committed suicide three months ago.”
“I’m Joyce Oldham, and my husband committed suicide thirteen months ago.”
“I’m Bailey Barron, and our daughter committed suicide four years ago.”
“I’m Stanley Barron.”
“I’m Jean Clark. My husband committed suicide three years ago last January.”
“I’m Tom Rossi, and my brother Rick committed suicide eight years ago.”
On a winter evening nineteen months after Carl’s death, Merryl Maleska and ten other people were seated in a semicircle in a small room in a three-story redbrick building in Somerville, Massachusetts. They were members of Safe Place, a support group for survivors of suicide. Group “facilitator” Tom Welch, a young Roman Catholic priest, began the meeting with his customary introduction: “Each of us comes to this circle with a private urgency, even agony and sorrow. Perhaps others we love are carrying their own burdens and aren’t always available to comfort us. Let us use this time to create an opportunity for each to share, giving room for silence if that is appropriate, understanding that each has strengths to cope with his or her life, yet all are enriched by compassionate and understanding hearts.”
Welch looked around the semicircle at each member of the group. “I wonder if someone might begin by sharing a concern they are presently dealing with.”
There was a pause, then Bailey Barron, a middle-aged woman with short blond hair, began, “Fredi committed suicide four years ago . . . today,” she said slowly, looking at her hands. “I didn’t realize it before we came tonight. It was a Monday, a rainy Monday. . . . It brings back a lot of things. You go through the whole procedure again. Holidays are rough, anniversaries are rough.” She shrugged. “Every day is rough.”
Welch said gently, “Has anyone else recently experienced an anniversary?”
Peter Courtney, a compact, muscular man in a flannel shirt, nodded. “We’re coming very close. Lisa was on a Monday. It was snowing, cold and snowing. I was out on the boat, working, and when I came home, I found out. It’s coming right back again now. A couple of weeks.”
Joyce Oldham, a prim middle-aged woman in matching blue skirt and jacket, smiled politely. Her earrings trembled. “Just a month ago it was a year for me that my husband killed himself, and I was very depressed.” She gave an anxious, apologetic laugh and looked to either side for support. “Does it get any better after the years go by?” She scanned the room nervously.
“Not better,” said Bailey softly, staring at the floor. “Different.”
Merryl Maleska was fortunate in having parents, relatives, friends, and a therapist who were unusually sensitive to her needs. Because the subject of suicide makes many people uncomfortable, survivors often have difficulty finding support. A survivor’s need to analyze the suicide may seem unquenchable, and even the most sympathetic friend may eventually find it difficult to listen. But the need to talk may continue long after friends and family have had enough. Some survivors feel that even their closest friends cannot truly understand unless they have themselves lost someone to suicide. It was this need that drew Merryl to Safe Place.
More than one thousand survivors of suicide, ranging in age from twelve to eighty, and coming from as far away as Maine and Vermont, have attended meetings of Safe Place since it started in 1978. Some have lost parents, some husbands, some wives, some children, some grandchildren, some friends. One woman first came to the group a few days after her son had killed himself; another woman first came to the group thirty years after her father had killed himself. Safe Place meets twice a month. People may attend as many or as few meetings as they like. Some come once, find it overwhelmingly painful, and never return; others attend every meeting for years. Most come for a year or so, then gradually stop, perhaps returning for meetings around birthdays, holidays, or the anniversary of the death, when wounds tend to reopen.
When they first hear about Safe Place from a friend or a counselor, survivors are often resistant to the idea, perhaps because of some stiff-upper-lipism, perhaps because they stigmatize others as they themselves have been stigmatized—something must be wrong with the people in the group because, after all, someone in their family committed suicide. “When a friend told me about Safe Place, I said no thank you, my husband and I weren’t up to it,” remembers Arlene Feltz, whose son had hanged himself a few months earlier. “But deep down we felt we didn’t belong to this kind of group. I don’t know what kind of people we thought they would be—derelicts or something.” She laughs. “Somehow I just felt they would look different.” When the pain didn’t let up, Arlene and her husband decided to try Safe Place. Sitting in a group of twelve people, Arlene, who had always been terrified of speaking in public, was anxious and mute. As the meeting started, there was a pause, and suddenly Arlene was shocked to hear herself talking about her son. “I don’t even remember what I said, but that meeting was the biggest uplift since his death.”
For many survivors, attending their first Safe Place meeting is like happening upon an oasis. “It was literally my salvation,” says a woman who came to the group two months after her husband shot himself. “It was the first time I felt that life might go on.” It may be the first time new members have met anyone else who has lost someone to suicide. It may even be the first time they have ever said the word suicide out loud. Merely being in the same room with other survivors can be tremendously painful—and tremendously liberating. Tom Rossi, a young priest, came to his first meeting three years after his younger brother’s suicide, still dogged by feelings of guilt and low self-esteem. “I looked around at the other people and thought, ‘It happened to them, and they look like nice, normal people, so maybe I’m not such a horrible person, maybe I could be a nice person, too.’”
Merryl Maleska first came to Safe Place three weeks after Carl’s death. She hated it. She said nothing, just sat there numb and stone-faced. “I was looking for someone like me, someone young who had lost her husband to suicide but who had come through it,” she says. There was one woman close to Merryl’s age whose husband, a psychology student, had shot himself, but after two years she still couldn’t speak his name without weeping. Merryl left the meeting that night feeling more raw than when she’d arrived. Nevertheless, she continued to attend, even though for many months it seemed only to depress her further. But Merryl had a vague idea it might be good for her someday. And occasionally, lying in her bed or crying at work, she thought of the woman whose husband had shot himself and felt a little less alone. “It helped me to know that this person was going through the same loss, the same torture. In the midst of my pain I would remember her face and think of how she had lost her husband, too. And that communion would somehow help me to make real, tangible, this event that was so unbelievable.” After a while Merryl began to speak at meetings. “It was the only place I could talk about nothing but suicide for two hours and not feel guilty for taking up someone’s time.” Merryl’s calendar, which had once been so full, now had only two appointments marked on it each month—meetings of Safe Place.
When Safe Place began in 1978, members of the Samaritans attended the meetings as observers. One night a survivor said that the presence of the Samaritans, whose work is based on the belief that suicide can be prevented, felt like an unspoken accusation. Since that night no one has been allowed in the room who has not lost a family member or close friend to suicide. (The meeting I witnessed was a special one in which Safe Place members had volunteered to be videotaped for educational purposes.) Otherwise, there are few rules. Safe Place has no agenda, no speakers, no required readings, and, although people come looking for them, no answers. There is just a lot of what Welch calls “unloading”—talk, talk, and more talk. But even that is not required; some survivors attend faithfully for a whole season and never say a word. Safe Place meetings are not counseling sessions. There is no advice given. “People can respond to questions and share what works for them,” Welch told me, “but they can’t suggest that someone else do this, too—it works for me, therefore it works for you.” The goal is to create “an atmosphere in which people can safely grieve.”
Midway through the meeting Welch turned to Rona, a divorced, middle-aged woman whose daughter had killed herself three months earlier. She was perched on her chair, lips tight, hands folded, as quiet and contained as an owl. She hadn’t said a word all night; when someone spoke, she looked not at them but at a point on the floor in their general direction. Welch gently asked whether caring for her remaining children had left her any time for her own grief. Seven words into her answer, Rona began to weep. She could not stop crying but she could not stop talking, and a flood of anxieties gushed out: her children’s fears, her son-in-law’s drinking, her miserable Thanksgiving. “And I tried to go through my daughter’s things, but I couldn’t go through them, so my son went through them and he said it’s sad but he went through them and I just can’t, and every day it’s a different pain I have to face, I try to leave it in God’s hands as much as I can, and that’s helped, and I try to take it one day at a time, and that’s helped with my pain, but it also, it . . . just . . . it doesn’t . . . I just miss her so much.”
As the words and tears poured out, the rest of the group was still. Although it was clear from their faces that they were deeply affected, no one gave her a handkerchief or moved to hug her or even touch her, although Liz Courtney, sitting next to her, unconsciously swung her arm up to rest on the back of Rona’s chair. Later, I questioned Welch about their restraint. “If someone starts crying,” he explained, “and you immediately pass the Kleenex or run over and hug the person, it stops the feeling. It may make the person feel that tears are inappropriate. Nothing should interrupt whatever someone is feeling. That’s why refreshments aren’t served until after the meeting. People need to be able to explore their pain without any interference—which is something they don’t get to do at home.”
Eventually, Rona’s sobbing subsided into weeping, her words slowed, and like an accordion that must be squeezed flat before all the notes can escape, she finally stopped. “And I know it’s going to be even harder at Christmas, but my son said he would come over and put up the tree because my daughter always did that. And I find as time goes on it’s gotten harder instead of easier.” There was a long pause, as if the group were giving the spilled pain a chance to settle, and then Merryl said gently, “But three months is like yesterday, really.” There were murmurs and nods of assent from the others. Bailey gave a wry smile. “In the beginning I thought that every day would make it better, every step would make it better,” she said. “Well, it doesn’t, and we all know that. You never go back to the beginning, but it isn’t just a steady upward progress.” Rona stopped crying. She looked up at the faces of the group, meeting their eyes for the first time.
People feel comfortable at Safe Place talking about things they can’t talk about anywhere else: the nightmares and gory details that friends want to be spared but a survivor can’t shake, the fear that another family member might complete suicide, the sneaking suspicion they might be going crazy, the sense that they’ll never be happy again. “It’s amazing how many times I’ll unravel an incident and people will say, ‘That’s how I feel,’ or ‘That happened to me,’” says a woman whose husband shot himself. A young woman whose lover killed himself a year ago can’t tell friends that sometimes, when the pain is overwhelming, she gets in her car, rolls up the windows, and drives back and forth across a bridge, screaming. “You can say anything you want at Safe Place,” she says, “and no one will ever laugh at you or think you’re a jerk.”
One of the most difficult issues for survivors to talk about is their own suicidal thoughts. “They need reassurance that it’s okay to have those thoughts,” Welch told me. “In the group, people understand those feelings and so it gets said. No one gasps, no one faints.” No Safe Place member has ever killed himself, and although a troubled survivor is occasionally referred to counseling, interventions in the group are minimal. More often the group’s atmosphere encourages honesty on less dramatic questions. “If friends ask me how I’m feeling and I say I’m feeling bad, they don’t know what to say,” says the mother of a boy who hanged himself. “So now I just tell them I’m okay. But in group the other night, someone asked me how I was feeling, and I said, ‘Terrible.’” She smiles. “It felt good to be able to say that.”
At Safe Place comfort comes in peculiar ways. No matter how awful a survivor’s situation seems to be, at Safe Place there’s always someone whose story sounds even worse. A mother plagued with guilt for not taking her son’s suicide threats seriously meets a man who, hoping to shock his wife out of her threats, told her to go ahead and kill herself. A couple whose son shot himself in the heart meets a woman who found her husband shot in the head. A woman angry because her husband left no note meets a woman angry because her husband left a note. A young woman devastated by the suicide of her father meets a woman who lost both her father and her brother to suicide. “Measuring” can also work another way: survivors for whom the wound is unbearably fresh can listen to a survivor whose loss is further in the past and realize that some day their pain may lessen. A woman whose son killed himself four years ago has never told anybody it was a suicide. Sitting in silence at Safe Place is the best she can do for now, but listening to survivors who are able to talk about the suicides in their families gives her a seed of hope. And those survivors are comforted to feel that their pain may be of use.
None of which means that a survivor will ever forget. “After five years I feel a lot better,” Liz Courtney told the group. Her hands cut quick geometric shapes in front of her as she spoke. “But still, it comes back. The waves keep coming.” She looked toward her husband, Peter, who nodded. “Two weeks ago one of our daughters came home from St. Louis for some job interviews,” she said, “and she was really excited. Our son had just bought a house, and our other daughter was getting along really well with her beau, and I was so happy that everybody was perking. But then when they left, I just dissolved. I couldn’t put my finger on it at first, and then I realized, ‘Lisa isn’t here to be a part of this.’” Liz’s hands folded tightly in her lap as if now that they’d found each other they’d never let go. “I find I can get really upset about something and not have any idea what it’s all about until I analyze it. And always it seems to come back to Lisa.”
Safe Place was born because Liz and Peter Courtney, no matter where they turned, could not find enough room for their grief during the year after their daughter Lisa killed herself on the roof of a five-story building in Newburyport, a small town on the coast north of Boston.
One night, not quite six months after Lisa’s death, Liz and Peter were at Peter’s brother’s house for dinner. Liz had been warned by friends who had been through deaths in their families that she would have six months to “get over” her daughter’s death before people would expect her to “shape up her act.” But Liz was still reeling with grief, and that night at dinner she began talking yet again about Lisa’s suicide. Suddenly her brother-in-law interrupted, “Knock it off. Enough is enough.” Liz was mortified but forced a smile. “Wait!” she said. “It’s only been five and a half months—I still have two weeks!”
Liz and Peter Courtney laughed when they told me the story. They laughed at their naïveté in thinking they could possibly “shape up their act” in five and a half or even six months. “Five years is when we began to feel better,” said Liz, a tall, handsome woman who crafts lampshades. Her husband, Peter, a small, rugged-looking lobsterman, nodded. “After five years the salt started to come out of the wound,” he said. When I first met them, seven years after their daughter’s death, the pain still occasionally struck without warning. For Peter the tears came as suddenly as a summer squall; they rolled down his cheeks until his whole face was wet, and only when he stopped crying did he pull a worn red bandanna from his pocket. Liz dabbed delicately at her tears with a finger before they had a chance to travel far down her face. Recently, she and Peter had been at a friend’s house watching Fanny and Alexander, the film by Ingmar Bergman. In one scene a woman sees the body of her dead husband for the first time and howls like a jungle animal. “How awful,” said one of the Courtneys’ friends. “Who could make such a sound?” Liz didn’t answer. She had flashed back to a moment seven years before, to the day her daughter died, when she had let out a howl exactly like that.
Lisa Courtney was “born with a crayon in her hand,” as her mother said. At an early age she decided she wanted to be an artist; she edited the art quarterly in high school and attended an art school in Philadelphia. A slender girl with long blond hair and milky skin, Lisa was sensitive and shy, though, said Liz, “not painfully so.” Liz and Peter were shocked when on Thanksgiving of her junior year at college they got a call from the school counselor at two in the morning telling them Lisa had been found by a night watchman, curled up and whimpering in a public bathroom cubicle. They took off in their station wagon for Philadelphia, terrified. “Lisa was sitting on a bed looking so pathetic,” recalled Peter. “I felt so sorry for her. I thought, ‘God, if I’d ever known this kid had been this tense . . .’” The doctor, who had given Lisa Thorazine, suggested they take her home for a rest.
Peter and Liz were determined to lick the problem as a family. Each week the three of them went to a husband-and-wife counseling team, and Lisa saw the wife for individual therapy. Over the next few years Lisa gradually seemed to emerge from her shell. She found an apartment, a good job as a jewelry designer, and a few friends. But each fall she went into a funk—a fog, as she called it—that she couldn’t shake until Christmas.
The fall when Lisa turned twenty-three, a number of things went wrong: she felt she deserved more pay at her job but was too shy to ask for a raise; her car wasn’t working; and worst of all, her boyfriend left her for his old girlfriend. One day Peter got a call. Lisa had stabbed herself, but she was going to be all right. Said Liz, “When we got to the hospital, we asked her what happened, and she said she’d gone out to Plum Island and that she just felt all this fog around her. She thought about stabbing herself out there, but she came back to her apartment and stabbed herself in the kitchen, fell to the floor, and thought, ‘Well, this is a dumb thing,’ and then she drove herself to the hospital.” Peter shook his head. “I remember asking her why she’d done it,” he said. “And she said, ‘Well, I’ve never felt real pain, and I had to find out what real pain was about.’” Peter pounded the table with his fist at each word. He looked up, puzzled. “And I think that’s what shook my boots.” Liz spoke quietly: “I think she meant she’d cut herself because she was in such a fog that she needed to feel something sharp.”
Lisa came home to live with her parents and went back to work part-time. Each evening the three of them sat by the fire and had “catch-up time,” telling each other about their day. “It was a very tense time,” remembered Peter, “hoping that Lisa would come out and say, ‘This is what was good about the day, and this is what was lousy.’ And trying to carry on a smooth conversation with somebody you knew was in a lot of pain.” Three times a week they went to their therapists, who taped each session. Afterward, Liz, Peter, and Lisa listened to the tape at home, talking and searching and rehashing, trying to get to the bottom of this, whatever this was. It was an exhausting time for Peter and Liz as they tried to give Lisa enough room but not too much, to be cozy and caring but not suffocating. “It was twenty-four hours a day, it was all for Lisa, trying to help her save her life,” said Liz. “And sometimes when I thought that we had done some good work, I felt so elated. I remember walking down the street one day feeling, ‘My God, maybe we’re really going to get to the root of this problem, maybe we’re going to lift Lisa out of this.’”
But Lisa remained brittle and self-conscious. One day in her mother’s studio, Lisa looked out the window and saw her old boyfriend and his new girlfriend walking down the street licking ice cream cones. “He never bought ice cream for me,” Lisa said in a small voice. Another time she curled up under a table. “I didn’t know the word regression then,” said Liz. “I didn’t see until later it was a step on a long path of making her world smaller and smaller.” Lisa worried that she was behaving peculiarly; one day she was mortified that she had driven out of a parking lot the wrong way. “You could always tell she felt a little raw,” said Liz. “Her biggest problem was getting up in the morning. She was panicky—afraid to face the day. She’d cry and throw up. I’d hug her and say, ‘Come on, let’s go,’ or ‘Don’t get up if you don’t want to.’” But it got worse. “One morning she said, ‘I don’t want to live anymore.’ I said, ‘But, Lisa, just leave it until Friday, until we go back to the therapists.’”
Monday morning it snowed. When Lisa came downstairs, Liz asked her how she felt. “I’m fine,” said Lisa. Liz told her daughter that she was going Christmas shopping and her father would be home at noon. “Is there anything you want to talk about now?” she asked. Lisa said no, she was okay, she was going to work.
“But Lisa never went to work,” said Liz slowly. “She went to the building where I work. Her ex-boyfriend lives there, too, which is pretty heavy.” Liz looked down at the table. “It’s an enormous brick shoe factory that was made into artists’ studios. And you can go all the way up to the fifth floor where there’s a little room with a door that opens out on the roof. People sunbathe out there. Lisa used to go up there at lunchtime with her boyfriend. There’s a beautiful view of the ocean. You can see Gloucester.” Liz paused. “Afterward, her ex-beau remembered hearing someone up on the roof, walking around this funny little room. He didn’t know it was Lisa, he thought it was a kid. She’d gone up to that room where there was a lot of broken glass from kids busting windows over years and years and years, and she did all of this”—Liz made a cutting motion at her wrists—“and this . . . and this”—her hand flashed at her legs, her arms, her neck—“I mean she really wanted out.” Liz looked away and began to cry. “And then we assumed she just must have rolled off the roof.”
In a coma, her skull fractured, her body covered with cuts, Lisa was kept on life-support systems while the family took turns sitting by her bed, talking softly to her, “just to let her know, whether she could hear us or not, that we were there,” said Liz. But the doctors told the Courtneys it was hopeless, and they agreed the machines should be turned off. Friday evening they got a call from the hospital. Lisa was dead. “Saturday we saw her without any of the needles or the support systems, and that was a relief,” said Liz. “I was glad she was at peace.”
After the blur of friends and relatives arriving, the funeral service, friends and relatives departing, there was a sudden lull. Peter and Liz were alone. They talked about Lisa constantly. A sturdy, energetic man, Peter was drained and vulnerable. For weeks he couldn’t finish a sentence without crying. About six weeks after the funeral he was painting the ceiling when he felt dizzy and fell off the sawhorse. He was able to telephone Liz, who rushed him to the doctor. Peter’s heart had fibrillated; he was weak for weeks afterward.
Peter was angry at his daughter. Four weeks before her suicide, when she had stabbed herself in the stomach, Peter had asked Lisa to let him know if she ever felt like that again. “Don’t leave me out of your act,” he had said. Now he felt angry that she had broken her promise. Out on his boat he would suddenly cry, “Goddamn it, Lisa, why didn’t you come to me?” When he was driving a truckload of lobsters into Boston, a sad tune would come over the radio, and he couldn’t stop crying for half an hour. On his boat he would burst into tears, and then, just as quickly, it would be over.
Liz turned inward, wrestling with feelings of guilt. She felt she was a failure as a mother. One moment in particular haunted her, the morning before the suicide when Lisa had come downstairs in silence and Liz had said in frustration, “Please, for once, let me know how you’re feeling—don’t make me always have to ask.”
Lisa had fallen from the tallest building in a small town, and her suicide made headlines in the local newspaper. “There wasn’t anybody who didn’t know, so there was no hiding, which made it easier in a way,” said Liz. “But it also meant we were unable to hide if we wanted to. We knew everyone knew, and they knew we knew they knew.” She gave a short, dry laugh. “Our close friends were great. Our medium friends were scared to death of us.” Like many survivors, Liz and Peter often found themselves doing the comforting because their would-be comforters were so uncomfortable. Peter remembered one friend who crossed the street every time he saw him coming. “He could get from one side to another faster than a weasel in a chicken coop,” said Peter, chuckling, shaking his head. “That went on for a long while, until one day there was a true traffic mess, and he couldn’t make it across before I came upon him. I just said, ‘Albert, how are you?’ I knew he wanted to say something, but he just didn’t know what the hell to say. So I said, ‘Time’s gone on and it’s not easy for us, but it’s getting better.’ I just spilled that out to him, and I could see that just by my talking to him, it released some steam from his boiler.”
While friends kept their distance, other survivors, some of whom they hardly knew, seemed to come out of the woodwork. Said Peter, “That spring a fellow fisherman came up to me. ‘You’ve been through a bitch of a winter,’ he said. ‘My wife tried to kill herself so I know what you’re going through, and it’s a son of a bitch. The only difference is your kid didn’t make it, my wife did.’” Peter tapped his fingers on the table. “It was good to know a guy like that could understand.”
Although Peter’s need to talk about the suicide gradually diminished, for Liz the ache was continuous. She could still talk to Peter, to their children, and to Peter’s brother and his wife. But after a while some of her friends grew weary. “People just didn’t want to hear it,” said Liz. “I tried to talk about it less, to be more careful about it.” She chuckled drily. “To grieve right.” But her pain kept spilling over the edges. Years earlier she had been involved in several women’s support groups, and now she kept wishing there were a group for this, a group where she could say what she wanted and people would listen whether it had been six months or six years.
Liz decided to look. A sixty-page notebook she kept that fall documents her exhaustive explorations. First she called the Boston Samaritans and talked to its director, Monica Dickens. Dickens was encouraging but knew of no groups for suicide grief; she suggested Liz try the Compassionate Friends, a support group for parents who have lost a child to death. Liz and Peter drove out to a church in Lynnfield one night for a meeting. It was comforting, but none of the other parents had lost a child to suicide. Suicide, Peter and Liz thought, needed a special group of its own. Liz called Massachusetts General Hospital and was referred back to the Samaritans. She called McLean Hospital and was connected to a psychiatrist researching the biochemistry of suicide. She called a specialist in group therapy at Harvard, who seemed surprised by the idea but wished her luck. She called a rabbi who had written books on suicide; he said if a group got started, he would love to write a book about it. She called an Episcopal minister who told her about Erich Lindemann and the importance of grief work. She called another minister, who offered his church to the group if she ever found or founded one. She called a famous grief specialist, who warned her to be careful because groups could be scary and someone might flip out.
After several months Liz had contacted a veritable who’s who of bereavement. No one knew of anything in the area for suicide survivors, but they all knew of people who could benefit from such a group. Liz’s notebook started filling up with these names—a woman from a farming town whose son had killed himself, a woman from a North Shore village whose son had killed himself. Liz talked to some of these people, and each survivor seemed to lead to another survivor who was looking for help. Then one morning Monica Dickens called and suggested Liz get in touch with Tom Welch, the young priest who had founded Omega, a grief assistance program in Somerville that ran support groups for widows and widowers, and for the terminally ill and their families. Liz called Welch and they arranged to meet. Tom Welch was aware of survivors’ needs to talk about suicide, and he was aware of how often those needs went unmet. When he was in the seminary, a fellow priest had killed himself while on a retreat. It was never announced as a suicide. Welch only found out because word spread quickly. During his years at the seminary, two other priests took their lives. Each time there was no discussion or sharing of grief. “The seminary dealt with it very poorly,” Welch recalls. “In fact, they didn’t deal with it at all.”
After meeting with Liz Courtney, Welch did some research of his own and found that although there were a handful of support groups for suicide survivors in the country, the closest was in Detroit, Michigan. “The groups were set up along the Alcoholics Anonymous model,” Welch says. “In fact, one of them was called Suicides Anonymous. The Anonymous bothered me because it seemed to feed the idea that people need to be anonymous about suicide. It contributes to the conspiracy of silence and to society’s inability to acknowledge that suicide is the way some people die. We didn’t want to be anonymous about it, but we did want to be safe about it.”
On November 9, 1978, almost one year after Lisa Courtney’s death, nine people gathered in a small room at the Omega offices in Somerville. After Tom Welch spoke briefly about his ideas for the group, Liz described the research that had led her there. When she finished, there was an awkward pause. Then one man said that before they went any further, he wanted to know who everybody was and what had brought them there. One by one, people in the room introduced themselves. Then, as if a dam had burst, they began to talk about what it felt like to lose someone to suicide. For some of them it had been many years since the death, and talking about it was painful but freeing. At the end of the meeting, one woman stood. “I’ve said things here tonight that I’ve never been able to say anywhere else,” she said. “This is a safe place.”
By 2005, Safe Place was one of 270 suicide survivor groups meeting in churches, kitchens, living rooms, and suicide prevention centers across the country. (Now run by the Samaritans, Safe Place has four chapters in New England, each led by a trained Samaritan volunteer who is also a survivor.) The first group was started in 1971 in San Diego, and others—with names like LOSS, Heartbeat, Seasons, Life Line, Transition, and Life After Suicide—quickly followed. Many groups have informal roots. Two survivors meet, talk over coffee, invite other survivors, and are soon gathering regularly to share their grief as well as advice on such practical matters as how to tell a child, how to manage anniversaries and holidays, or what to do with the dead person’s possessions. There are survivor conferences, survivor books, and survivor newsletters such as Afterwords, Mayday, and The Ultimate Rejection, which print poems, personal stories, and news about survivor research. The Internet has spawned dozens of survivor-themed Web sites, some of which allow survivors to “chat” directly with other survivors around the world. One survivor organization runs separate e-mail support groups for teenagers, adult children, parents, fathers, spouses, adult siblings, grandparents, and support group facilitators. Its Web site also sponsors “Movies to Miss!” in which survivors rate hundreds of films that have suicide-related scenes survivors may find disturbing. (Best in Show, a mock documentary about dog shows, in which a few passing jokes about suicide are made, earns one frowny face, indicating “no visuals,” while Titanic, in which a ship’s officer shoots himself, gets five frowny faces—the equivalent of an X rating—signifying “shows the act in detail.”)
Because the concept of the “suicide bereaved” as a special population is new, there is disagreement as to what approach best meets survivors’ needs. While most of the groups, like Safe Place, are based on sharing personal experience, they range from intense weekly therapy sessions to irregular potluck dinners. One group leader runs “guided fantasies” in which she helps survivors reenact the mourning process—the funeral, burial, and so on—in order to complete issues they may not have had a chance to resolve. Most groups meet once or twice a month and are open-ended, while others hold weekly sessions for two months, with agendas and reading lists. Some groups charge a fee, some pass the hat, most are free. While some prefer members to join as soon after the suicide as possible, others suggest they come when the numbness has begun to wear off. One group won’t let survivors join until six months after the death. Some groups are specifically for siblings, others just for mothers. There are a few groups for teenagers only, and at least one for therapists who have lost patients to suicide. Another group sponsors home visits by survivors who hold the same kinship relation to their dead loved one as the survivor to be visited. After being notified of a suicide by the Los Angeles Police Department, the Suicide Prevention Center sends trained survivors to the scene to provide family members with immediate emotional support. And a group in Louisiana brings together survivors with people who have attempted suicide so that survivors may better understand what their loved ones felt, while attempters can see the pain they might cause if they were to complete suicide.
The growth of survivor groups has been so rapid and the variety so wide that in 1984 the American Association of Suicidology, recalling the unsupervised growth of prevention centers in the early seventies, appointed a committee to review survivor groups. The committee found that the main disagreement among groups was over the role of mental health professionals. While about one-third use a therapist or counselor either as coleader or consultant, some are led by survivors with no training. Some professionals worry that these “amateurs” may be in over their head. “A few leaders don’t recognize that they’ll get involved with people who are severely troubled,” says Sam Heilig, the social worker who chaired the AAS committee and for many years led a survivor group at the Los Angeles Suicide Prevention Center. “It’s not uncommon for a suicide to trigger a series of underlying problems. In our group we’ve had people who are mentally ill, psychotic, severely depressed, and suicidal.” Heilig is among those who have worried that survivor leaders may overlook people who need professional help. He feels that groups co-led by a therapist and a survivor offer the best of both worlds: the survivor can draw from personal experience, and the professional can answer questions about medication and statistics and act as a “safety net” so a survivor can feel safe falling apart.
Yet some survivors harbor great anger toward the mental health profession, especially if the person they mourn was in therapy. They may feel the “professionals” let them down. A few survivor-leaders insist there should be no professional involvement in groups. They say that they are capable of spotting problems and, when appropriate, of referring the survivor to professional help. “A lot of the literature writes up the pathological cases of survivors, so a few therapists think we’re all basket cases,” says one survivor-leader. “Many therapists look on us as a big pool of potential clients, but many survivors will never be able to go to a therapist.” Explains one group leader, “The already stigmatized survivor may see needing therapeutic help as bringing them further stigma by labeling them as sick.” At bottom, many survivors feel that no one who is not a survivor himself can understand. An Illinois social worker whose mother killed herself started a group when she realized that many survivors who were already in therapy seemed to need something more. “I feel so safe and warm and understood here,” said a woman at her first meeting of the group. “I feel safe and warm at my shrink’s office, too, but not always understood.”
Whether a group leader is a trained therapist, an untrained survivor running a self-help group, or a counselor-priest like Tom Welch, working with survivors offers a unique perspective on suicide itself. In his years at Safe Place, Welch occasionally got anonymous phone calls from people who were planning to kill themselves and, taking advantage of his reputation as a survivor expert, wanted to know how to make their suicide less painful for their family. What method should they use? Where should they do it? What should they say in their note? Welch listened carefully, suggested some options other than suicide, invited them to call him anytime, but told them their questions were unanswerable. “‘There is no best way,’ I say. I share with them what I learned from the group—that there is really no way to prevent the people who love them from feeling responsible for their death. They could leave them a thousand notes saying they’re blameless, but it will never stop affecting them. Their lives will be forever changed.”
As the Safe Place meeting continued, the ten survivors became progressively more animated, their voices more sure, their bodies leaning farther into the circle. As I watched the videotape, I got an image of them—Peter, Liz, Merryl, Bailey, and the others—driving to Somerville from homes all over eastern Massachusetts, carrying their pain, coming to this room, and pouring it out as if there were an almost palpable communal pile of shards of grief and guilt and anger on the floor in front of them. Each time their load became a little lighter, although they knew that no matter how much they unloaded, there would always be something left.
“We still have a few more moments,” said Tom Welch, “and before we break from the group, I’m wondering if someone has something he’d like to share.”
“Earlier, we were talking about the holidays,” said Jean, whose husband had shot himself three years ago. “One thing that has been helpful to me is to do something different each year. I haven’t had a Christmas in my house or a tree, and that has been helpful. . . . I try to find a totally different scene over the holidays.”
“It’s a reminder of the happiness you can’t participate in,” said Welch.
“I don’t ever want to have Christmas in my house again,” murmured Jean.
“I think one of the things about time is that even though the loss never goes away, other things come up, other things grow,” said Tom Rossi. “It’s like the pictures now of Mount St. Helens. There’s life there, and things fill in some of the spaces that right now are just yawning wounds or huge horrible gaps that it doesn’t look like you’d ever get over. So I try not to say that anything’s forever—that I’ll never celebrate again or that it’ll never get any better.” He paused. “It’ll never be like it was. But new things grow.”
“Every Thanksgiving since Fredi’s death, we’ve visited our cousins in North Carolina,” Stanley said. “It’s always been an escape. But every time we come home, it seems to come right back to that Monday after Thanksgiving when she took her own life.” He looked at his wife. “I don’t know why, but this Thanksgiving seemed to be the least difficult of all. This year I see things replacing the pain.”
Peter nodded. “Lisa’s grave is down on Plum Island, not far from where we live,” he said. “Every so often I go down there with some flowers I might find on the roadside on the way home from the fishing boat.” He looked down at his lap. “For the first three or four years, I couldn’t get to the gate without crying. By the time I spoke to the guard and went through the gate I was a basket case.” He shook his head. “But last time, I got all the way through the gate before I started crying!” He looked up, shaking his head, and smiled, and everyone in the group began to laugh with him.
After the laughter settled, Welch looked at the faces in the semicircle. “I’d like to make an opportunity for us to chat with one another for a while after we break from this group,” he said, “but before that, why don’t we spend a few moments in some quiet.” And he, Peter, Liz, Merryl, Eileen, Rona, Joyce, Bailey, Stanley, Jean, and Tom joined hands, eyes closed, looking down. After a silence, Welch said, “Just feel all the warmth and support and comfort that’s been here in this circle this evening. We can send out our good wishes, our hopes, our concern, our prayers. And remember always to take from this circle what we need for ourselves, to put all of that warmth and support into our own hearts.”