FOR NORMA BEATTIE, THE SUICIDE of her father when she was fifteen years old was an insidiously catastrophic event. More than four decades later, it still reverberates through her life. Like many of the survivors I interviewed, Norma was introduced to me by a friend. She was completing an undergraduate degree in religious studies at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, her home town. She had raised a family, been divorced, and returned to school, where she was spurred by nagging questions about her own past to focus her studies on the philosophical and spiritual aspects of suicide.
“I came home from the beach, and was told my father was in the hospital, he had taken all his pills, and he died, and that was the end of that.” There was no funeral, as though to mark the death would be to accord respect where it wasn’t due: Jim Beattie had been a difficult man, who caused much domestic strife throughout Norma’s childhood and adolescence. Her parents were separated at the time of his suicide. “The death wasn’t discussed at home. I know I talked about it with my friends, but I felt like some kind of freak,” she says. Her brother, six at the time, told her many years later that he hadn’t really accepted until he was twenty-one that his father was dead and would never return. One older sister, twenty at the time of the suicide, took her own life at the age of fifty-one—the same age their father had been when he died.
Norma believes her father sexually abused her sister, and is haunted by memories of violence she witnessed and didn’t understand at the time. “I’m a naturally cheerful person myself, but the sadness is there, it is part of my foundation,” says Norma, who for years, felt a persistent sense of irresolution about her father’s death. Her grief of course deepened after her sister’s suicide in 1987. “With a suicide, you feel that any dialogue you might have had is truncated, but the body is still littering the ground wherever you go. It’s hard to move through that body. All there is is silence. It has been silenced, or you have been silenced.” Her own pain became more acute—she would scream and cry uncontrollably while driving alone in her car—and her questions about how this tragedy had come to be visited on her family became more urgent. She didn’t even know what had become of her father’s body. Finally, her mother told her it had been donated to the University of Toronto’s school of medicine. Norma called the school, and learned that her father was buried in Toronto’s Mount Pleasant Cemetery, in a grave with other bodies that had been used for medical research. Standing at the spot at last, it comforted her to know that a religious ceremony had been conducted at the time of burial. “At least someone had acknowledged this life and death!” she says.
But even this revelation wouldn’t entirely lay her father’s ghost to rest. And so, on a muggy August day in 1997, at a Presbyterian church in Hamilton, several dozen friends and family gathered to mark the long-ago, still painfully echoing, death. “The thing is, I didn’t even like my father,” Norma says bluntly. “This ceremony is for us, really.” And a gentle, emotional ceremony it was, complete with prayers, hymns, and readings from each surviving member of Norma’s family, an eclectic yet profound collection of words by the likes of Victor Frankl, Hannah Arendt, and James Joyce. As she looked out at the crowd and began the service, Rev. Kathy Kraker remarked that we were “a mixed bunch of souls,” brought together for a unique occasion. The ceremony included a moment aptly described as “a call to name our brokenness.” The words stay with me. If you don’t name something, or acknowledge its existence, it’s tough, if not impossible, to move beyond it. Although the idea to hold a funeral had welled from Norma’s own foundation of sadness, there was also a curious lightness about it, a palpable sense of relief and release.
After completing her B.A., Norma went on to teacher’s college, and in the fall of 1998, took a position at an American school in Cairo. Before leaving, she told me: “That funeral really had an effect. It was like this huge burden was lifted off my shoulders, just gone! Others in my family feel the same way. Many good things have happened since then that are hard to explain.” Norma had done something essential, something that few did after a suicide back in 1956: faced her grief, the truth about her family, and all its underlying welter of jagged emotion. So many people, like Norma, told me stories of grief denied popping up in the strangest places, at the strangest times. One way or another, it has to come to the surface, or it will wreak havoc in unseen and dangerous ways.
There’s a stereotype that situates despair in the alienating blur of cities, but people in rural areas are just as prone to experience it. This is not a joyous time to be trying to eke out an existence from the land. I learned that when I visited the Canadian branch of the Samaritans in Lethbridge, Alberta, which serves virtually the entire province south of Calgary, with its small communities, native reserves, and isolated ranches and farms. Anxious, depressed, and suicidal callers keep the phone lines busy at the Samaritans’ distress centre, some of them in genuine acute agony, others suffering more chronic and curious difficulties. On the centre’s walls were tacked lists of regular nuisance callers, more than one a “lonely farmer” with some pitiable habit to confess, or secret, raging need to routinely vent at strangers. (A typical note read: “‘Bob’ wants to talk to female volunteers only, about bestiality.”)
Sometimes tragedies happen, even after people in real distress reach out. Two of Hilde Schiosar’s volunteers had recently tried to help a man who called after he’d turned on his car in a secluded garage, somewhere on the southern plain. He was already becoming disoriented from the carbon monoxide fumes, and his location was so isolated that the police were unable to find him in time. The horrified volunteers literally heard the man take his last breath. The situation spoke loud and clear of the ambivalence so many suicidal people feel, even as they enact their own deaths—and of the toll suicide can take on people beyond the deceased’s family.
If anyone understands these truths, it’s people running organizations like the Samaritans, now affiliated with a sister organization called Befrienders International, which seeks to bring distress counselling and suicide prevention services to every country in the world. You might call them experts in global despair management, from the original phone line service that still operates in London, to a huge diversity of culturally specific programs, like puppet theatre in remote Sri Lankan villages and peer counselling in British and North American penitentiaries. It was Hilde who in 1996 had helped launch Canada’s first suicide prevention program run entirely by inmates, at Drumheller Institution, tucked away among the dinosaur bones of Alberta’s badlands. In 1997, she took me there for a visit.
We arrived at the prison during a lockdown—all prisoners are confined to their cells twenty-three hours a day—that had been instituted because of a recent riot, and were ushered through a sprawling warren of one-storey buildings, security checkpoints, and designated safe areas. In a locked meeting room, Hilde and I talked with four of the twelve inmates who make up the Samaritans group that offers confidentional distress counselling to other inmates. The need for such counselling in prisons is hardly new, given their notoriously high suicide rates. Drumheller, a medium-security institution, has one of the lower rates in Canada, but during this riot, said the men, they had been called upon to keep vigil with more than one despairing inmate through long, awful nights.
Wayne Carlson, the group’s leader, was motivated by a loss of his own. While imprisoned at Stony Mountain Penitentiary some years earlier in Manitoba, a friend of his named Chris Hood had killed himself, at the age of twenty-eight. “Chris’s death could have been prevented,” says Carlson. What was lacking for Hood and others like him, he believes, was the presence of people trained to spot someone at risk of attempting suicide, and to effectively intervene in an emotional crisis. Today, when prisoners arrive at Drumheller, they are shown a Samaritans video, produced locally and featuring some of the “Sams” themselves as actors, depicting scenarios in which an inmate might seek help. Names of the Sams are prominendy posted throughout the prison. Ordinarily, inmates have freedom of movement during the day, and can approach a Sam themselves, with sessions taking place in cells or meeting rooms. Prisoners in isolation (“the hole”) may also request that a guard send in a Sam for a counselling session. During the lockdown, Hilde also debriefed the men on the symptoms of post-traumatic stress syndrome—nightmares, loss of sleep, loss of appetite, feelings of numbness, and disorientation.
Does the program work? “You can’t measure prevention,” says Hilde, but the Sams are continually evaluating their program, through weekly meetings with each other, and monthly ones with Samaritans staff. They also compile statistical data that are strictly anonymous and confidential. Over time, says Hilde, with the support offered by the Sams to a prison population, “you’d expect the general level of stress to go down, and we do monitor that and consider it important.” Three years after the Samaritans got started, they are officially endorsed by the prison administration, and have become known and respected among the inmates, mainly by word of mouth. “Kindness and compassion are lonely entities in prison,” says Carlson quietly, as he thumbs through a copy of Chris Hood’s suicide note. “I’ve been in the system a long time, and I know what happens to people. I also know how people respond to kindness, acknowledgement, validation.” His sentiments are echoed by the other men, all of whom say they have lost someone to suicide, in and out of prison.
Now in his mid-fifties, Carlson doesn’t gloss over his years as a bank robber and rather flamboyant prison escape artist. He is now on a work release and living in a halfway house, working for the Lethbridge Samaritans on furthering their prison programs, and speaking to high school students about the downside of a life of crime. By the time he left prison, he was well on the way to redeeming himself. A talented writer, Carlson gave me some of his work the day I met him during the Drumheller lockdown. I passed it on to the editors of This Magazine, who assigned Carlson a piece on his recent experiences and observations of prison life. “Riot,” a gritty, at times absurdist essay, was published in the magazine later that year, and won an honourable mention at the National Magazine Awards. We still correspond, and his writing career is well under way, with plans for works of both fiction and nonfiction based on his life experiences, in and beyond “the big house.” CBC’s the fifth estate aired a documentary feature about him and the Samaritans this past February.
Through the eyes of people like Norma Beattie and Wayne Carlson, my own eyes were opened on the matter of how many lives, in so many places, are touched and marked forever by suicide. Where before I might dispassionately read or hear of suicides without a sense of connection, now, when I read a short news item, for instance, about a native reserve that has had ten suicides in the past year, I stop in my tracks. I know this is an emotional apocalypse. I shudder at the thought of such unchecked devastation, some of it irreparable. I know that only ignorance and denial could possibly stop Canadians from viewing the suicide rate in native communities as a national disaster worthy of emergency measures. Among the small number of people, native and nonnative, who do turn their attention to the problem, heroism is demanded, burnout is common, and solutions are not easy or obvious. Healing from individual, family, and community trauma echoing through generations has only begun, and will also take generations.
Meanwhile, hollow, sensationalized portrayals routinely show up in film and on tv, leaving a person who’s actually been near a real suicide to either cultivate numbness or give in to painful feelings. Careless misunderstandings about the nature of suicide and the experience of survivors show up so often, unbidden. There was, for instance, the wholesale media bitchification of Courtney Love in the months after her husband’s death. Reading the sniffy articles casting aspersions on Love for having on-line chats with fans about her feelings at the time, I thought I must be the only human being alive who could entirely forgive her for what to others seemed like wallowing. When a Seattle rock group wrote a song that mocked her late husband’s death, it was reported that she had gone to visit the band leader, pleading for some understanding. When I read about the callous reply she was said to have received—”If the shoe fits, wear it”—I felt only dismay at the indifference of those who would coldly rebuke someone, even a mouthy rock celebrity, in the face of her immense suffering. “Give her a break,” I found myself muttering as I read the news item. “You have no idea what she’s going through.”
There was something ugly and undeclared in the animus expressed against Love that I think had something to do with envy and sexism, on top of sheer ignorance of the pain that goes with grieving a suicide. She’s fierce, intelligent, talented, beautiful, rich, brazen. Is it any wonder some might wish to bring her down with an accusation of murder? Having watched Love weather this storm of mostly male media aggression while moving beyond her grief, having witnessed the unseemly antics of her estranged father, and having read of her firm declaration that her daughter by Cobain “will not be fetishized,” I can’t help respecting her and feeling a rather protective empathy.
It was the same way I felt toward other strangers suddenly turned suicide survivors whose stories showed up in the news, like Pia Southam, or American author Louise Erdrich, after the suicide of her husband, writer Michael Dorris. When a reporter for New York magazine described how he’d arrived unannounced at Erdrich’s home, how she’d stood on her porch crying and asking him to please leave her alone, I felt a sense of outrage, and wished I could have been there shooing him off with a broom—though I also noted the irony that the image came courtesy of this man’s published article, which I read. And when, after the death of Ted Hughes, a letter to the editor appeared in The Globe and Mail declaring that while Hughes might have been an excellent poet, he was obviously a “sleazeball” in his personal life, by virtue of the fact that two wives had killed themselves, I was taken aback by the glibness of the judgment. The fact that Ted Hughes lost two wives to suicide suggests many complex, important things about the psychology of relationships, and of suicide, that might fruitfully be explored, but never will be by those lacking compassion, or the ability to accept life’s inevitable ambiguities.
In all of these cases, though, once I’d sorted through the flurry of my own reactions, I settled down and came to my own conclusions: Everyone who goes through such a trauma, famous or not, feels something profound and entirely outside the limited vision of such publicly aired idiocy and voyeurism. These distractions become only part of the whole experience to be endured.
It was a sense of how terrible it would be to grieve a suicide alone that motivated me to train as a volunteer counsellor in late 1996. The Survivor Support Programme of Metropolitan Toronto is the oldest such service in Canada, and by virtue of the size of the population it serves, also the busiest. After eight sessions of training, sometimes painful—role-playing can bring back memories—with a dozen other aspiring volunteers, some survivors of suicide, some not, I went out for the first time to meet a fellow survivor.
Night begins around 5:30 in Toronto in January, and it’s unforgivingly cold. I drive through the early darkness into a remote, unfamiliar suburb, a sprawling nowhere-land of low-cost high-rises, strip-malls, smoky donut shops, muffler-repair franchises. It is a landscape imbued with all the welcoming charm of a Siberian gulag. I’ve got the radio tuned to a station that airs Dr. Laura Schlesinger nonstop all evening. I must admit, the call-in advice show is gruesomely fascinating. I even once bought a remaindered copy of Schlesinger’s best-selling Ten Stupid Things Women Do To Mess Up Their Lives, figuring I had probably done eleven of them. This was during a period when I would sprint from my office at Equinox to the self-help section of the mall bookstore at lunch. Judging from the author photos on some of the dust jackets, it seems the first thing those who would help ourselves should do is bleach our teeth.
But as I listen to Dr. Laura dish out her snarky brand of doctoring, I can’t believe how many people, like shameless puppies, want to elicit this famous stranger’s approval, or more often, to present their waggling rumps for punishment. “Please, Dr. Laura, tell me how bad I am, and then forgive me….” seems to be the tenor of most calls. Only on rare occasions does Dr. Laura spare a caller her waspish wrath—when children phone, or now and then, when people whose unpolished vulnerability is so powerful, even this artificial and public situation can’t diminish it. “Oh, shut up,” I say to the radio as the diva-doc cuts in with a quip before the caller has adequately explained her situation. “She said her ex-husband,” I mutter. The one thing she does not always do well, I can’t help noticing, is listen. And a counsellor who doesn’t listen is sort of like a pilot who can’t fly. Maybe real listening is such a rarity now, attention spans so short, and lives so disconnected, fewer see the difference between canned, scattershot pseudo-wisdom and genuine response. I turn the radio off and pull into the parking lot of a forbidding high-rise. For the next hour and a half, what I am called upon to do, more than anything else, is listen.
In the brightly lit lobby, I meet with my fellow volunteer, Robin, an easy-going and likable guy in his late twenties, who’s completing his Master’s degree in social work, and whose wife is about to have their second child. He looks dreadfully tired, but still manages to grin and gather his energy for our appointment, when we will listen to and counsel as best we can someone recently bereaved by a suicide. We press the intercom buzzer, the door lock clicks open, and we’re on our way, up an elevator and down a long anonymous hallway to our destination: one family’s sad, troubled home.
Throughout the city, every week of the year, in private homes and church meeting rooms, people are going two by two into the night, to meet with others who have reached out for help. Most have found out about the program by word of mouth, from a police officer who arrives at the scene of the suicide, a minister, physician, or friend. Marking its twentieth anniversary in 1999, the Survivor Support Programme grew out of a study on bereavement in widows, and began in response to research showing that those who had recently experienced a suicide were at high risk for suicidal feelings themselves, and more likely to act on them than other bereaved groups. Back then, the word “suicide” carried enough stigma not to be included in the program’s name; even today, says executive director Karen Letofsky, who has been with the program since the beginning, people appreciate discretion, some requesting that material be sent in unmarked envelopes.
Literally thousands of people have used the service over the years, some driving hundreds of miles to receive this unique specialized counselling that can’t be found in their home communities. Mostly people make contact within a few weeks or months of the suicide, but the program has been known to counsel people who are finally grieving suicides that occurred years, even decades, earlier. There is always a waiting list of potential clients to be matched with volunteers, of whom there are at any given time about three dozen.
Letofsky puts much thought into matching volunteers and clients, taking into account the similarity of their experiences. It’s part of the program’s philosophy to pair as co-counsellors a survivor with a non-survivor. A survivor can easily empathize with specific inner conflicts of a person bereaved by suicide, and signals that it is possible to restore balance and emotional order, enough even to have something left over for someone else. But a non-survivor’s presence is important too. It says that grief after suicide need not carry a stigma, that even people who have not directly experienced this kind of loss can offer sympathy, understanding, and support—a link back to the wider community.
Sometimes, says Letofsky, the city’s suicides seem to come in unaccountable waves, inundating the list all at once, making the waiting time many months, and causing her to wake up in the night, haunted by the thought of all those people clamouring for help at the worst time of their lives. In twenty years, there has been only one client suicide, and one of a volunteer who was also a survivor. Both events were devastating to staff and volunteers. Yet tragic as these deaths were for all involved, that’s a pretty good track record for any helping agency involved in community mental-health care. The model seems sound, providing the choice of not just eight one-on-one sessions with a two-member volunteer team, but also eight sessions of group support with as many as twelve other survivors. Anyone who seems to need extra help is referred to a psychiatrist, psychologist, or other bereavement professional.
A main tenet of this program, and it is key, is that grief is something you pass through, and evolve from; not something you remain within forever. The idea is not to freeze-frame suicide survivors, in their own minds or in the eyes of others, as eternally outside the ken of ordinary existence by virtue of their tragedies. The program establishes a time boundary on counselling that may in some ways be arbitrary—there’s no suggestion that someone is magically healed by eight sessions of talk and tears—but also recognizes that it is up to the individual or family to make use of the supports they have in their own network of family, friends, and community. If gaps exist, there’s time and space in the counselling sessions to figure out what to do about them.
Eight sessions is enough time to get to know people and their situations reasonably well, to discuss everything from the overpowering feelings of anger, guilt, and confusion to preparing for the tasks, both spiritual and practical, of letting go. At what point does a parent dismantle a beloved son’s bedroom after a suicide? What do you say when someone asks how many kids you have? How do you cope with the anger of others, sometimes directed at you, and the way the death changes other relationships in your family? How do you cope with your own anger at the deceased? The questions and issues are profound and numerous, the need to talk about them often urgent, yet usually suppressed in day-to-day living. The sessions become, for many, the safe place where it all gets aired. They can be intensely painful, but also grounding, cathartic, and liberating.
After so many years of shepherding wounded people through this process, Letofsky is reflective and philosophical about what may be gained from it, recognizing that to a large extent, it depends on the individual’s or family’s state of heart and mind. “Some people just want their lives to return to ‘normal’ as quickly as possible, and aren’t really interested in exploring much about what happened,” she says. “I think the people who benefit most from the program are those who see it as an opportunity to face some difficult issues within their families, and that takes a lot of courage. But you know, it is possible to look at what went wrong, and get to a point where you’re not blaming yourself. You can see all the things that might have led to the suicide, but know you are not responsible for that person’s decision. We want to support people in getting to that point, but we recognize how painful that is.”
For my part, I found none of the witnessing easy. Before each session, I would spend at least half an hour sitting quietly, composing myself, donning internal emotional battle fatigues, so that I might feel and project strength to someone I knew was going to need it. I would go over my notes from the previous session, and read the volunteer guide, with its suggestions for the subject of that particular meeting. The conversation could meander, but it helped to have in mind a central path we could always return to, if we ended up hitting a dead end or feeling lost. The other volunteer and I would have already discussed any concerns we had with Karen. Perhaps there were generational differences in the way the suicide was viewed, perhaps children were affected, or conflicts within families had intensified since the death. Perhaps there was a real concern that a person might be at high risk for suicide him or herself. If that was the case, there was no beating around the bush—we had to ask, “Are you feeling suicidal? Have you thought out a plan?” From the answers to these questions, we had to assess how serious the risk was, and report our concern. Fortunately, no one I met ever talked seriously of planning his or her own suicide.
If nothing else, it is the sheer magnitude of the loss experience that makes it useful, if not necessary, to discuss each element, piece by piece, sometimes repeatedly until the reality of it sinks in. I had to respect every person I counselled. I felt they were brave to come forward, yet at times, so breathtakingly vulnerable. More than once, I cried driving home, the words of someone in unbearable pain echoing in my head, sometimes triggering a memory of my own. On occasion, I even woke up in the night after a session, haunted by what I’d heard, saying to myself, “My God, how could anyone go through that?” Counselling brought me much humility. Hearing others’ stories teaches one lesson unequivocally: You are not alone in your suffering.
While it was important to be able to respond articulately to what survivors told us, I came to see that what mattered more than anything was our willingness to be there, listening, not tuning out, judging, or rejecting, not gasping in horror. Our simple presence signalled that it was entirely fine to be saying and feeling these uncomfortable, unfamiliar, yet undeniable things. Sometimes, people asked point-blank, “What brought you here?” But more often than not, that was peripheral information, and I never offered it unless asked, or unless the person related a disturbing experience, such as seeing a deceased loved one everywhere, and wondered if they had gone insane. I could assure them they had not by revealing that the same thing had happened to me and many others. It was a way of placing an individual experience in a larger context, but not everyone wanted or needed to do that. We let their concerns lead the discussion, guiding gently when we could. I came to see the role of the volunteer as more than anything that of a human shock absorber, someone who muffled the waves of massive feeling, and kept them from rising and spilling over into an unanswering wilderness. We couldn’t take away someone’s pain altogether, but we could help ease it for a time, offer a soothing compress on a wounded heart that we understood would take a long time to heal, and would have to do much of its own regeneration to return to a state of healthy functioning.
At the end of these sessions, shaking hands or hugging people I would in all likelihood never see again, I sometimes wondered if we’d managed to do anything at all. It seemed such a small thing to have offered, and sometimes, the people were still so obviously hurt and bewildered. But usually, they thanked us, sent us away with a card summing up their feelings, and sometimes, with small gifts. Fragile though they often seemed in those moments, these were people I recognized were on their way to being survivors. We said goodbye and wished them well.
After that, we could only hope.