During this time of decline when so much is shrinking: friends dying and for the most part not being replaced; the public exercise of independent thought and compassionate awareness of others both struggling to breathe; there is one gathering, one coming-together twice a month, where we all share what is in our hearts and minds.
Some of us are recently bereaved, some struggling with lingering guilt, some angry, and all of us—or we wouldn’t continue to come to these survivor-of-suicide meetings—finding support in the company of others with whom we can speak openly about our lives after the sudden departure of a loved one.
So why do I continue to attend these meetings seven years after my son’s death? One reason is that I am a co-facilitator of these peer meetings, and I tell myself that I am helping others who are still suffering in a way that I no longer am. To show up and be sensitive to the human need to be heard and to hear ourselves being heard feels important. These meetings provide the recognition of a human experience that everyone present shares.
Sometimes I can sense that someone–usually recently bereaved but at other times emerging after years from an unforgiving and isolated world–is not looking up, is unable to break free of a smothering weight that has settled over them, and who can’t believe they will ever join in and share their experience with others. They are not just yet able to see any parallel between the stories being shared by others and their own situation.
I can’t see into this kind of silence, but I can remember what it feels like for a traumatic event to take the future hostage.
Even though the guidelines for these meetings exclude asking intrusive questions, offering advice, or judging, I want to say something to them. Sensing how alone the person sitting there is feeling, in the midst of this roomful of people, I search for some unintrusive way to cast out a line.
“Was your brother older or younger than you?” “Thirty years is a long time.” “I’ve forgotten what you said your daughter’s name is.”
And sometimes, this is all they need for it to dawn on them that they are in a room where others have also been wounded by the way things have turned out. They might even–if they have not been able to speak about their loss for years, until they stumbled into this room of fellow survivors–surprise themselves with how deeply they need to share.
Has this become a new community for me, like joining a neighborhood bowling league, or a book reading group? It certainly fulfills my need to be among the people I meet there.
The meetings themselves, in which we share one another’s worst moments and deepest misgivings about how we have behaved—sometimes voicing the debilitating fear that we will never be whole again–tend to be allocated to periodic 90-minute encounters.
A positive side-effect of sharing our fallibilities and losses with other survivors–who can understand because they have experienced something similar—may be that in being honest about what has happened in our private world, we are practicing being honest about what is happening in our wider world. And in some cases, a new friendship develops that transcends the fact that we are both survivors.
Telling Stories
There is at least one noteworthy difference between SOS meeting and other meetings that have a specific activity. At the Survivor meetings, we tell stories with a predetermined theme: we share what we remember from our loved one’s shortened lives and our own lives since they left. We don’t talk about, except occasionally in passing, a book we are reading. We don’t engage in some activity we are meeting to do together. We simply talk about someone we can’t forget and our sense of the role we played during their time on earth; sometimes we may share our fear that if we had only done something differently, or not done something, or known more about what they needed in order to want to live, they would still be here.
The stories we tell may represent our attempt to exempt ourselves from ultimate responsibility for what we could not control but wish we could have; our stories may also represent a hope that they can help someone else quiet the voices that haunt their inner being with harsh narratives too difficult to bear alone. In any case, the process of sharing can deepen our awareness of who we feel we are.
Sharing these deeply personal stories–each proclaiming the longings and fears at the heart of their narratives—it may gradually dawn on us that they are actually only stories.
For me, the process of dealing with personal loss has made me more aware that our whole world is witnessing a wider loss: the world we grew up is coming loose at the seams. A side-effect of this global loss is the shredding of stories in which we made plans for a life journey in a world that recognized us and accommodated our hopes for the future. Now so many of our stories include a narrative that tells us we are helpless to protect what we most care about.
Spiritual traditions and psychological theories that attempt to explain the inexplicable all have their stories. Whether they are sacred books held to be revelation or poetic celebrations of the value of friendship, courage, honesty, loyalty and perseverance, it has long been a human need to acknowledge an invisible coherence that we sense but cannot prove exists.
It isn’t just our misgivings about belonging in this world that has us hungry for company that sees us, knows us, and shares our values. As that wider world unravels from the actions of those who do not share our values, we are likely to find a target for our anger and our alienation. However, identifying a source to blame for this unravelling tends to winnow our minds into a doorway that leads—not to a promised land—but to an escape from unbearable reality that is more like Temple Grandin’s calming chamber than an open field inviting us to explore.
Hasn’t this become our way of living? Some of us cling to a set of convictions that we pull around us like a blanket on a winter night. Some of us can’t find that blanket and so we try to weave one out of fragmentary hopes, practices and afflictions that have landed in our minds and hearts over the years. Either way, we may lose the confidence we once suspected we would find if we learned to be honest and modest and showed a little courage when faced with challenges that we told ourselves would be temporary.
I ask myself whether an SOS meeting and the recognition that life is not fair can teach me anything of ultimate value. What do I hope this mutual recognition might teach me? I’m not looking for a suit of armor to protect me from further losses. Armor just weighs us down so that we can’t swim in the waters of life or fly into the open sky.
I’m not looking for a society of like-minded people, unless what we share and encourage in each other is one another’s love for life and caring for the world that supports that life. I am looking for strengthened faith in the community of friends and neighbors. I hope that becoming aware of threats to the natural world isn’t just a memory of something that I took for granted—like a relationship I let slip away through obliviousness. I want to be aware of the cohesion that is present in my daily life–the quiet grace lifting me up and carrying me whole into the future.
It is the young and the not yet born who will have to find a new way.
I increasingly understand why the few younger people in my life don’t seem very interested in what I have to say. I just don’t have the experience they will need to forge themselves if they are to succeed in creating their own life in this evolving world.