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Support Groups of Belonging: A Survivor’s Experience in Healing

By JoAnn Chavez

On August 4, 1985, my second of three sons, Chris, 21, killed himself.  We were totally shocked and devastated. There were no reasons such as drugs or alcohol abuse that we knew of, but he had recently gone through a break up with his girlfriend, a motor cycle accident which required multiple surgeries and the suicide death of one of his best friends. Certainly, I thought, he was dealing as well as could be expected with all that was happening to him. We were talking, he was sharing some.  So, yes, he was sad, upset and now, I know, depressed. We had no idea of the depth of what he was experiencing.
For his whole life he was super sensitive, more so than his brothers and peers. However, we didn’t know the intensity of his pain.

That night, before his death, we heard that he had spent one-and-a- half hours talking with his ex-girlfriend then left her place to go to the apartment where he was living. Sometime before 4:00 a.m., he shot himself. As I state these events, I don’t mean to say that I know why he died.

The brutal blow of losing him is impossible to describe. I had no earthly idea how I was going to get through it. Having to learn to live without Chris was going to be an insurmountable task.  I did not want to go on living, but I had two other sons and my husband.  It wasn’t that I wanted to die in the same way, it was that I didn’t know how my body could go on functioning with this immense sorrow and despair.  I really believed that my body would expire.

In the blur of those first days, friends and family were there to help and someone kept a note pad with messages. A call came from a support group for bereaved parents offering friendship and understanding, explaining that expressing thoughts and feelings are part of the healing and that we could share and learn from other parents.

So, a month after our son’s death, we found ourselves going to our first meeting. When we walked in, I had a strange feeling that I didn’t belong there, that I was out of place, and how dare these people laugh and eat cookies and drink coffee.  Clearly, I was in the deepest denial that this had even happened! It’s difficult to explain, but my feelings did not match my thinking in the beginning, and the confusion of emotions made me feel like I was going insane.

We found out very early on that the meetings were the only place that we could talk about Chris freely and openly because the rest of the world, by and large, did not want to hear about him, or about our pain and anguish. To mention his name made most people more than a little uncomfortable. There were precious few friends who were willing just to sit and be with us while we grieved and cried.  Washington Irving wrote, “There is sacredness in tears. They are not the mark of weakness, but of power. They speak more eloquently than 10,000 tongues. They are messengers of overwhelming grief, of deep contrition and unspeakable love.” Grief is not a weakness! It takes strength to mourn.

At the support group, we gathered together to share our experiences and to exhaust ourselves reliving and retelling our stories, listening to the stories of others, and asking the ever-present inevitable question: why? Why God? Why Chris? Why Us?

While they were our lifeline and we continued to go to meetings, for us, as survivors of our son’s suicide, we needed something more, but we didn’t know what that “something” was. Although we had all lost children in the group, suicide has other dimensions and burdens, like the guilt that engulfs us. Other parents had lost children to illness, accidents and murder, but Chris had chosen to take his life, as one mother pointed out to me. Her son had died of an illness; she could not comprehend my agony. I might have been able to grasp the idea of his death to an accident or some other external cause, but Chris did the taking of his life. That was unfathomable. My psyche could not conceive that act.

Suicide is a different kind of death and only survivors understand. Other kinds of death are treated with sympathy and compassion. Ours is treated with reaction of horror, questions and distancing, blank stares. Our challenge is to mourn without understanding, without knowing why and learning to live without answers.

Almost one-and-a half years later, I met a mother who also lost a son to suicide one-and-a half years before me. She felt she had no place to go to talk about the guilt and devastating effects of that kind of death, the fell8ings of being a second-class citizen, and the shame and stigma of suicide. There was no support group for survivors in San Antonio, Texas, where we live, so we decided to start Survivors Of Loved Ones’ Suicide (SOLOS).
There I could talk about the isolation I felt as the mother of “a Suicide.” I experienced total acceptance among these people. They had gone through what I had and they did not judge Chris or criticize me when, for example, I told of going to the cemetery at midnight to sit by his grave to watch over him or the time we took a July 4th picnic lunch and ate it there. I couldn’t imagine telling that to an “other,” my name for people who have not walked a mile in my shoes.

An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal. I’m not sure that some Mental Health Counselors who have not gone through this would approve. A therapist I know thought there was something very wrong with her client because she was still going to the cemetery six months after her child had died.

Sometimes, when survivors seek professional help, they may be expected to grieve within a neat time frame of one or two years maximum. It does not help to hear that. It might, in fact, put that already vulnerable survivor in yet a more vulnerable position to ask, “What is wrong with me that I’m not getting on like my counselor says I’m supposed to?” As survivors of suicide, we do not fit the models of grief that are found in psychology books. Our grief is life long. Our task is to learn how to live with it and to become able to resume a meaningful life. This will take a very long time, longer for some than others. In my opinion, being in the physical presence of other survivors has therapeutic value beyond any other way of resolving grief of psychologically healthy people. Grief is the common denominator that connects us all. Thomas Jefferson said, “Who, then, can so softly bind up the wounds of another, as he, who felt the same wound himself?”

The survivors group didn’t lessen my suffering psychologically and emotionally, but listening to those who had been living with their loss much longer than I helped me intellectually to know that I was not going crazy, that I was not alone, that what I was doing was grieving naturally, yet in my own individual way. It helped, also to be able to call someone between meetings for reassurance. That was very sustaining. Sharing my grief experience and having it validated and normalized by those who have made the journey before me has been one of the single most important factor in my healing. To me, grieving is sacred work and the support group is a most valuable instrument in facilitating that work. My pain has been transformed into a kind of wisdom I could not have gained in any other way. I think that’s what one would call a gift.

I am a survivor. I have walked through the fire without being consumed by it. I have earned the status of “elder” in this tribe. I’ll never get “over it,” and yet I’ve adapted to living with my loss much as an amputee learns to live without a limb. It’s a poor comparison, I know.

Love never dies. Chris lives in my heart and in my memories. He is my son today as much as he was in life.
With Permission, Excerpted from “Surviving Suicide Newsletter,” Vol. 17, No 1, spring 2005, published by The American Association of Suicidology. http://suicidology.org