Wednesday, November 1, 2000

Fayette County has lost yet another precious life to suicide. The family and friends of another young teen are asking all the unanswerable questions. The most frequent: "What could we have done to stop this?"

I know the drill all too well. My husband committed suicide in 1993. I spent endless hours playing and replaying the events of the previous year of his life. What could I have done differently? I know from my experience as a facilitator of a Survivors of Suicide support group that guilt and blame are the demons that emerge first in the fallout of the tragedy of suicide.

Let me say right now, and I say it with certainty, all the blame and all the guilty feelings and all the Monday morning quarterbacking we can conceive will not bring this precious life back. I am deeply concerned that there may be many people who are feeling some sense of responsibility for the choice this boy made. No one knows what goes on in the mind of a person who dies by suicide.

On Sunday morning, at a church in Fayetteville, Iris Bolton, a nationally known expert on suicide prevention and aftercare, spoke to a crowd of 200 bereaved parents and teens. She used the following analogy to help give perspective. "Imagine a cup of water, full to the brim, rounded off, it's so full. The act of adding just a couple more drops makes the cup overflow." She continued, "It isn't those last drops that make the cup overflow, it's the accumulation of all the drops in the cup that cause it to overflow."

I say, we must all forgive ourselves for not knowing how full that young man's cup was. Mary Ann Stark, a member of the Link Counseling Center's Survivor Support Team, provides hope when she adds, "We each can empty our cup at anytime. How? By sharing our burdens and our feelings with people we trust."

In the seven years I have attended Survivor of Suicide support groups, I have seen the pained faces of parents who have lost children. I have heard their stories with agony in their voices. As a community we must retreat from the blame game and wrap our arms around this family. They need our support, they need our love and they need us to act in positive and proactive ways.

Kathy Bruce

ssurvivor4@aol.com

Member of The Survivor Support Team of The Link Counseling Center's National Center for Suicide Prevention and Aftercare and Suicide Prevention Advocacy NetworkCommunity Organizer/Fayette County

770-719-9893

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