To most people, it wouldn’t have seemed like much: me sitting at the registration table at a conference held by the Suicide Prevention Coalition of Colorado, greeting people and finding their nametags for them, as Celia had greeted me two years before. The difference was that I was wearing a nametag of my own, with a colored sticker on it identifying me as someone who had lost a child to suicide. As I took my place at the table that morning, my heart hammered in my chest. Would I be caught off guard by someone from the press? Would an attendee realize who I was and spit in my face?
I greeted the conference participants and answered questions about the speakers and gave directions to the restroom, and nobody said anything, except occasionally to offer condolences for my loss.
After that watershed day, I became seriously involved in initiatives to prevent suicide and violence. I manned registration tables and folded programs. I joined thousands of others at community walks to raise money for suicide prevention. I shuttled presenters to restaurants from their hotels, packaged items for silent auctions, picked pamphlets up from the printer. I talked to people, I hugged them, and I listened.
Recent data from the Centers for Disease Control show that suicide is among the top ten causes of death in the United States, right up there with pernicious killers like diabetes, Alzheimer’s, and kidney disease. But when it comes to funding for research, suicide prevention is at the bottom, perhaps because of the misguided and yet persistent belief that suicide happens by choice rather than illness. Funding for suicide prevention research comes largely from families who channel feelings of sorrow and helplessness into volunteering and fund-raising. Like all nonprofit efforts, suicide prevention organizations are often underfunded and understaffed, and I quickly discovered that someone with my administrative skills could make a difference. For the first time in a long time, I felt I had a contribution to make.
My motives weren’t purely altruistic. Being part of a group, working shoulder to shoulder toward the same goal, was a gift I gave myself. Even if I couldn’t officially attend a support group, I could link arms with other suicide loss survivors to make a good conference better. It was a privilege and a blessing to connect with a cause so deeply. I’d had many jobs and hobbies that I had cared about. I’d taught kids to read as a reading specialist, and I’d worked to provide adult students with disabilities the accommodations they needed to succeed in college. But my work in the suicide prevention community felt like a bona fide calling, a path out of the darkness, a way forward for a life that had careened off the rails.
Over the years of working with people with disabilities, I had observed that profound loss often brought with it a depth of gratitude for life, a sense of joy, and an ability to be in the present that people untouched by tragedy could not always access. I felt that among suicide loss survivors, too. We cried a lot, but we also laughed.
One told me, “You can’t laugh and cry at the same time.” Laughter, I found, helped me to recalibrate the gyroscope inside me that was swinging so wildly. I started to seek out Seinfeld reruns, Whose Line Is It Anyway?, movies to crack me up like the absurd spaghetti Western parody They Call Me Trinity. I read books by humorists like Erma Bombeck, Dave Barry, and Bill Bryson. I listened to musical satirists like Weird Al and P. D. Q. Bach, as well as comedy on the radio during my commutes. Comedy became a form of community, too, as the best of it comes from a place of tragedy. Some of the comedians I came to enjoy the most, like Maria Bamford and Rob Delaney, speak openly about their own brain health struggles.
Through other survivors of suicide loss, I learned to find compassion for those who judged me, too.
One day, I heard through the grapevine that a colleague had been overheard saying, “You can’t tell me a mother wouldn’t know her child was dealing with something like this.” It hurt because the woman and I had been friendly. To find out she believed I had known about Dylan’s plans—that I had stood by, idle, while he planned to hurt himself and murder others—put me right back in the rock tumbler I’d been living in since Dylan’s death.
I couldn’t stop perseverating about the comment, and mentioned it to a suicide loss survivor further along than I was. She nodded.
“I used to think, ‘If this happened in your family, you wouldn’t judge. May life give you the opportunity to learn what a foolish and cruel thing you’ve said.’?” Hearing her say that shocked me a little; I’d never seen her be anything but unfailingly generous and kind.
She continued: “Of course, I wouldn’t wish this on anyone. Anyway, they’re only trying to convince themselves nothing like this could ever happen to them.” We were in the parking lot by then, and she gestured to the box of suicide prevention pamphlets in the front seat of my car. “Ignorance is what we’re out here to combat, right?” she said, shaking her head. “God knows, I didn’t think it could happen to me, either.”
Her comment helped me to realize why the suicide prevention community felt so much like a home. This is a grassroots movement made up of mothers and fathers and partners and daughters and sons. We donate our time because we believe our loved ones did not have to die, and we know firsthand that ignorance can be lethal. This lends a real sense of urgency to the work we do.
In the aftermath of Dylan’s death, I entertained hundreds of fantasies about ways to atone for what Dylan had done. Finally, here it was. I didn’t have to trade my life in a terrorist attack to save a school bus filled with children. I could write a paragraph for a website, populate a spreadsheet, go around a ballroom putting programs on plates, pick a speaker up from the airport. The suicide loss community taught me that showing up in small and simple ways could save lives too.
I read every book and article I could get my hands on. I worked conferences so I could hear the speakers. I struggled through academic papers I found online, even when the summary was the only part I could understand. I watched webinars, pored over educational resources, asked lecturers for their PowerPoint slides so I could make sure I hadn’t missed anything. I asked as many questions as I could.
Eventually, the suicide loss community helped me to see that it was Dylan’s behavior—not mine—that had been pathological. In the process, though, I began to develop an activist’s passion. What had happened with Dylan was an outlier in terms of magnitude and scope and rarity. But it had also been part of a larger problem, one I hadn’t even realized was there.
At any given conference, I meet people who have lost someone close to them. Some of them come from families riddled through the generations with suicide, violent behavior, addiction, or other brain illnesses. Others have no known biological history at all. Many will have lost more than one close family member; others have survived their own attempts, and share their stories so others might learn. Some help the bereaved, while others work every single day to keep their loved ones or their patients alive. All of us are united under the same banner: It may be too late for the ones we have lost, but it may not be too late to save others.