LYME — After losing his 23-year-old son to suicide in 1994, Michael Whitman felt as though time stood still.
“Grief in the earliest weeks was awful,” Whitman said during a panel discussion on the topic of “hope and healing after suicide and traumatic loss” at the Lyme School on Tuesday evening.
“Mostly I just felt sadness that I wasn’t there, that this young man died alone.”
But in the years since his son Breck’s death, Whitman, a Lyme resident, has found comfort in talking with others who have suffered similar losses, as well as through therapy.
“These people did not get tired of hearing my story,” he said.
Whitman and his fellow panelists, Dominic Candido, a psychologist in Lebanon, and Ann Duckless, community educator for the National Alliance on Mental Illness’s New Hampshire chapter, sought to offer insight into the grief people experience after a loved one dies by suicide, as well as how community members might support these survivors.
Lyme parish nurses Kari Allen and Sharon Morgan organized the event in response to folks who sought to support friends and neighbors who have been affected by recent suicides, as well as other traumatic losses such as deaths by overdose.
Some people who attended later said the town of 1,750 had lost three residents to suicide in a span of six months.
Though she declined to discuss specifics, Allen said in a Wednesday phone interview, it’s “so hard for the people who have had things in the last year.”
The rate of death by suicide in New Hampshire was about 19 per 100,000 people in 2017 — the most recent year for which data is available — and the rate in Vermont was about 18 per 100,000, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The national average was 14 per 100,000. Nationally, New Hampshire ranks 16th for deaths by suicide, while Vermont ranks 19th. It is the eighth-leading cause of death in both states.
Lyme School principal Jeff Valence welcomed the 50 or so attendees who sat at tables decorated with green tablecloths, gourds and vines; snacked on Hershey’s kisses; and sipped on water and coffee provided by the event’s organizers.
“No matter where you’re from, you’re home now,” he said.
The panelists first talked about what might lead someone to suicide, including impaired thinking. Candido said that he has spent thousands of hours counseling people who are having suicidal thoughts. Factors might include a sense of hopelessness and helplessness, a thwarted sense of belonging and perception that they have become a burden. Addiction and substance use also can play a role.
Often, he said, people are overcome with the false notion that suicide is the answer to a particular problem they’re facing.
People “believe all kinds of things about death and what it might deliver,” Candido said. But, he said, suicide “leads simply to death and not to a solution to that problem.”
When counseling people with suicidal thoughts, Candido said, he tries to work with them to understand why they might be ambivalent about ending their lives, and then he tries to align himself with the part of them that wants to live.
“Solving this problem whatever it is, that becomes our list,” he said. That conversation “takes people in a more hopeful direction.”
Panelists noted that suicide can be prevented when people recognize the signs and find treatment, but just as people sometimes die from other chronic diseases such as heart disease and diabetes, they sometimes die of suicide or by overdose.
“Sometimes people can turn that corner with (suicidal) thoughts and feelings and they can recover and sometimes not,” Duckless said.
Duckless emphasized that just like deaths from other chronic diseases, suicide has many factors and often cannot be completely understood by survivors.
“There is no one cause and effect,” Duckless said.
But she said she sees hope for the future as society gets better at discussing mental illness and substance use without judgment.
“We have to get better as a larger society (at) having these conversations,” Duckless said. “I’m impressed with your community being able to have this conversation.”
Survivors of suicide loss navigate their grief in various ways such as reading, talking, art and music, Whitman said. Music has played a significant role in his own recovery, he said. He produced a collection of music about loss called “Before Their Time” in 1999.
Some in the audience had more recently experienced losses. Some wept during the panel’s presentation.
Duckless said people shouldn’t feel the need to apologize for crying, which is “something that is so innately human,” she said. “Why would we need to apologize for being human?”
And, Whitman said, “Tears express love. (They) can feel very healing.”
Duckless urged those in attendance to listen to themselves in order to understand what is helpful and what is not as they are healing.
The passage of time also helps, Whitman said. Though survivors never forget their losses, Whitman said it gradually becomes possible to re-engage in normal activities.
Sometimes survivors feel guilt as they move forward with their lives, knowing they are doing so while the deceased is not, Candido said.
It’s important for survivors not to blame themselves for a loved one’s death, the panelists said.
“People have to understand … in the end they don’t have control of that outcome,” Candido said.
Typical symptoms of grief might include difficulty accepting the death, disbelief, emotional numbness, difficulty recalling positive memories, bitterness and anger related to the loss, self-blame, desire to be with the deceased, difficulty trusting others and confusion about one’s life role. Candido cautioned that symptoms that last more than a year may require treatment.
“If I’m really in a bad place, you know what? I need a mental health tune-up,” Duckless said. There’s “no shame in getting myself … back on track in a way that’s going to be helpful for me and those I love.”
For those who are seeking to support someone who has experienced such a loss, Whitman recommended material goods such as a gift certificate for a massage, food or a restaurant gift card.
“Use your imagination,” he said. “What would you like?”
He also encouraged community members not to avoid survivors as they are grieving, though he acknowledged that beginning a conversation with a survivor of such a loss “can seem very difficult.”
“One way to start is saying, ‘I don’t know what to say,’ ” he said.
Or a simple “How are you doing?” can give a survivor an opportunity to talk if they wish to.
Lyme Town Clerk Patty Jenks, who lost her husband, Jimmy, to suicide earlier this year, attended Tuesday’s event with some family members and a “ton of friends,” she said in a Wednesday phone interview. She was prepared to leave if it didn’t feel right but stayed to the end.
“From my perspective, it was helpful,” she said — not only for survivors such as herself, but for “people left dealing with us after all this crap happens.”
“Everybody handles these things differently,” Jenks said. “There’s no right or wrong and that’s a fact. We can all be left with doubts and worries and questions … regardless of what’s said or not said.”
But being able to talk openly about traumatic deaths such as suicide and overdose helps, she said.
It “takes away some of that guilt that is really hard to shake,” she said.
Allen, one of the Lyme parish nurses, said many of the evening’s attendees came up to her after the panelists were done speaking and disclosed their own losses to suicide, including those of children, a brother and a father.
When a woman whom Allen has known for some time came up to her at the end of the event and disclosed that she had lost her daughter to suicide years ago, Allen said she was guided by the speakers’ suggestions to ask: “What was her name?”
“What that evening gave a lot of us was ways that we can help to be good listeners,” she said.
If you or a loved one is in need of support, the National Suicide Hotline can be reached at 1-800-273-8255 (TALK).
The Greater Sullivan County Survivors of Suicide Loss Support Group, the sole Upper Valley-based support group for survivors, meets in the chapel room at Valley Regional Hospital on the third Wednesday of each month from 6:30 to 8 p.m. For more information, contact Connie Kincaid Brown at 603-558-0961 or cjkincaidbrown@comcast.net; or Randy Wiggin at 802-376-6115 or wig@vermontel.net.
Other resources for survivors are available online at afsp.org and naminh.org.
Nora Doyle-Burr can be reached at ndoyleburr@vnews.com or 603-727-3213.
