Collaborative Grieving: Many Voices Building Hope in The Spoken Coast Project

One of the gifts that has come out of my grief is the concept I've called collaborative grieving. I think of collaborative grieving as the opposite of isolation in our grief process. While the unspoken message in our society is that grief is something to process in private, outside of work hours, and as quickly as possible to return to someone's version of normal, I chose the opposite. I grieved out loud, in public, in workshops, with strangers, and now I feel free of my suffering because I had to do so.

In the rest of the world, collaborative grieving is ingrained in ritual and in culture. When I traveled alone through Asia for two years in 2000, I discovered grief was a part of daily life. There grief is not something to fear, or quieted to exist merely in life's shadows. Death and grief happen in community - and it is shared and processed out in the open among its members. In Indonesia on the island of Bali, processing death even has its own month - August - where villagers have their teeth filed, the dead body wrapped in a white sheet is placed on an altar to be carried by its community, and the body burns while its ashes float over loved ones into the tropical air. When I stumbled on this ritual during the month my parents visited me on the road, my father became uncomfortable - frustrated even - while I had to remind myself not to stick out my tongue, as if catching flakes of snow. I like to think that moment was my personal foreshadowing, as to how I might arrive at my personal place of comfort with death.

But being in Asia didn't bring me to collaborative grieving, or to sit on my comfortable cushion with death. It just gave me a glimpse into the concept. I had to struggle and grieve myself - and bring what I was experiencing after my boyfriend's suicide into my community - in order to find solace.

Insert The Spoken Coast Project.

I met Marissa Krupa, the creator of The Spoken Coast Project, shortly after Bryce's suicide. She most likely knew me as the girl in a heap of emotions who cried out my sorrow to strangers. Fortunately, I was able to return that gift of listening when she learned that her mother, and her brother, were both diagnosed with late stage cancers. Marissa went through her own grieving process - and continues to do so - through her project. Her brother, Mickey, unfortunately died early this year. But the way her community failed her in her grieving process prompted Marissa to look at her own life, and to make the necessary changes in order to honor Mickey's life as well as her own. She was laid off from her job, but she chose to leave the corporate sector that abandoned her to properly grieve her brother and find her own hope. How is she doing that? By climbing every peak Mickey climbed - from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego. She is feeling all of her feelings, as well as interviewing people about their own grieving process between each climb.

Marissa interviewed me this summer, and what arose from the ashes in my interview - and in all of the people she has interviewed in her path - was this trailer to introduce her project. It's about a fifteen minute film. And it's about death. But most importantly, it's about how we think we are grieving as individuals, but it's our collaborative grieving that creates the healing we have worked so hard to live with today. Please watch and enjoy. And if you are so inspired, please donate some dollars or some airline miles to her project so that Marissa can continue this very important work. She needs it. I needed it. America certainly needs it. And I imagine - that one day - you will need it too.

The Real Prescription for Healing Your Loss

How in the hell do I survive my loved one's suicide?

I'm often emailed and asked this question by friends, friends of friends, and just last week, from a woman in South America who lost her boyfriend and found my story in The Courage Companion: How to Live Life With True Power. Near and far, we are all reaching out for someone to help us navigate this traumatic loss.

I decided that the research, grief work, and learnings from my boyfriend's suicide five years ago is necessary for me to share with all of you. Not only because doing this all cleaned my slate to start anew, but because my grief allowed me to seek out diverse methods for healing fully in all areas of my life, and to come up with a real prescription for what I believe might just work for many of us left in the wake of suicide. To be honest, there is also a selfish incentive to sharing what I've learned with other survivors. Each time I share what I've learned, I get to watch myself heal and grow even further. It allows me to chart my progress and then take what I've learned to support others along this trecherous path.

Before I launch into what a magazine would probably title, Top Eight Ways to Heal Your Loved One's Suicide, I want to say that I am so sorry for your loss. I truly mean that. If you are here, this may be the first time that one person can say to you, "I know exactly how you feel," and really mean it. It is the first time in my life when I've felt 100% aligned with others (survivors, that is) and the first time in my life when I've felt I truly belonged (even when I didn't want to). No one should have to experience the level of guilt, shame, anger, confusion, and trauma that comes with the messy package that is suicide. But what I have learned in just five years is that if you take the time to process your grief fully, go into the trauma instead of treating it as just another aversion, and care for your heart as if it's the sweetest guest in your house, then the possibility to grow and expand and become more compassionate in this lifetime is more available to you.

What I've learned for myself after Bryce's suicide is that suicide is incrementally painful for three reasons:

1) it is shocking and often unexpected, even if we happen to later see that the signs were possibly there;

2) often our peers don't have the tools to talk about it with us because our society doesn't;

3) it's a stigma death, one that's unnecessarily loaded with shame and guilt in our world culture.

I have had to work very hard to move through all of the above. But the only way out is through, and through has now become a purpose in my life, to help others navigate suicide as I did. This way, we can rid ourselves of the shame and the stigma, and then educate ourselves so that no one has to suffer beyond the loved one we lost who suffered too much already. We may only have one life, so let's save ourselves while we're living it.

Here is my prescription for how to survive after a loved one's suicide:

1) Join a Suicide Support Group - it doesn't matter how far or close you were to the person who took their life, suicide has a profound ripple effect. Suicide Support Groups (which I trained to lead and will begin next year) can be found through AFSP (American Foundation for Suicide Prevention) here and through the American Association on Suicidology here. They both have incredible resource pages, as well. I did my suicide support group with San Francisco Suicide Prevention and they list their groups here. Being in a suicide support group or grief group gives you a community of people who are going what you are going through, so they understand your pain and they are the people you can talk to about all that you are feeling. They are the only people I can go to to talk about suicide, fully, even today. They are the only ones I feel comfortable sharing the intimate details of my loss, of the trauma, of the secrets that died in the shame. In fact, I had brunch with four people from my suicide group last month and it continues to help process our grief today. A suicide support group is grounding, it is safe, and it is necessary. Studies prove this fact.

2) Process your grief fully - I also did a grief group that had a mindfulness focus because the eight week suicide support group had not been enough. I feel grateful that I had seven years of meditation practice under my belt when Bryce took his life, and as I was comfortable with the topic of death from my meditation practice, the Zen Center where I live in San Francisco offered exactly what I needed in a mindfulness-based grief group. Help yourself by giving yourself the time to process the grief, no matter how long it takes. Many people will expect it *should* take you less time than it actually does. I have learned that often that is because they may be uncomfortable with their own ideas around death, or because your grief is too much for them. Let that stay with them, you have enough to deal with at this time.

During my loss, I had to teach myself and educate my peers by pulling back, hunkering down, saying no to outings, and to the needs of others upon me. Saying "No" taught me my limitations during my grief, and by doing so, I magically taught them that grief is personal and grief takes time. When I was soft with myself, others were softer towards me. It also taught my friends and family how to be with me during the grief years.

3) After you've helped yourself, help others - Early on in my meditation practice I realized that doing service always deepened my compassion. But I have found this to be particularly true with suicide prevention. This came much later down the road, after a few years, when I had worked through my grief quite a bit. How I did that is the following: 

-Zen Hospice Project —where I worked for the last year as Volunteer Coordinator & serve as a Volunteer Caregiver at the bedside one day a week—was where I eventually landed to lean in toward death in order to heal my grief. This is not recommended in the first year from your loss, but can be an incredible act of service to another and to oneself when the time feels right.

There I learned by watching family members and residents that when we don't fully process the grief that happens throughout our lives, it shows up in our bodies, in our minds, in how we relate to our loved ones, and to others in our current day-to-day life.

-Overnight Walk & Community Walks with AFSP - these are healing opportunities to gather with other survivors and honor your loved one by walking overnight through cities in America. I did mine in New York City years ago and will never experience the camraderie and hope I felt gathered with other survivors as we made our way through all of Manhattan and Brooklyn in the middle of the night to great sunrise.

-AFSP's Suicide Support Group Facilitator Training - trains survivors to lead a suicide support group. I took the training and found that my own support group was invaluable, as mentioned above.

-Volunteering as an adult facilitator with Challenge Day - I was drawn to this work when I saw it on Oprah just after Bryce's suicide. As a volunteer adult facilitator, I join the organization when they go into middle schools and high schools and teach teens how to break down the barriers, the bullying, and talk to us about anything. Often they talk to us about their pain, their cutting, and their suicidal thoughts. For teens, these actions are often an extension of what is going on at home, on top of the pressure & bullying they now have in schools. It allowed me to learn how to be with teens and heal what Bryce first experienced as a teen himself.

4) Therapy and 12-Step family groups - I realized after my two grief groups that it wasn't enough. I still needed to talk out the trauma and the pain. I asked for recommendations in the field and sought out a suicidologist. The therapist I found taught suicidology to graduate students and had worked with survivors for years. She knew exactly the level of pain I had suffered and was a wealth of information. This one-on-one relationship was invaluable. When I finished my time with her (she had come out of retirement to work with me), I leaned heavily on Al-Anon, a 12-Step program for family members of alcoholics. People often assume that Bryce suffered from addiction when I am in "the rooms" (a term they use in 12-step regarding meetings), but this was not the case. What I did learn, through the opportunity of tracing the lineage of my desire to be with him while at a 12-Step based rehab treatment facility for a family member the summer after Bryce died, was that I survived too many codependent relationships. I needed to learn to live my life anew, and this time with the knowledge of recovering from the effects of the family disease of alcoholism, along with the support of others doing the same.

5) Grief workshops - One day I mistyped my blog address and magically landed on Nancee Sobonya's website for her documentary, The Gifts of Grief. Nancee and I both came to the conclusion that there are gifts in grief if we allow ourselves to process our grief in order to find them. I highly recommend the film and her subsequent workshops.

6) Create a ritual - Ritual around death is severely lacking in our culture. I feel fortunate enough to live in the Mission district of San Francisco where the Latin culture celebrates Dia de Los Muertos. Bryce's birthday is November 1st, and every year on his birthday or the day after Dia de Los Muertos arrives in my neighborhood. I join other mourners and walk the city by candlelight in a procession that leads us to altars that people in the community have created to honor their loved ones they have lost. It is an incredibly healing night for me. If you don't have access to such celebrations, lighting a candle to honor your loved one on their birthday-or doing something kind for yourself to honor your loved one on their death day-is incredibly healing. This year on the anniversary of Bryce's suicide, I took a bit of his ashes out to the beach and sprinkled him out there. How I received his ashes four years ago was a surreal experience, but I have vowed that since Bryce and I loved to travel the world together, I will take a little bit of his ashes whenever I go to places where he never went. 

7) Trim the Fat - One thing I learned very early on was who I could and could not spend time with after the suicide. Some of my friends were very angry at what Bryce "did to me" and voiced their opinions, sometimes too honestly. Other friends had an ingrained sense in them to just listen, as much as possible, whenever I needed it. Guess which friends I ended up spending more time with after the suicide? Bingo. There are some friends that require more than we have to give on any given day. These were the friends that I knew I couldn't spend much time with, if only because all of my extra energy (of which I had little) was spent tending to my grief. I made sure to let people know how I was feeling at all times and made no promises that I couldn't keep.

8) Read, read, and then read some more - Some of my best understanding as to why people die by suicide was by reading books on those who have researched the topic, and by those who have survived a loss themselves. Below are the most helpful books I read on grief, death, & suicide. And there is a whole stack on my bed stand that I have the rest of my life to read. I often feel that homicide and suicide are so similar because they are the most unexpected ways to die, leaving survivors behind to pick up their pieces. Remember, your life may feel it's in pieces now, but I can assure you that will evolve over time if you tend to your grief. Hold those pieces with tremendous care - the pieces of your broken heart - and eventually, once put back together, the hole in your heart can be filled with new love and a new life.

Recommended books on death: 

The Year of Magical Thinking - Joan Didion is an articulate writer and this won the National Book Award. It's a stunning portrait into losing your partner and what you have to face. 

Angel Catcher: A Journal of Loss and Remembrance - this journal written by a mother-daughter team who lost their son doing aid work for the UN in Africa is perfectly scripted to help you journal your loss and remember the details your loved one left behind for you. Fill it out so you don't forget. Read it later to chart your progress.

Tear Soup - this book is simple, kind, and it's perfect for kids. Or it's perfect for you when the heavy reading is just too much. I wrote an article for a magazine where I was staff writer entitled, "Serve Them Tear Soup, Kids Can Handle It", about how I discovered this sweet book and how deep inside me I somehow just knew how to talk to kids about suicide and death. Keep it simple. Kids do.

Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death - this was helpful regarding the trauma we face as humans when looking death squarely in the face. 

On Death & Dying - the bible on death by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

Half a Life - Darin Strauss' memoir about a tragic accident describes perfectly what life can be like while living it with unanswerable questions.

Recommended books specifically on suicide:

Touched by Suicide: Hope and Healing After Loss

and

No Time To Say Goodbye: Surviving the Suicide of a Loved One - Carla Fine does a *fine* job navigating the intricacies of losing your partner to suicide.

Why People Die By Suicide - a son who's father killed himself, so he became a suicidologist and wrote the best book that explained suicide in concrete terms for me.

Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide 

and

An Unquiet Mind both by Kay Redfield Jamison - she stuggles with depression herself, is on staff at Johns Hopkins Medical School, and is also on the AFSP Board in NYC. She knows her subject matter deeply and lives with it everyday.

I Don't Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression - this book put the pieces together for me regarding men and suicide and insight to untreated early childhood trauma and how it can lead to depression later in life.

Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness by William Styron - he was a master in his time to write about his depression.

Go into your grief,
for there your soul will grow.
                                            - Carl Jung

Coming Out Courageous

Earlier this year, fellow Litquake committee member, author and friend, Nina Lesowitz, called me one morning. As our fundraiser extraordinaire, I thought she was calling me for that donation back to Litquake since I shared with her weeks before about the surprise inheritance I had just received two years after Bryce's suicide. Instead, she called that morning to ask me a few questions about courage to include in her new book, The Courage Companion, and how one goes about finding it after the current love in your life chooses to take his own life over your love.

Two of my favorite quotes speak to what courage is truly about, the first, by my beloved Anaïs Nin, "Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage". The other, by one wise Eleanor Roosevelt,"You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience by which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, 'I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along."

I often say to friends, family, and other survivors, that Bryce's suicide made me more aware of what now in life is truly horrific. It taught me how I need to live my life now, how I now take more risks (like the need to speak openly about suicide, rather than whisper it as a secret like many learned to do), how much further it opened my heart, and how I go further into the causes, like how was it that I got there, meaning, how did I come to be in relationship with a man who took his life? It also taught me that the best relief comes from giving back my honesty to those who are on this path just behind me. Whether it be a woman in an emotionally abusive relationship, highly codependent, who doesn't know how to shut that door calmly behind her before she slams it in frustration one last time, or the friend who keeps letting her relationships turn into the top-bottom variety, where her partner calls the shots through silence, doubt, neglect, and she obliges by letting that neglect take over her own needs. 

Bryce's suicide was hopefully my life's only horror. The one event that arrived as a necessity for me to use as my launching point to look at future horrible events and say, "Well, this just doesn't trump suicide."

This came up surprisingly on my wedding day just one month ago. Two girlfriends scurried around my hotel room asking for things to do to busy themselves. "You're so calm," they said, "Why are we so nervous?"

I laughed.

"Actually, I think I have the suicide to thank for this one," a response they were all too familiar with by now. I think any life event that is supposed to make me nervous now fails in comparison to the nervousness, shame, fear that event had over me. Nothing really stacks up. "Plus, I'm marrying the right man," I said. "I should be calm." In a way, courage came simply, but only after the arduous task of gathering tools to turn me towards the courageous.

Please join by reading Nina & Mary Beth's chapter on me (p. 135, to be exact) and the full book on courage & inspiration. Nina asked the probing questions and I gave the honest answers. There are sparks of clarity, and realizations of what could have been, but most importantly, there is solace in having learned that it took the tools I gathered since that fateful January day to get me to the place where courage carried me through so I could quietly shut the door.

 

 

My Boyfriend ’s Ashes

I met my boyfriend’s brother for coffee and walked away with my boyfriend’s ashes. As I stood waiting for my name to be called, hoping for distraction from the silence, I took a deep breath. In the last fifteen minutes, I hadn’t heard his brother once say my boyfriend’s name. You might think that made it easy for us to meet on a sunny day to talk in a crowded coffee shop, but it wasn’t. Because now that my boyfriend was gone, his brother and I had a lot less to say to one another.

I expected to talk about his suicide notes or how incredibly scary it was in those final summer months living with my boyfriend, and how I had cried myself to sleep in the second bedroom out of fear. I wanted to tell him that his parents and I had mistakenly believed the cuts on his brother’s wrists had come from a slip of his chisel. I wanted to know if he had also counted five suicide attempts from his brother’s final two-week journal entry, and how his brother could hide anything. As I sat waiting to hear my boyfriend’s name cross his brother’s lips, I wondered if his lack of questions for me meant he had known something that I hadn’t, and had known it so intimately that it would never be shared.

We put our empty mugs on the counter and drove to his house to retrieve the remaining items that I was meant to have. He asked, “What else is going on?” which had been his most probing question of the morning. Did he want to hear about any romance, or was he thinking that if I shared something then he wouldn’t have to share himself? But therapy, support groups, helpful programs, and new friends had taught me that I only had to share what was best for me. “Not much,” I said dodging a car that tried to cut me off.

He walked me through my old house, the one I had shared with him, his (and my boyfriend’s) sister, and her husband and daughter. He spoke about the new back porch that would include a handicap ramp for his father, who my boyfriend had paralyzed in a car accident just two months before taking his own life. The ramp would be removable because my boyfriend’s father wouldn’t have his oldest son’s legacy be that he had put his own father in a chair. His father knew he would move his own legs again some day, as did I, because we were both optimists, one of the very qualities that my boyfriend had envied in both of us.

We stepped into the kitchen and he handed me a rock I had given to him that I had stored in my boyfriend’s tool shed. My boyfriend had collected large rocks to build into a fireplace, a fireplace that he fantasized about with me as we lay under a tarp on sand watching moose dunk their heads into the Salmon River on our first Idaho river trip. His fantasies of the future had included me, so I spent our lazy afternoons on rock islands in the river looking for my own rock to contribute. I found a light gray rock with a solid dark gray stripe around the center, outlined on either side with two thin white stripes. An unbelievable rock that had only seen nature, but was found by a city girl. He smiled, throwing it into his handmade dory that we floated. Now I held the rock in my arms, just as I had held him that last time we were together, when we sat in spider position on the carpet facing one another. His tears soaked his neck while he questioned, “What is happening to me?” All I could muster after a year of hell was, “I don’t know,” through my own tears.

As I stood in the kitchen with the rock, I thought back to my attempts to find a container for his ashes last summer while visiting his parents. His mother had found four ceramic jars with corks to distribute a handful of my boyfriend’s ashes to his four siblings, but said that she couldn’t find a container for me. I had mistaken it as a form of silent punishment until she told me the shop where she had bought them so I could see if they had one more. I stood in the kitchen wanting to tell his brother how humorous that day had been, and how grieving sometimes did that to us, gave us laughter as a respite from our pain.

The town where my boyfriend and I had lived for the last two summers only had a handful of shops. I stood in the grocery store aisle with a strange smile, wondering who would ever go to a grocery store looking for containers for their dead loved ones. So I went next door to the shoe/outdoor wear/clothing/houseware store and crept around set tables hoping a perfect container might call me over to its shelf.

“Can I help you find something?” A blonde saleswoman asked while I tipped a container upside down to look inside.

“I’m looking for a small container with a top on it to hold something.” I figured my ambiguity might encourage her to bring options over without me having to whisper “urn” or “ashes.”

She walked me over to a fancy set of salt and pepper shakers, the kind with the glass bottoms and stainless steel tops that twisted right, exposing large enough holes for the salt to seep into boiling water or a pot of bubbling sauce.

“That’s not exactly what I’m looking for. It needs to be unbreakable, and have a top, like a cork, so whatever’s inside can’t escape.”

I wanted to be more helpful for her, until I realized that wasn’t my job. Not now, no more. My chest sunk until I smiled politely at her, “Thank you,” as I turned to leave the store. She smiled confused since she had shown me five containers that would never work. How could she know that the containers weren’t meant for dead boyfriends?

“Here, you can have my container of ashes,” his brother said, pulling me out of my daze. His mother had eventually found an empty jam jar for my ashes, but his brother was apt to keep the jar and give the other container to me. He stood at the junk drawer pulling out rubber bands and tape to wrap around his container that was now mine, the handmade piece of pottery with the cork stuck deep inside so none of his brother could ever come out. He pushed the cork in further with his thumb, wound the rubber band around the cork, and then taped over the cork four times with scotch tape.

“This is so surreal,” I said as he secured his brother’s ashes, reminding me of his brother himself.

“Oh, being here in your old house?” he said deadpan.

“No, you giving me Bryce’s ashes.” I finally said his name as if to jog his memory. “Sometimes I still can’t believe that he’s really dead. I would never have foreseen this years ago.”

“Yeah,” was all he gave in return.

I walked out to the car with the flawlessly lined rock in my arms and Bryce’s container of ashes between my fingers.

“What are you going to do with them?” he asked.

“I don’t know. I remember Bryce and I talked about flying his plane over Africa. Then he had this dream about me and a place I would build for travelers in the Serengeti, so I think having these ashes will give me more of a reason to get there someday.”

I explained to him that a part of me knew that the contents of this small container were no longer Bryce, but then another part of me felt he should go to a place where he had always wanted to go.

“But he’s just going to ride in the van with me for now,” and I smiled, climbing into my van.

I looked down at the small compartment in the console, just behind the gearshift, an ideal place for my boyfriend’s ashes in his small container. I nudged him in there securely, knowing that he would never spill out, and then I drove him home.