Dear Reader,

After my father’s suicide, I searched for books to help me through my grief process, but there weren’t many available, especially not one page meditations. The nature of recovery from a loved one’s suicide, for me, was silent. The people that knew about my loss did not know how to console, and I rarely spoke about my father’s suicide. I was afraid of what others may think of my father or me. Unearned shame kept me quiet. I needed words and feelings from someone who had walked down the same path. I did not need graphic descriptions of a person’s suicide. I couldn’t deal with words that brought home the horrible scene of finding my father. But still, I needed to know that the churning feelings inside me were normal. With the thought that possibly another person could relate to my feelings, writing them has been a catharsis.

For me writing has always been a release. There was an old game I used to play as a child called pick-up-sticks. The object was to remove one stick at a time without moving the others. That’s what writing these meditations has been like for me; I picked up one thread of a thought at a time to look at and express. Singling out just one thought and developing it into concise words was difficult and frustrating. Yet, it left me with a clear heart and the ability to get on with my life. Writing these one-page thoughts were both my own cathartic attempt to make some sense of what happened to me after my father’s death, and my attempt to help others cope with their sorrow.

Writing was just one tool in my efforts to heal from the grief of losing my father. Professional direction from a psychologist helped me to understand, also, that once I was able to see my father as no longer in pain then I could begin my own healing. Joining a support group gave me confidence to stop isolating and helped me to talk about my father’s suicide.

Efforts at good writing ask the writer to always speak their truth. It was the truth that I adhered to in these reflections. I did not whitewash the pain. If you have lost someone to suicide, I hope my truth will not cut sharply into your agony. And painful though they are, I believe these reflections have a healing grace. I hope that you will find something in them that will help.

Sincerely,

Karen Phillips





Saturday, June 4, 2011

Memories

            I awoke one morning with clear visions of Daddy teaching me how the guts of an AC unit worked and then another memory of his sitting at the kitchen table trying to drum into my head the notion of compound interest.  In the first, he pointed to black tubes with his grease-covered fingers, and though his brow beaded with sweat, his eyes smile-crinkled at my understanding.  But in the next, he sat upright with a pencil eraser tapping impatiently at the examples that made no sense to me.  “Look here,” he said, his voice raised and frustrated, “you mean you can’t understand this?”  I never wanted to talk to him about money, but always, I loved helping him work out there in his garage. 
            After his death, such nightly memories sucked away my energy.  Throughout the day, I felt like bland food with no added salt, no pepper, no spice.   Come nightfall, thoughts and memories of him flickered behind my eyelids like a movie-marathon.  I saw him laughing, talking, or just looking off into thin air.  I saw his hands petting his dog or holding my mother’s hand.  I saw him sitting on the couch with his elbow on the armrest.  I heard him cuss under his breath when something he fixed broke.  I heard him whistling when things he worked on went right.  I missed him so much—I still do.
            At first, those memories hurt.  Leaded with the pain of his suicide, they came with extreme sadness and wild, horrible imaginings of the seconds before he shot himself.  Later after time healed the rawness of my grief, my true memories helped me understand that his life meant far more than just how he died. 
Memories are a pathway that connects us to others.   Memories help me hold my father in a gentle and real place now.
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