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





Monday, May 30, 2011

Going Back

            Visiting my mother after Daddy’s suicide was more than difficult.  I varied from extreme emotions of fear and anger to numbed-out feelings of procrastination and passivity.  I forced myself to make those trips.  Driving there, I couldn’t count the number of times I wished she would sell their home of nearly a half of a century.  Nothing seemed changed to me.  She said that wasn’t true.  She was right, too.  Mom had repainted the house, had changed the household into her own place.  Still, for me, the house was stained with unthinkable memories. 
After we had found my father’s body, the police asked us to wait inside Mom’s house while they roped off the garage with yellow crime-scene tape and waited on the coroner.   Mom and I sat and just looked at each other, speechless, helpless.   Then the medical examiner came and pronounced his death as a suicide.  Screams spilled out of the both of us.  That was when her livingroom furniture became stained from my own drowning emotions.  Days, months, and years later I tried not to sit in the same chair anymore when I went there.  I tried not to look at Mom out of the same corner of my eye.  I tried so many ways to avoid the lapsed silences when our eyes would meet, for me, in that one great memory.  When I went there constant, nervous conversation poured out from me in that room, along with arguments, cut-off attempts of answering the ‘why’ question.  Or I sat white-knuckled with the same trapped-fear I have in a dentist chair.  Many times, I cut that trip so short it broke off into the quick of both my mother’s heart and my own.  For a long time each and every element of my mother’s house, as well, sometimes as my mother, filled me with dread.
            Many times I took my dog with me if my husband couldn’t go.  They distracted the demons lurking in the furniture while my mom and I laughed.  I was not aware when the dreadful feeling subsided, but it did.  It honestly did.  She and I have strived to retain our love that had always been influenced by Daddy in one way or another.   I didn’t lose a relationship with my mother just because I wanted to hide from the memory-stained furniture.
Feeling the feelings of post-traumatic fear and dread is worth the effort.   
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