Every year suicide claims the lives of more than 40,000 people in this country. It is the 10th leading cause of death in the U.S. and, in fact, is the 5th leading cause of death for adults age 18-64. To put it into understandable terms, every 12.8 minutes someone takes their own life....about 112 per day. Every minute someone is making an attempt to end their life. Thankfully about 11 of those people's plans are intercepted and they are given the care they need to live a fulfilling life.
Ninety percent of people who die by suicide have diagnosable psychiatric disorders at the time of their death. Why is that number so important? It tells us that many of the people who choose to take their own life perhaps are in a state of shifted perspective which may affect their ability to make choices that fit with who they are when they are not suffering with mental health issues. For at least some of these people access to mental health services may make the difference between life and death. For many of these people just connecting with a mental health professional who can help them understand how to manage their mental health may change their perspective.
I am a Licensed Clinical Professional Counselor in Maryland and I own a private practice which strives to meet the mental health needs of the community. Suicide matters to me because it's my business, but it mattered long before I ever started counseling. Suicide is professional to me, but it's also very personal. I have lost eight first-degree relationships (meaning I knew them directly) to suicide, and I understand that I cannot look away from this tragedy. I am drawn to work directly in the path of suicide in the names of those I've known, loved, and lost. And so I walk.
My grandfather, my father's father, took his own life in his 50s. He suffered with mood disorder issues that eventually led to some type of psychosis during which he made the choice to kill himself. I never knew him, and I learned very little about him through my father. He was not talked about. His death was talked about even less. As for many people, it was introduced to me as an accident, when I started asking questions. The gun had "accidentally" discharged. He had "accidentally" shot himself. He was "accidentally" no longer with us. That didn't make sense. I didn't understand how it was possible. Being a questioner...I questioned. Not my father, because I knew. Somehow I knew that he wouldn't...or couldn't...talk about it. The silence on this topic was deafening. I learned much of what I know through my mother. I pondered it for hours...days....weeks...months...years.
I went through the stages of grief for someone I didn't even know. I was in denial vicariously. By not telling me the truth, my family denied the death. I bargained with the universe, with my dead grandfather, saying "if you'd only known me, you would have wanted to live," "if you'd waited it would have been worth it." But he didn't. There were no grandchildren then, and given the stories I've heard, he wouldn't have been very involved with us anyway. It wasn't his thing. I got angry. I cursed him in my mind, wished him into hell. Common knowledge said people who kill themselves go to hell. So I envisioned him there. And I wanted him there. I was angry that not only did he deny me the right to know him, he denied me the right to know about him because no one talked about him.
He was a big empty hole in the family. A big, dark, scary place that no one wanted to visit or mention. My father once said, completely offhandedly, "you're just like my father." I held my breath when he said it. He had never mentioned his father....at all. And now this. I was like him. I didn't know what to do with those feelings. I went from anger to fear. What if he meant I'd do something like that too? What if he thought I'd kill myself. Reviewing that comment over and over I finally recognized that he meant simply that I loved animals, as did his father (I think I had just saved a field mouse from the cat or something). He wasn't comparing me entirely to his father, but connecting a piece he loved in me with a piece he loved in his father.
Years later in my adulthood, I became sad for this loss. All of the anger I had expressed internally shifted to a profound sadness. I was sad for not knowing this man who was more than his suicide. I was sad that nobody could help him. I was sad for my grandmother who had found him. I was sad for my father who couldn't speak of such an important person in his life. I was sad for my siblings and I for never having known our grandfather. And I was most importantly sad for a world in which this was stigmatized and shut off from our experience as a collective people. I walk daily with this sadness.
My grandfather was the first suicide I knew. The first suicide I had to grieve. It was in some ways easier as I hadn't known him, so my grieving was held in the imagination rather than in the actual day-to-day experience of my world. He was not the last. In 6th grade a classmate took his own life and we were given very little to no support in grieving his death. In a class of just over 30 this was a tremendous burden on myself and my classmates, and I still recognize effects in my life 30+ years later. After graduating, three more classmates took their lives. Did they do this because the door opened with the first? I don't know. Part of me wondered how they could do it when they knew how much it hurt to be left behind. Each of these four people was suffering, and suffering far more than any of us around them could recognize. I realized early on that suicide takes the pain of one suffering being and multiples it then divides it by the people who love that person. I walk daily with the pain of these losses.
So I became a counselor. I remember my father telling me once that he had one worry about my future work. This worry was that someday a client of mine would end their life in suicide. My father was accurate in his prediction that this would happen. Two of my clients took their own life years after leaving counseling with me. One client took his life five days after a visit with me. Grieving these losses has been a long and lonely road, but one I must walk.
Talking about my experience of the deaths of my clients was the closest my father and I ever got to talking about his father's death. He was supportive and I strongly relied on him as I worked through my feelings about these losses. There is something about talking to another person who has suffered loss by suicide that is comforting. I didn't have to explain to him how I felt; he already knew. I longed to ask about his father, but I kept putting it off for another day. I had planned to ask him specific questions about his father's death when I was to visit him on his birthday October 13, 2015.
My father left this world on October 3, 2015. I never got to ask. However, he did not take his own life, and for that I am thankful to him. He breathed until he could breath no more. And I like to think there was heroism in his last years which were difficult for him with a chronic illness. I believe that perhaps my father endured those difficulties for us, so that we wouldn't have to bear the burden he did of losing a parent to suicide. And so I walk in memory of him too, for being quietly brave in the face of many sources of pain.
On June 27th in Boston, I will walk. I will walk 18 miles in honor of the eight I've lost, in honor of the others who are lost to people I know, and for the thousands who I never knew. I will walk to shine a light in the darkness that is clinical depression, suicide, and the after-effects of such tragedies. I will walk for change by bringing the topic of suicide to the forefront where it belongs. I will walk to honor the idea that we all struggle, that we all push through much more than anyone will ever imagine, and that we are all connected.
I will walk because I can and for all of those who can't.
This post is in memory of John, Geoff, David, Joe, Jamie, Brian, Keith, Travis,
and my dad, Samuel Dunham Fairchild.
May you all walk with me in spirit always and forever.
