Reassurance for Survivors

• Post, suicide is often shocking, painful and unexpected
• Traumatic, surviving suicide is like losing a limb. It’s violent, permanent and you don’t know how you will manage
• Stress, you’ve possibly lost faith in the bureaucratic promise of support or you own expectations for results by paid professionals.
• Disorder; “you should have left me there GUMP!” Clinically, your thought process is not normal until your PTSD subsides.

Your new pin-up hero is Lieutenant Dan.(Seriously, print him off and pin up) P.T.S.D. (see left). …and you’re smart, almost too smart for your own good. You cant believe the naive platitudes like Forest & Bubba of the problems you face ahead. Lt. Dan was right.. for a while.. 

Understand the FULL LIFE STORY of lieutenant Dan. Life happened again, but differently. Because he was a different person from the trauma, it opened up opportunities uniquely for him. He could never have ‘understood how’ or believe the circumstances of just how his life would re-invent itself.

Admittedly Lt. Dan is a charactor in a fictional movie. But the hundreds of the survivors that have gone on to achieve great things (like publishing books etc.) aren’t fictional.

Gump was right and Dan was wrong. You never know whats going to happen in life, so just keep living day to day.

Quote from “Rabbit Hole” (film) on the subject of grief –

“Does it ever go away? (Answers) No, I don’t think it does.. It changes though, the weight of it I guess..

At some point it becomes bearable. I turns into something you can crawl out from under..and carry around like a brick in your pocket. You even forget it, for a while but then you reach in for whatever reason.. there it is. ‘Oh right, that’.

Not that you like it exactly, but it’s what you’ve got instead of your loved one, and so you carry it around. It doesn’t go away. Which is.. fine, actually.

This baby was flushed down a drain pipe in China. Against all odds, the baby survived and was rescued. Regardless of your thoughts on miracles, certainty in life is an oxymoron. Life is beyond our control.

We think life is certain. But its not.

We’ve come to expect regularity, reliability and reason. Particularly in a western economy, where computers, pattern and regulation dominates the ‘mundanity’ of our 9 to 5 work days.

So when our loved one goes.. who has so much to keep living for, and we love very dearly.. whether they leave a note or not.. When that human being from way back on “the longest journey”.. When they disappear overnight, our brain just can not process this to give any suitable answers.

It can not apply usual reason and logic, to resolve why another human being ‘chose’ death over life. Seemingly one of the most certain things they could expect from the person they loved.

At the time of the Gettysburg address by Abraham Lincoln, his speech was not celebrated by the media nor considered particularly special.

Writing this in 2014 and being a 2005 video on the Stanford University Youtube channel and as at 2014 with a meager 20m hits, I believe this speech is also under recognised for its brilliance.

I also acknowledge Steve Wozniak as the true brilliance behind Apple computing and that Steve Jobs was always a brilliant business person, then brilliant IT mind (behind Woz!) 

“A year ago i was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. It turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that could be cured by surgery. I had the surgery and thankfully, I’m fine now.” “This was the closest ive been to facing death and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades.. Having lived through it, let me tell you; no one wants to die..” (Steve died 6 years later)

Steve Jobs on his own mortality (Stanford Address)“Some times life’s going to hit you in the head with a brick, don’t lose faith.”..”Remembering that “i’ll be dead soon” is one of the most important tools I’ve ever encountered to make the big choices in life..Remembering you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap that you have something to lose.” 

“If you live each day as if it was your last, some day most certainly you’ll be right.” “For the past 33 years, I’ve looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself “If today was my last day of my life, would I want to do what what i am about to do today”..and whenever the answer has been ‘NO’ for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.” “Yet, death is very likely the single best invention of life. Its life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.” “Your time is limited so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.. Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become, everything else is secondary.”

After 6 months or more of intense grief work, you will start noticing sayings like this as they now apply to you.

This is a photo of a banner that hangs in our house. The circumstances in which I came across it were quite uncanny. I know I’ve said above that life is random (You can probably bulk order 50 of these exact banners from a factory in china). But I swear my father gave this banner to me because I found it at a time i really needed to hear it.

Again just be aware you must give time before sayings like these start to fit with your progress through grief work.

“Its the hardest thing I’ve ever had to live through.

Ill go for a couple of days, and then i’m back to where i was before, and i wonder what its going to be like in 5 years.”

If i could draw a graph of my experience of “grief work” over time, it would take the shape of the graph on the left.

Your “grief work” is intense at first. Initially it gets worse and worse. In the first 3 months you think its going to increase like that forever

(“i wonder where ill be in 5 years”).

But like this graph after 4-6 months the intensity eases and works its way towards a steady state. It never goes down, but it does plateau out as you move toward a “new normal”

Hard to accept, hard to let go. 

People must change as well.

Everyone experiences change.

Everyone must move forward.

The best thing Mike Rutherford did for me was was co-wrote “the living years”.“and if you don’t give up,you dont give in, you may just be OK”

Personally, my circumstances were very similar. My father was a retired armed services officer and I looked into his new born babys eyes 9 months later and told her of a grandfather that never knew about her.

Below quotes from “the living years” by Mike Rutherford (the book)

“When i met my father that day for his birthday, it never occurred to me, even for even a minute, that anything would happen..

It wasn’t until I found dads notebook in his trunk that I realised they’d had money worries. If only I had known, I could have…

I began to understand what a shock leaving the navy must must have been for him too…

One of the most painful parts about discovering dads memoir was seeing what hed called it: “this is my thing”..

At Eighty, Dad was still very mentally sharp and I suppose that’s what i saw when we met that day.. With hindsight, I should have noticed… (how much he’d aged)..

I never really had time to ask how he was. I’m sure I closed him down and prevented him from talking to me...

If id been more open, as i am now, I think dad would have responded, i only realized that when it was too late…

But perhaps my biggest regret with dad was that we hadn’t chatted more

We are born spirits on a human journey

and not the other way around.

Tell me Why?!

There is no reason because there are no reasons,

What reasons do you have to choose?

Remember how your loved one lived

Not on how they died.

The shock of suicide means people repeatedly go over their loved ones death.

Consider for a moment had they died of any other cause. With suicides we disproportionately weight our grief toward their death, at the expense of celebrating their life

The reason news of suicide travels so quickly is that people feel if they talk about it, they’ll understand it more.

If they understand it more, then they feel they’ll be able to avoid it. “I can make sure it doesn’t happen to my family.”

Acquaintances and others, however, can’t ever travel that same depth of journey survivors do. Months of months of hard labour until the point where the brain exhausts itself from the question why.

So generally, uncomfortably & without resolving, they are forced to pack it away and move on

And the brain doesn’t like what it can’t understand. So anxiety, fear and funnily enough, a stigma will always exist towards the family survivors of suicide.

This saying was given to me by a relative I have the highest of respect for. During an intense period of his life, he woke ‘briefly’ after falling asleep on the couch, in front of the TV which then delivered this message to him (hence the TV).

This is a rather dark version of the famous ‘carpe diem’, seize the day line from the movie ‘Dead Poets Society’.

In particular we remember the charactor Neil, one of the most lively and artistically gifted protagonists who had so much to live for. Tragically in the movie he takes his own life, crushed by the pressures of his fathers expectations of military school and studying medicine.

Its especially poignant now given it starred Robin Williams.

But like i say, theres no bullshit on this website (Not deliberately anyway, you can give feedback here), I’m not here to give you another platitude that ‘trys to help’ but hinders your search for clarity with noise. This version intends to describe the ‘carpe diem’ uniquely experienced by survivors who find renewed life clarity, purpose and motivations.

“Psychache”

as attributed to suicide;

“Intense emotional and psychological pain that eventually becomes intolerable and which cannot be abated by means that were previously successful—as the primary motivation for suicide.”

This book is reputed to be a very helpful resource for survivors, particularly loss of a life partner.

“With No Time to Say Goodbye, Carla brings suicide survival from the darkness into light, speaking frankly about the overwhelming feelings of confusion, guilt, shame, sadness, anger, and loneliness that are shared by all survivors“

This video was very helpful to me during the months after my fathers death.

It was available online before beyond blue was publicized as a support network in Australia

I recommend watching the entire video if possible