An Open Letter to the Students at My Son's High School
On the Loss of a Fellow Student

It was late Friday night and the Internet chatter was that apparently a teenager had hung himself from a tree by the lake. My son and his other friends knew Friday what the local police could not yet confirm in their brief Saturday statement. Their friend had committed suicide.

I know something about suicide. Not just because I'm a Licensed Clinical Social Worker and Red Cross Disaster Mental Health Technician, but also because I had a friend commit suicide last year. Nothing in school or professional experience prepared me for the emotional sucker punch of finding out that someone I knew, spoke to frequently, and cared about, had suddenly taken his life.

If I sound like a father giving advice at times, please don't tune me out, m'kay? I can't help being who I am. Because you can't help being who you are, try to be the best version of who you are right now, not some inauthentic superficial version of what other people, peers or adults, want you to be. My friend had his problems and we had talked about them. But he concealed from everyone how deeply depressed he was. He was inauthentic and chose not to reach out for help. That's a mistake and I decided I would not make it after my friend died.

Don't let other people convince you that they know how you feel. That's a dumb thing people say when they don't understand grief. I know how I feel and you know how you feel. We only know more about each other if we choose to reveal what's going on inside. You don't need me to remind you that high school can be cruel. Even so, please understand that you can't simply grieve well alone. It's essential you allow yourself to feel the way you feel and to express that in safe places with people that you trust. It's the way grief works.

Dealing with grief is like watching a teapot on a stove. It needs to rattle and whistle and blow off steam. If you don't believe you have any safe places to blow off steam, or any ways to blow off steam that aren't self destructive, get working on that right away. Not having those things are risk factors for feeling miserable and for suicide. Understanding risk factors for suicide, which is something I have studied, is different than being able to predict it. If we could predict suicide, we could prevent it - and we would - so neither your friend nor mine would be dead if we could.

Grief is like a quilt. Everyone gets one. This is a universal experience. Initially it is blank. When we have the first permanent loss of someone or something we care about, we create the first square that is sewn to that quilt. As we mourn, we have to wear it, touching all of the other losses we have had. It feels like the first cuts are the deepest because we don't know how to do this and certainly don't want to, but pets and Grandparents die. Everyone has to deal with that. As we make the most recent loss part of our life, the most intense part of the pain fades and we can take the quilt off and put it in the closet until next time. Sometimes when someone you care about has a loss that is like yours, like a son and father both losing friends to suicide, suddenly you find you are wearing it again.

One of my temptations was to try to burn the quilt. I never wanted to feel this way again. Then I realized that meant never being attached to, or caring about, or being cared about, by anyone. The price was too high. Another temptation was to avoid pain, hoping I could somehow heal over time without remembering and talking about it when I was ready. Some people try to avoid pain with drugs and alcohol.

Using drugs and alcohol is another risk factor for suicide, particularly alcohol, because it is by definition a depressant. Depression is not the initial experience of people who drink, which is why 150 years ago liquor was considered a stimulant. Feeling bad is the inevitable outcome for people who drink more than one or two drinks at a time. Getting drunk will not bring your friend back and it will add suffering to your pain. Booze ain't food.

My friend died too soon. He had people around him who cared about him. How could he forget about that? I'm horrified. I'm angry. What kind of a selfish jerk would put the people he cared about through so such pain? I feel guilty calling him a selfish jerk, even though I mean it. Sometimes I feel guilty on those days, common to grief, when I either feel numb or just forget about him and my life goes on and I don't miss him at all. I am ashamed that I did not see how hopeless he had become. I'm confused because it doesn't make sense. I don't think his suicide will ever make sense. I'm sad because I miss his sense of humor, his unusual way of seeing the world, and I miss our friendship.

It's magical thinking for me to believe I might have prevented my friend's suicide. I cared about him, I'm a trained mental health professional, and I never saw it coming. Even if I had known more and worried about it, I couldn't have predicted it. I feel lonely when I'm grieving and I need to fight the temptation to isolate myself because grief is always easier with friends. No one can take anyone else's pain away, so the comfort I have to give is to be tolerant and accepting. Every day is a gift and those gifts are limited, so I should be grateful even for painful days. No gift is greater than that of a friend.

Protect and value the gifts you have when you have them.