A Walk Towards Hope

In 1983, at the age of 30, my oldest brother Pat took his life. Our family was devastated. My remaining siblings and I vowed to one another we would never allow invisible despair to fester ever again. And then, 30 years later, my second brother Neil died by suicide at the age of 57. How could this have happened? The questions were many, the answers few.

In March 2015, I wrote an article on depression that ran in the Dayton Daily News. In it, I shared my family’s very personal story of suicide. Shortly thereafter, I was asked to become involved with local suicide prevention programs through the AFSP (American Foundation for Suicide Prevention).  I said “yes,” not knowing exactly what I was getting into or how I could help. For the next several months, I attended planning meetings and brainstorming sessions to facilitate an increase in community awareness. Suicide is not easily reconciled, but the people I met embraced activism stemming from their own loss of a loved one or personal experience of suffocating despair. Although inspired by them, the burden of “becoming involved” felt too much. Initially, I left most meetings feeling sad and heavy-hearted. Hearing similar stories of others made me feel stuck in my own sorrow, resting in the forever raw remnants of grief.

Yet, there was something that kept calling me back. That whisper reminded me that the memory of my brothers was propelling, encouraging me to be inspired by their lives in joining a collective voice of hope. Also, there was an understanding among those I met because they, too, experienced the pain of suicide. The camaraderie of understanding was immediate.

There’s an old adage, “Good comes from everything.” In the case of life lost to hopelessness, good can never match the heartbreak, and may be revealed only with time. What I have come to learn, however, is the altered path after loss can be filled with goodness and light. It’s what happens when muscles of hope are made strong by the connection with others and shared experience. If we join in solidarity, we can not only lift the memory of those we have lost, we can also heal ourselves. I’m grateful for my brother Gerry and my sister Kathy. We hold our brothers Pat and Neil safe between the space of our hearts.