Offering hope, comfort and support for survivors of suicide loss.
Fall brings with it some of the most wonderful holidays of the year. However, Halloween is one that can be difficult for many survivors to face. We already experience enough insensitive gestures and chatter in everyday life. This holiday is built around potential emotional triggers, making Halloween after a suicide especially hard. On the surface, it’s an innocent day, centered on costumes and candy, but some of the elaborate and gory decorations ...
This week (Oct. 6-12) marks Mental Illness Awareness Week and I was thrilled to take part in a unique event
hosted by the global non-profit organization, NØSTIGMAS. I learned about NØSTIGMAS shortly after we launched this blog and was really moved by their efforts to raise awareness and erase the stigmas of suicide and mental illness. They collect and share stories of hope and inspiration to help educate the general public about mental ...
Have you ever felt that tinge of guilt when someone tells you they’ve recently lost a loved one to something other than suicide? This has happened to me a few times this year, usually in response to hearing about a loved one’s hard-fought battle with cancer or even the passing of an elderly grandparent. Before my dad died, I only experienced my grandparents dying from old age. I’ve now started to experience “suicide guilt” when talking to people ...
There’s no denying we live in a digital world – which can make our lives more efficient and also unnecessarily complicated. The blessing and curse of “smart” technology really hit me after my dad’s death. Weeks before he died, I created an account with Ancestry.com in hopes of piecing together the story of our family’s history. I wanted to learn where in Italy my dad’s grandparents came from and also uncover the many countries my mom’s relatives ...
Every once in a while, I come across news or other revelations that help me piece together the puzzle of my dad’s suicide. Even though I’ll never have the puzzle solved, I do find some comfort in this information when I find it. This week, the Huffington Post reported findings of a study that showed a ‘clear rise in the number of suicides globally in 2009,’ one year after the global financial crisis. In the U.S., this impact was felt most heavily ...
