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Mental Health/Depression/Suicide
Suicide Has Collateral Damage
Survivors are the true victims of suicide. For survivors, there is no such thing as closure.
Trigger Warning: What you are about to read will be disturbing to some, but that is precisely the reason we need to think about it?
By the time I was six years old, I had attended two funerals, one for my father and a second one for Grandpa Koester. Although I was too young to have labels for my emotions, the feeling-memories were imprinted.
When I was three years old, my father was dragged to death by a team of runaway horses. His funeral was filled with a sense of tragedy and grief, but it was also an observance of a short life, well-lived.
The second funeral felt vastly different from the first.
My grandfather died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head in the fall of 1948. It was about a year after we had moved in with Grandpa. As I rode in the funeral home’s family car behind the hearse, shame choked me as if it were an ammonia leak.
The funeral cortege crept slowly past the school grounds, lights flashing on the cars. My friends on the playground stopped their play and stared. In Wakefield, Nebraska — population 1030 —…
