TL; DR: Help me launch the Suicide Widows Project on August 4
“Don’t make it fancy! It’s a one-minute video. Relax and be you. The realer, the better.”
Photo by Михаил Секацкий on Unsplash
This advice comes from a friend and communications expert who is helping me launch the Suicide Widows Project. The goal is to recruit forty people to participate in interviews about their experience losing a spouse or partner to suicide and to raise $15,000 to cover the costs of the interview process.
She has convinced me to personalize the ask for social media and email.
I’m all in but also nervous. What do I wear? How “real” are we talking here? Who will record . . . oh, me? Like on TikTok, holding my phone vertical, awkwardly, while sharing my innermost thoughts and avoiding double chin angles?
Yep, okay, will do. All in. It’s for a good cause.
Actually, it’s for a great cause. The find-your-passion one that is changing my life and will, hopefully, change many more.
I never decided to be a suicide loss advocate. I’m not even sure that’s what I do now. I feel more like one of those diving rods, following internal cues of thirst and curiosity, a search for the restorative and elemental.
Three years from now, if all goes as planned, I will have collected and organized a broader and deeper body of knowledge about the life experience and needs of people widowed by suicide. That new information will support a suite of recommendations for meeting those needs, new partnerships among researchers and loss survivors, and a self-sustaining community supporting one another, and welcoming new members through deeper conversations and proactive outreach.
By then, my book, Life, Changing: A Suicide Widow’s Guide, will also be out in the world. The kids will be starting college. I’ll be turning fifty-something.
I will have to decide whether to keep building the Project or hand it off. It’s an intentional, if counter-intuitive inflection point. After all, why start a whole new career only to potentially move on so soon?
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Because it’s suicide.
I’ve lived it for twelve years. It’s colored every moment of every day, wound in and out of my home, my relationships, my body, my bandwidth. Grief shifts, guilt fades, and the questions — the whys, so many whys — recede too, eventually, into the background.
But the ending of a life by the person who lived it? That reality, that unfathomable fact, doesn’t go away.
Could I really sustain not just living but working in this space for more than a few years? I recently started conducting test interviews with personal contacts, three generous women who each lost her husband to suicide. I was drained—likely they were too—after each ninety-minute session.
Even when it’s just me, I’m frequently exhausted at the end of an intense day of writing or research. The topic is emotional, complicated, personal, multi-dimensional, technical, and abstract. There is no sense of closure, no certainty, and few conclusions to be reached at the end of a work week.
I ask myself what it will take to do this week in and week out, year after year. Where will I find the stamina?
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Others have done it. There is a small but mighty community of loss-survivors-turned-advocates working hard to reduce the harm of and increase awareness about suicide’s impacts on the people left behind. Some are widows; others are bereaved yet determined siblings and friends. Many are parents who lost children—children—to suicide. They’ve been doing this profound work for years, often with little or no pay.
In the face of such pain and perseverance, a different question keeps surfacing: What’s the alternative?
What would happen if I decided not to dig deep, not to roll up my sleeves, my vulnerable heart smeared across both of them, to help others now, even in a small way, rather than planning to do more in the future? What if others made the same choice?
Photo by Fabian Kleiser on Unsplash
Nothing. The world would keep turning, people would continue to love and lose and rebuild and repeat. Like any uninterrupted cycle, the pain of suicide loss will continue to sear just as it has.
And what will happen if I put everything I have learned, personally and professionally, into the Suicide Widows Project?
Something.
Maybe something small, like a few more people feeling a little less lonely, a little more understood, having been asked thoughtful questions about an excruciating time in their lives by someone who can relate.
Or maybe something bigger.
Perhaps new knowledge, momentum, and common cause will coalesce around uplifting suicide widows—who sit at the intersection of suicide prevention and postvention—to be leaders in this field.
Privy to our spouse or partner’s last days and the immediate effects of suicide on their loved ones, this little-studied group of unknown size possesses intimate knowledge of the circumstances and outcomes surrounding a suicide. Understanding how we navigated our experience, at once shared and uniquely our own, could inform new research and programs that support all types of loss survivors and build toward more resilient, care-centered communities.
And maybe, just maybe, a group of funders will see the value of investing in these resilient humans who can blaze new trails to enlarge humanity’s resilience.
Ultimately, this work is about all of us who’ve lived through something deeply painful, or supported someone who has, and know that better days lie ahead if we can pull together in the same direction.
Photo by Terry Vlisidis on Unsplash
I really don’t know what will happen, long term.
I know the Project will follow its guideposts and meet its goals. I know this work is important and that I need to be part of it.
And I know I’ll need help. Your help.
As you’ll see when the website goes live on August 4, many caring people have contributed to the inception of the Suicide Widows Project. Some I already knew; others simply responded to a “Can I pick your brain?” email.
For this to work, I will need to reach people. So what I’m asking is for you to forward an email or share a post on Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. I’ll make it as easy as possible for you to have an outsized impact on the success of the Project.
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I’m in the New Hampshire mountains this week: home of my heart, origin story for this newsletter last August, site of my wedding eighteen years ago. There are so many memories here. And, of course, meals to prep and kids to drive places. And relatives and house projects, trees and birds. The nesting merlins are back, screaming at anyone walking in the field below.
Quiet moments are scarcer than usual, and I wonder about test-driving my video selfies in this environment. I don’t have many wardrobe or make-up choices. Or mirrors. Maybe I’m too real here for the internet.
I’ll wonder and then I’ll do it. What else is there? Right now things are as simple as taking each next step in the project timeline. It may not always be this straightforward—we never know what could happen tomorrow—but the stakes are too high to wonder for too long.
I hope you’ll join me. Be on the lookout for simple instructions in early August.
Like what you just read, or any of my previous posts? Please support my work HERE. (It’s a digital tip jar that goes directly to me, not a Substack thing.)
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