At 48, I was in my final year of graduate school becoming a Marriage and Family Therapist. I was taking a Group Therapy class where we discussed our personal issues. One of the classes evoked memories of my mother’s suicide, and I spoke about it. She had died decades earlier, but when I talked about her death, it felt as if it was the day it happened. It felt utterly unresolved and challenging.
After class, my professor said, “You are going to specialize in helping people who have gone through this.” My immediate reaction was no way—deep down, I still felt the shame, rejection, stigma, and trauma of my mother taking her life. But like a good student, I took my teacher’s advice and called Didi Hirsch to see how I might help others who had gone through the same experience. I spoke to Rick Mogil, who told me that to assist others, I would need to attend a Survivors after Suicide support group myself.
“Is it OK if it has been over thirty years?” He replied that it was.
At the first group session, we introduced ourselves and shared who we lost to suicide, including when and what happened. I had the same feeling I had always felt. I am different. My loss was so long ago. I didn’t feel guilty like the others when it happened. I felt relieved. I didn’t miss her like others in the group missed their significant person. I felt rejected, not from her suicide but from her inability to continue parenting me from age 11, when she sent my brother and me to live with my father. I held the trauma of witnessing her prior attempts when I was seven and eight years old. Lastly, I carried around shame—giant heaps of shame.
I attended the group every week because, even with all those thoughts, it was a safe space. I couldn’t talk about my mother’s suicide without a buzzing feeling taking over my body and going numb. Week after week, I spoke about different topics related to suicide. I was exhausted, as if the loss was fresh. I couldn’t believe how intense the feelings were and how they stayed with me during the week. Notably, I felt the opposite of another member who adored her mother and missed her terribly.
Then, one week, the group leader told us to write down the positive qualities of our person. Until that point, I had been firmly planted in how much I disliked my mother due to her mental health disorders. When I started writing about some of her good qualities, I began to recall my positive feelings toward her. I wrote about how she delighted in me as a child. She told me I was beautiful, smart, and artistic. Her sense of humor was dry and quick-witted. My mother was an avid exerciser and healthy eater, which she handed down to me. She took my brother and me to museums, the library, and on nature walks. She painted, sketched, and danced. On Saturday mornings, we boogied out to Soul Train. She worked successfully as a headhunter for engineers and was a member of Mensa. It all came rushing back.
Suddenly, I felt it. I experienced the grief of a mother lost to mental health disorders and then suicide. It was the most devastating thing I had ever felt. I could feel the love again—love lost when I was young. In the next group, our leader asked me to pretend my mother was sitting with us and tell her what I felt. Through tears of grief and anger, I told her how mad I was at her and that I hated how she saw the world through judgmental, paranoid, and fearful eyes. I also told her I was so sad that her love went away because I needed it. I cried everything out that day. I also remember feeling extremely close to the other member of the group who loved her mother, as I felt all the sadness that I previously had no access to.
I left that day changed. The buzzing disappeared and never came back. I was able to put my mother’s mental health struggles and death in a place in me that felt comfortable. As my teacher predicted, I went on to specialize in suicide bereavement and work on the SRT team. The gift of that group changed my life for the better. It helped heal a 30-year-old wound.
About the author
April Blair is a Marriage and Family Therapist practicing in Sherman Oaks, California. She works with a wide variety of people in the Los Angeles area both in person and on zoom. In her spare time she enjoys surfing, running on trails, playing the bass, dancing and spend time with family and friends. She is a member of the Didi Hirsch Suicide Response Team (SRT).
