About
Familiar friends....where are you?
A few weeks after Mark's death, I found an on-line support group for
those who had lost someone to suicide. It was, unquestionably,
one of the most helpful and supportive things in my life during that
living hell. Living hell is a term that anyone who has lost a
child suddenly can completely identify with.
When I joined, there were, tragically, several more people who joined
the group in the next two or three months whose children ranged 16 to
30 as well as some who lost spouses. Several women there had lost their
only child.
We, this core group of people coming together in tragedy were fortunate
to find each other as well as each of us having particular skills that
could help us as a group. One of our members was able to take the
initiative to set up two web sites to be supportive to others.
For many years, both of the sites were very active. As time went
by and adjustment to the horror that collapsed our worlds was able to
take over, one by one, people left After several years, the sites
were ended as those who were key to keeping them going needed to do
other things that were not a daily reminder of their pain and the
absence of their children. Unfortunately (or fortunately
depending on your point of view), there was no one else willing and
able to step up to take the reins.
This writing was one of my contributions to the 1000 Deaths site.
The name was chosen by one of the women who lost her teen-age son, her
only child because we die a thousand deaths each day after the loss of
our children. I wish I had copied the writings from that site as
there were many, many that were very helpful. In November of
2010, I came across a printout of Mark's site made in May of 1998 which
contained this writing. Reading it this long afterward helps me
understand the overwhelming response from people about how it helped
them along the journey they never wanted to take. I retyped it to
place here, on Mark's site, so that it can again be shared with those
who might need it.
As I retyped it, I was careful to keep all punctuation and word use as
the original was prepared even though there are things I might now
change. As both a writer and an editor, I realize that those
things are chosen at the time of writing for a reason. Though the
reasons for the choice of changing the number of transition periods or
adding or not using particular puncutations are long forgotten, they
were carefully chosen at the time of writing.
Please feel free to share "Familiar friends.....where are you?" with
those who might need it but give full credit to me as this is an
original writing but no one has permission to publish it in any medium
used for income purposes unless I personally give written permission.
For those who have lost a loved one to suicide, there is a listing of
books that were read by and recommended by members of our SoloS
group. SoloS (copyrighted with a backward "S" at the end to
designate suicide is not what should be) was the name of our support
group, an acronym for "Survivors of a loved one's Suicide."
http://www.pacifier.com/~bowman/books.html