A Long-Shadowed Grief: Suicide and Its Aftermath

Written by former funeral director Harold Ivan Smith, A Long-Shadowed Grief: Suicide and its Aftermath is a compassionate, serious discussion of the grief and suffering that friends and family endure in the wake of a loved one's suicide. From permitting oneself to grieve and survive, how one can learn to live a spiritual life as a survivor, to praying one's grief, surviving the toll suicide takes on one's assumptions and values, and much more, A Long-Shadowed Grief covers in-depth the emotional dimensions of relearning day-to-day living after a loved one has made the choice to die. True stories of suicide and the words of survivors illustrate this comforting, plain-spoken discussion.

Author Smith has written many books on dying, death and grieving (as a former funeral director) and leads seminars on grief and spirituality. His cousin committed suicide (or suicided, as he terms it)--so he is also a "survivor" of suicide--those left behind. In the past few years, people dear to me had young people suicide. Every 16.5 minutes there is a suicide (86.7 in the U.S. every day--a million in the world every year), and Smith writes about the days, months, years and even generations the "whys" of suicide affect a family. Often families deny the "truth" of the suicide because of suicide's stigma to those left. He writes of famous people suiciding (Katherine Graham's and Joan River's husbands, and many famous children) and of average people who come to help of others going through what they have and are still experiencing. Smith writes about survivors not being able to pray in the "dark despair of the spiritual night. Vance Havner is quoted: "If you can't pray as you want, pray as you can. God knows what you need." Prayer cannot lesson the pain but it can change the survivor. "Even though I walk through the valley of death," (Psalm 23:4) the author asks survivors to reflect on the word "through"--as on a journey, not staying in one place. "I will fear no evil, for you are with me." (v.4). Many survivors say suicide grief is like no other grief. For example, the insinuations from people about your parenting (if it was your child)--and he recommends you not allow those kinds of people around you. The stats on page 17 were sobering. So much about suicide centers on youth (1,000 on college campus suicide each year), but the 65+ age group has the most suicides. Although 90 percent of people who suicide are mentally ill, there is no "suicide gene," but depression, manic depression, schizophrenia and alcoholism (mood disorders) have a strong genetic base. Armchair Interviews says: Even if you have not been affected by suicide, the book will give you more compassion and empathy toward others--well worth your reading time.