Navigating Grief: The Journey of Suicide Loss Survivors

Summary

In this conversation, Susan Andersen and Ronnie Walker discuss the profound impact of losing a loved one to suicide and the importance of community support for survivors. They delve into the history and evolution of the Alliance of Hope, an organization dedicated to providing resources and a safe space for those affected by suicide loss. The discussion highlights cultural shifts in the perception of suicide, the power of shared experiences in healing, and the ongoing efforts to sustain and expand the organization's reach and services.

Takeaways

• The Alliance of Hope was founded to support suicide loss survivors.
• Community support is crucial for healing after a traumatic loss.
• Cultural perceptions of suicide have shifted over the years.
• Online forums provide immediate support and connection for survivors.
• The organization relies on donations to maintain its services.
• Survivors often feel isolated and need a safe space to share their experiences.
• The forum fosters a culture of kindness and understanding among members.
• Specialized support groups are being developed to meet diverse needs.
• The organization is continuously evolving to better serve its community.
• Fundraising efforts are essential for the sustainability of the Alliance of Hope.

Thank you for listening! Visit www.sueandersenyoga.com for Yoga for Grief classes and additional resources.

Transcript

Susan Andersen: Hi, Ronnie, thanks for joining Growth from Grief. 

Ronnie Walker: Thank you for inviting me. Yeah, good to see your face. 

Susan: So I wanted to invite you because this is the third podcast that I'm doing that's in a series around being a suicide loss survivor. So I think it's important for our listeners here to understand about organizations that are available to help. I've spoken in previous podcasts about my experience with the Alliance of Hope, and we've known each other for a long time, almost 12 years, almost the same length of time that my son's passed away. And I'm really excited to have you join in. Maybe start with a little bit of the history of the organization. 

Ronnie: Sure. And thank you for inviting me. And I, as I listen to you speak, I find tears coming to my eyes. I'm very moved to be here. And I remember when you came on the forum, the Alliance of Hope Forum, whenever it was 10, 11, 12 years ago, just after your son Ian died and, and seeing you come through all of that devastation and turn it into something of contribution is very moving to me. So thank you. I'm thrilled to be here talking with you. 

Susan: Thank you. 

Ronnie: Yeah. And I forgot your question.

Susan: It's an easy one. Talk a little bit about the history. the history of the Alliance of Hope. 

Ronnie: Okay. Well, I think we're going into our 17th year. You know, come February 2025, we'll be going into our 17th year. So way back when in 2008, I should preface this by saying that I'm a suicide loss survivor. I lost my stepson Channing August 4th of 1995, and he was 21 years old and suffered from bipolar disorder. And I was a counselor at the time, but there wasn't anything that prepared me for what I experienced after he died and what I saw our family going through. 

And that grief was so deep and so traumatic and so complicated and lasted for so many years that I really kind of came out of it on the other side with an interest in supporting people who were going through traumatic loss. And around 2006, 2007, I noticed that there wasn't much on the internet by way of support for suicide loss survivors. And so I just wondered what would be possible.

And I really didn't have any experience in creating websites or much more than using email, but something happened. Something tapped me on the shoulder, and I sat down and I created a website with information for suicide loss survivors. And also one that provided hope because what I had noticed was at that time that prevailing conversation in the culture seemed to be one that said, you never get over it, you just learn to live with it, you've joined the club no one wants to belong to. And there's a case to be made for all of that, never getting over it. Some losses we never get over, the loss of a child or a family member, so forth. But I didn't think there was much possibility or hope in the way things were being spoken and in the way people were being treated.

And so I wondered if we could change that to forever altered, able to survive and even eventually go beyond just surviving to have happy, meaningful and contributory lives. It's a little uppity perhaps to say something like that. But I designed the website with that woven throughout the copy of the website and present visually in the photographs. 

If we were going to talk about trauma, I would choose a photograph of a tree with a broken branch with new growth coming, so forth, to really reflect what people usually see if they're further out in the grief journey, that there is this devastation where people are thrown into an abyss, they're catapulted out of the life as they've known it, and they struggle for months and years to survive and deal with the debilitating emotions or collateral damage, all the kinds of other challenges that occur. 

And then eventually there's an integrating of the loss at some level into one of the fiber of one's being and turning back into life. And what I have seen over the years is that, well, let me stop for a moment. What, what, what I also was seeing back then was that people were being told, now you should work for suicide prevention or mental health awareness or something in that vein. And that's a very worthwhile thing to do, but I don't know that everybody is called to do that. 

I have a sense that we each bring some kind of a signature energy down here when we come down to this planet. And so once one begins to integrate the loss and turn back into life, I usually encourage people to listen to the call of their heart, the yearnings of their heart and soul, and move into action on that informed by what they've gone through.

So for some people that might mean opening up a bakery and baking bread or building a playground or in your case, teaching yoga and turning what you went through into becoming a master at yoga and teaching others and providing that for others. So that's a little bit about the beginning of the Alliance of Hope. I didn't know what I was doing, honestly. It was a lot of help from customer service in the Philippines, that people that worked for the website company.

And after I designed the website, there was something that I saw that offered a forum from this company. I didn't know beans about anything about forums. I downloaded it. I started it. I wrote a post. I waited, not knowing if anyone would come three days later, somebody from Australia joined the forum. I don't even know how they found us.

And then three days after that, somebody else, maybe from upper Michigan, like that. And today I think we have just under 26,000 members on the forum and tens of thousands of other people who come to the forum to read it, but don't actually join because we keep it open so that they could read it. So that's sorry for being so long-winded, but that's a little bit about the beginning of Reliance of Hope.

Susan: Yeah, and I'd like to talk about my experience just as finding the Alliance of Hope. know, 2012, so this is like six years, seven years after you started the... 

Ronnie: Four, four years. Four years. It started in 2008.

Susan: Eight, okay. Okay, so four years later, I, you know, found the forum and or found the website, found the forum, and joined and immediately was greeted by other people who, just to clarify, in this forum, you can just read, as Ronnie said, you don't have to create a login, you can just read. I chose to create a login, which was not my real name. And then I posted my introductory post in the section of the forum that was like introductions, I think. And immediately I had probably four or five people respond and welcome me and questions that I might have posted because this was probably four weeks after Ian died. you know, they gave me some really great advice, one of which was a breathing exercise that I talk about as my beginning to yoga because I found that so calming. 

But the other thing I wanted to mention at that time, I did not find a lot of resources in person or online. And even on Facebook, it was very different because there certainly are groups that are related, that are focused on loss, child loss, loss to suicide. But it's a different way of engaging. I don't know, you're just, it feels more one way, I guess. It doesn't feel the same as when you're in this forum because there's, first of all, people that are monitoring the forum, which I think was also really important, might be the first or second person to welcome you to the group.

I just felt that it was very warm and inviting group to belong to. And the other thing was that you could get up in the middle of the night and somebody was on there and you could post your question or whatever and you'd get an answer right away. So I found it extremely helpful and comforting. 

Ronnie: So you can post in your pajamas.

Susan: Exactly. So one of the things that you were talking about was the culture at the time when you experienced loss of Channing your stepson. And then maybe a little bit after that, when you started the forum, what have you noticed over time, over this 17 years or longer since you lost Channing, that what have you noticed about cultural shifts in terms of accepting suicide loss and dealing with people that accept suicide loss survivors? 

Ronnie: I think back then when I started it in 2008 and going even back further when Channing died in 1995, there wasn't very much around. When I originally, we didn't use the term suicide loss survivors. We used the term suicide survivors. There were a few support groups for suicide survivors, but it became confusing because people didn't know if there were, if you had attempted suicide or if you were, they didn't understand. And when I shared that I had launched a group or a website, I can't remember what exactly I shared, to support suicide survivors or suicide loss survivors, when I clarified, people were a little puzzled about why was I putting so much time into it. I don't think people understood the depth of devastation, the level of devastation, the emotional debilitation that loss survivors went through. 

In part, I think that, and by the way, they couldn't find counselors who were trained, so over and over again, people would call and say, and start to talk and say, I can't find anybody who understands this. And really there has been very little, there may be more now. I'm not sure what there is right now, but I know when I went to graduate school, there was nothing at all about the suicide loss survivor experience. I don't think it was mentioned in one class or one textbook or anything like that.

I think in part that may be because survivors, suicide was so stigmatized for so many decades that the lost survivors suffered in silence. Many times they would say that their loved one died in a car accident or having a heart attack and they didn't share what they were going through. So counselors, don't think, or the mental health arena didn't understand. So we had a large movement to do walks and raise funds and raise awareness to prevent suicide. But nobody was really looking at the impact of the loss survivors, which is a very costly impact in so many ways. I think little by little, the conversation has grown. There's awareness that has grown. If you talk to people, almost everybody knows somebody who's died by suicide these days. So it's a more open conversation. And I'll leave it at that. I think it's a much more open conversation today. I think things changed dramatically with the pandemic in that lots of people went online. And so there are lots of support groups that people can access online and we see a lot more. 

Susan: Right, right. Yeah, I agree. When my son died, or I'm sorry, prior to my son dying, when he was in high school, two of his high school friends, their parents, one a mother and the other one a father, both died by suicide. And I think both of those students suffered a lot because this was back in the late ‘90s, early 2000s. you know, the same thing, it wasn't really discussed and talked about. And it was very difficult, I think, for people that were, especially if you were young, like a teenager, you know, to deal with. 

When my son died, I kind of just made the decision that I was going to talk about that he died by suicide and, you know, be open about it because I, because of that fact that I saw these other kids when they were in high school suffering because there wasn't a lot of openness about it. And I felt, well, I want to be open even though when Ian died, he was 25, you know, young people, I mean, they still needed to be able to express how they were feeling. But I also know of other people whose loved one died by suicide and they did not want it to be known. I think it was too difficult for them, whether it was from a religious standpoint that they had thought that because years ago the church was against this or... you know, it just was kind of an individual thing. And I still know people that don't want that to be known. You know, they don't want it to be out there, which I think, my opinion, I think really hurts this individual and other people that are also affected by this suicide loss because they're keeping all of that inside and it's going to affect them. 

Ronnie: I agree. I think so much healing takes place in community, in our relationships with others. And, you know, when you asked me about culture, how's the culture changed, we're looking at kind of the culture out in the world. But there's another aspect to that, that I realized about a year and a half in maybe, or two years in to the beginning of about a year and a half after it was launched, the forum was launched. I was starting to receive some private messages through the forum or emails and several people were saying, my God, this is my lifeline. This is keeping me alive. Thank you for starting this and so forth.

And I had to stop because that was like a big statement they were making. I was like, well, this is just an online forum. How is it saving your life? And when I looked, I thought to myself, what is going on here? And what I came back to myself with was it was the culture that we had created a culture on the forum. The things that divide people like politics or religion or socioeconomic status or whatever, that those things just had fallen away. That it was a culture of kindness, of grace, of human beings being with other human beings, knowing what it means to lose a loved one to suicide. 

And there is something about suicide loss that, you know, it's like that old phrase from Star Wars, it's a great disturbance in the force. It just hijacks people out of life, that type of loss. And so to this day, now, 16 years later, most people don't realize we have 70 volunteers on that forum. We have professional forum manager, professional forum developers. There's a huge amount that goes into maintaining that culture probably the thing I'm most proud of, that loss survivors are for each other. 

And it wasn't too long ago that I was thinking about this phrase, we've joined the club, no one wants to belong to, people hear that all the time. Okay, yes, you can make a case for that. There's another side to this, which is that loss survivors are some of the most compassionate and courageous people around. They aren't afraid to kind of reach out in places where a lot of other people would feel very uncomfortable and support somebody who is struggling to keep their soul alive. 

Susan: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I totally agree with that. I was just thinking as you were talking about community on the forum that one of the things that I appreciated was the fact that there were people on the forum that were three, four, five, whatever number of years away from their loss. So they had experienced a lot. And they were able to share that with me. You know, things that come up right away would be like, if you lost a child, for example, how many children do you have? And this is gonna be, you're at work or you're at a, you know, a function or you're in the grocery store or whatever. It's not somebody that knows you that's gonna ask that question. It's somebody that generally doesn't know you and they're just making, you know, small talk. And so how do you answer that? And what was really nice was that you could go back to the forum community and say, I don't know what to do. I don't know how to answer this question without, you know, bursting into tears or I just want to, I'm in a professional situation. I just want to answer the question and then like, then change the subject so I can go on.

And people would give all kinds of advice, examples, what they did, try this, try that. And it was great. I don't know where else you would get that. I don't know how you would find that kind of information. And I just mentioned one other thing. I was also participated in an in-person group, which was wonderful.

However, in-person groups usually are a limited amount of time. You can, they might be four weeks. I think the one I was on maybe was six weeks and you could go to the next group, but there were so many people that were looking for groups that you might not get in because there was new people that wanted a group. That six weeks doesn't necessarily give you enough time to come up with that question that I just mentioned, because maybe I didn't have that question until eight months after my loss. So I would not necessarily find that in a group. And perhaps even if I was going to a counselor, an individual counselor, they might not come up with that answer because that's not their experience. So that's huge. 

Ronnie: What do we call that when it's the crowds, the level of crowd sourcing? Crowd sourcing, guess that's the level of, we know a lot more in a crowd. Yeah. Sorry. No, I was just going to say, so that's just one example of how this community can support because of the number of people, like you said, 26,000 forum members. And, you know, there's, there's definitely people that are at all, you know, time, you know, of stages. 

Susan: Yeah, yeah, that can help. And it's just, it's a wonderful experience. 

Ronnie: There's one other thing I'm remembering right now. And I don't think we've mentioned it. You know, we have the Alliance of Hope has a lot more than the forum, but we have a very comprehensive website with hundreds and hundreds of blog articles that have been written by loss survivors. Because so often, many of them, I'd say probably 80 % of them have been written by people in the forum who have written about something in a very profoundly sensitive or moving, touching, moving, inspiring way. And we'll ask, may we reprint what you've written? We can do it anonymously or credit you, whatever you want. May we reprint it on our blog? And so there's so, and then we have different areas on our website where we have our blog with all that survivor wisdom. 

We have information about the survivor experience. We have information about the nature of the journey. There's so much and there's information about support groups that we offer, specialized support groups and healing emails from mothers and fathers and just a lot of ways bringing this information that you're talking about out, sending it out to people so that it lands right there on their desk, on their tablet, right there in the comfort of their own home. 

Susan: Right, exactly. 

Ronnie: But that's another piece of the forum in that the moderators were trained that if somebody is asking a question about guilt or holidays, how to get through the holiday. They can write their own response, but they can also add a link to deepen the information that's coming back to them. A link, they can add a link to an article that they know is on the website or on the blog. Yeah, it's a pretty nifty place. I don't know where that word came from.

Susan: So we talked a little bit about community. We talked about the power of community and cultural changes and the growth of this Alliance of Hope organization with the number of forum members. I'd like to just turn the attention to how you are able to support all these people. What does that look like for the organization?

Ronnie: I mean, financially. financially, in every which way. It's a it's a large task, and often feels daunting because we're a 501 c three nonprofit. The majority of what we do is free. I think there's most people may not really realize how many people are behind the scenes handling technology or handling calls for information, contact us, things like that. So it's a daunting task at times because that's the business model. We're a nonprofit. So we rely on the donations of the people who use our services or people who are sensitive to the challenges that loss survivors have. 

We have two major fundraisers a year. One is in the summer. It's our Sponsor the Forum Fundraiser. And then we have a fundraiser at the holidays, which we're just going into right now, to raise funds, hopefully to meet our budget so that we can continue in the coming year. So any help that people can provide in the way of donations, or reaching out to other members of their family. We don't have walks. We don't have a lot of the kinds of things that

people might, marathons and things like that. But we definitely need to have the support of the community in order to continue our services. Thank you for asking about that. 

Susan: Yeah, I think it's important because, you know, as somebody who's looking for support, that's not on the forefront of your mind. Like, how is this paid for? Like, you're not thinking about that. And you might not even really be thinking about it until a time, a year or whatever, a little bit of time goes by that you realize, wait a minute, I can contribute or I can help out here. 

One of the nice things, I think, I don't know when it was started, but is the Sponsor the Forum where the loss survivor can post a picture of their loved one and and donate in memory or in honor on the day on the day of their choice on the day of their choice. Yeah, I think that's really nice. I know I participated in that a few times on Ian's birthday.

Ronnie: that was a nice yes, you've raised tremendous amount of funds on Facebook.

Susan: Yes, I have. 

Ronnie: For many years, and that's made a big difference. thank you for that. 

Susan: You're welcome. But I just think it's important to know. And for our listeners, we're recording this on the 22nd of November, 2024. And Alliance of Hope will be starting their fundraiser, as Ronnie was just mentioning. So I will have a link in the show notes. So you can, of course, learn more about the organization, but also if you feel compelled to donate in memory or in honor of somebody or just to donate for end of year charities, I know that they would welcome it. 

Ronnie: Even if they don't feel compelled, we would welcome it. 

Susan: Ronnie, is there anything that we've missed that you would like to mention about the organization?  Maybe, actually, I do have one other question for you. What's the future hold? For the Alliance of Hope? For the Alliance of Hope? What do you see? 

Ronnie: Well, we're in the middle of strategic planning right now, which is an ongoing process always year after year. And we're looking at how we can better serve loss survivors. We're looking at the impact of social media, how we can reach people through social media. We've been in the last couple of years expanding the number of specialized support groups that we offer. we have about to launch. Actually, I think some of it just went up on our website today, but we currently have groups for fathers who've lost children to suicide, mothers who've lost children to suicide, women who've lost partners and spouses to suicide. I think we're about to launch a hobbies with hands group, which sounds kind of funny for people who want to knit and crochet and talk together in a support group. 

So we're looking to see what we always look to see what serves people who needs support and how can we serve them. And then we're looking at how can we do something about the tremendously heavy lifting that occurs for us each year when it comes to raising the funds. What do we put in place to make sure that the Alliance of Hope doesn't disappear? That it has the money it needs to hire the staff to run the programs and to keep the website going. So that's a little bit about what we're doing right now. We're just trying to strengthen everything that we do. All our systems, all our people and our fundraising activities. 

Susan: Well, that's great because it's definitely needed and I don't see the need going away. So I thank you for all the hard work that you and other members of the organization have done over the last number of years. Certainly, you from year one, but everybody else after that in support. So thank you for joining. I really appreciate you taking the time and we will talk again soon. 

Ronnie: Thank you so much. All right. Thank you. 

Susan: Bye bye. 

Ronnie: Bye.