Editor’s note: This reflection was written on April 10, 2017, the eighth anniversary of our son John’s death by suicide. It has been revised and expanded for Sunflowers After Suicide. The original appeared on the SOS Madison blog at sosmadison.com.
I looked down at the Book of Remembrance at church that morning. It was still there.
“April 10, 2009. John Edward Klingert.”
I did not need to be reminded. I remember that day every day. But sometimes it helps the soul to see it in writing. On the same page sat a line from Psalms. “I will live in the house of the Lord.” In my heart, I know our son John is safe.
My wife Teri and I have integrated John’s death by suicide into our lives, the way many parents who have lost a child learn, slowly and reluctantly, to do. In the beginning I counted the days. Then the weeks. Then the months. Now the years. That morning I went back and calculated. It was 2,922 days. Eight years to the day.
Not one of them has passed without both of us thinking about him.
I could have spent the morning with the things we never got to share with him. Prom. Graduation. College. The ordinary milestones that became impossible. In the early years, my mind went there often. Over time, something shifted. Now I find myself going back to the memories we do have. The ones we got to live. John was seventeen, but he had seventeen full years of living inside him, and I carry all of it.
That morning at church, I found myself thinking about a book I had read in those first months after we lost him. A book that made me question everything I thought I understood about what healing could possibly mean.
If you are in crisis right now, please call or text 988. The 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available around the clock. Survivors of suicide loss carry elevated risk, and reaching out is never a sign of weakness.
The Book and the Question It Left Me With
About three months after losing our son John, I found a copy of My Son, My Son by Iris Bolton. She was a clinical psychologist who had also lost her son to suicide. It was one of the most honest and useful books I read in those early days.
And then I came to a passage that stopped me cold.
She wrote that there is a gift in the loss. That it is real, precious, and there if you are willing to look for it.
I thought she had lost her mind.
How could there be anything in this unfathomable wreckage worth calling a gift? Our son John had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder just four months before he died, one thread in a picture that research on suicide and mental health shows is almost never simple or singular.
John was seventeen. I had gone from a father with a son to a man counting days just to feel like time was still moving. The idea of a gift felt like a cruelty.
What I understand now, and could not then, is that Iris Bolton was not asking me to feel better. She was asking me to look somewhere I was not yet capable of looking.
The head heals before the heart does.
I had read everything.
I understood the frameworks.
And still, at three in the morning, the heart said something else entirely.
I have heard this from many survivors in our SOS Madison support group meetings who are further along in their grief. They knew before they felt. The knowing came first. The feeling took its own time. That gap is not wrong. It is part of what makes grief after suicide loss different from almost every other loss.
In those first years, there was a question that could floor me without warning. Someone at a party or a work event would ask the simplest social question. “How many children do you have?”
Do you mention John? If you do, do you explain how he died? If you don’t, does that feel like a betrayal? I have a daughter. I lost our son John. I say both now. Over time I found I could say it without flinching, and then without needing to prepare myself first, and eventually without a full explanation attached. That shift took years. It still takes something from me each time. Some days I still just say “one” and let the moment pass without explanation. That is never wrong either. But telling our story is never wrong. Saying his name out loud is never wrong.
Iris Bolton was right that there is a gift in the loss. What she could not tell me is that I would spend most of eight years finding it. What researchers now call post-traumatic growth after suicide loss is real and documented. But I did not need a clinical term to eventually recognize it. I just needed time, and the people who held on while I found my footing.
If you are earlier in this than I was, that timeline is not a measure of anything. There is no schedule here, and nothing about where you are right now is behind.
What the Gift Turned Out to Be
It took me a while before I realized what it was. For me, the gift was compassion and empathy.
Eight years later, I went looking for what Iris Bolton was pointing toward. I found it in the traumatic wreckage of those first months, in places I had been too buried in grief to see clearly at the time.
Our son John died on Good Friday 2009, the most demanding weekend in the Catholic calendar. And still our pastor found a way to be with us. He said a private Easter mass in our living room. We are Catholic, and it shaped how comfort showed up for us in those first days. Your faith may look nothing like this, and however faith held or did not hold for you through a loss like this is exactly as it should be.
It was the supportive call from my college roommate, who had lost a child to illness and understood what a different kind of grief this was, and called anyway. It was Teri’s college roommate and her husband, at our door the first morning with hugs, love, and many boxes of tissues. It was Teri’s high school friend, who had lost her brother on September 11th and truly understood a sudden loss. It was family and friends who came and helped carry us through those first days. It was my closest friend and his family, who helped us with the funeral arrangements. It was the hundreds of people who stood with us at John’s wake and funeral mass. It was coworkers who opened up their homes to me and shared dinner after dinner while I worked through my grief away from home, in Seattle.
There were so many other people. I could not list them all if I tried.
I came to understand that inside the loss and the grief I was carrying, there was an outpouring of love and compassion I probably did not truly understand or appreciate at the time. I look back now and see the gift I was given by so many people. To all of you, thank you. You made my days brighter, and my life began to find better focus and meaning. From the shadows of my grief, I found new meaning.
What I came to understand, slowly, over years, is that I had been given something by all of those people.
And in receiving it, I had been changed.
Somewhere in the rubble of that year, I became capable of an empathy I had not had before. I picked up the pieces of my life and started to also notice that others were sitting with similar shattered lives. Not the general sympathy of a person who has been fortunate. The specific empathy of someone who has been at the bottom and been lifted by other people.
That was the gift. Compassion. The real, earned kind.
Back in the late 1980s, I took an Outward Bound leadership class built around something they called the high ropes. In one exercise, you climbed forty feet up a tree, walked across a rope connected to another tree, and when you reached it, you turned around and walked back to the middle of that same rope, forty feet up, and jumped off.
I faced my fear and climbed that tree while it shook in the wind. I pushed away the anxiety of walking the tight rope, and when I reached the middle, I set myself free and jumped.
The key to the whole exercise was the team on the ground. They cheered you on, and they held the safety belay lines that made sure you could not get hurt. No matter how much personal strength I had in that moment, I still needed the people holding those safety lines when I needed them most.
Looking back, that was so much like how we survived losing our son.
For the past fifteen years, Teri and I have co-facilitated SOS Madison, a suicide loss support group in New Jersey. We go into every meeting carrying what was given to us in those early days. We remember what it felt like to sit in a room with people who understood suicide loss grief in a way that even the most loving people around us could not quite reach.
The AFSP Healing Conversations program, where trained survivors connect one-on-one with the newly bereaved, runs on exactly the same principle. You hold the lines for someone else when you have had them held for you.
This is what the gift makes possible.
Not a destination.
An ongoing act of returning what was given.
I have met parents who lost children to suicide and are now speaking to teenagers in high schools about depression. I have met survivors doing advocacy work, writing, building communities. People who had every reason to close themselves off and walk away. They became people who chose instead to hold the safety lines for someone they never knew before.
When you find what your gift is, it will look nothing like mine. That is the point. What I have seen in our support group meetings over fifteen years, and what the research on post-traumatic growth confirms, is that growth after devastating loss is real, it can be fostered, and connection is one of the most reliable paths toward it. Growth does not arrive because the loss was worth it. It coexists with grief. John is still gone. The grief is still real. The growth happens through the loss, not instead of it.
If you are new to being a survivor of suicide loss, I am not rushing you toward anything. The early grief is its own thing and it has its own demands. Iris Bolton was right, even though I could not see it the first time I read those words. It took most of eight years to begin to understand what she meant.
The gift does not announce itself. It arrives slowly, in the people around you, in the ways you are changed by what you survive, in the moment you find yourself holding someone else’s safety lines. You may not see it yet. You will not see it until you are ready. And when you find it, it will be yours alone.
If you are looking for people who understand this grief, the AFSP support group directory and programs like Alliance of Hope can help you find them. If today is heavier than you can carry alone, 988 is there any time, day or night. What those spaces offer is not a cure. It is other people holding the lines.
After a suicide loss there is hope, there is healing and there is a future.
Posts You May Also Like
- The Hard-Fought Hallelujah: Finding Spiritual Healing After Suicide Loss — On Good Friday, Easter, and what spiritual healing actually looks like when faith is shattered and slowly, imperfectly, rebuilt.
- Seventeen Years and Still Counting: Long-Term Survival After Suicide Loss — A later anniversary reflection on what long-term survival actually looks like, and what it means to keep moving through grief rather than past it.
- Grieving Longer Than They Lived: A Suicide Loss Milestone — On what it means when the years of grief outnumber the years shared, and what that milestone asks of us.
- Finding Your People: The Healing Power of Suicide Loss Support Groups — Why being in a room with people who understand this specific grief changes something that nothing else can reach.
- Physics = Love: Continuing Bonds After Suicide Loss — On the physics of love that does not disappear, and what it means to stay in relationship with someone who is no longer here.
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