Children of Suicide Victims Need Support [PsychCentral.com]

Bob, from all the vignettes and information you've posted in your comments, you've had such a difficult, varied and full life. It seems as if they all belong in a book. Thank you for continuing to inform and enrich our lives.

I was 15 years old, when I 'witnessed' my mother's handgun "suicide'--except earlier that morning, before taking me to summer school, I asked my [deputy sheriff] father why his gun was in the car. We both knew he had two handguns. He never answered my question. At the time, it was a felony in NYS, to aid or abet a suicide attempt. Even though I called the police to report finding her...they didn't question me about anything. ... Since we didn't have the internet back then, I guess I could try using it now. The night before, my mother tried speaking with my [younger] sister and I near the garden. She tried to apologize for 'being such a lousy mother'-her words. I said: "It sounds like you're going away, and I don't believe you'd do that, and I refuse to forgive you." 28 years later, I did EMDR, and it stopped the flashbacks... It wasn't until 12 years after her death, that she [a WWII 'WASP' pilot] became a "Veteran". After the EMDR, I looked up her death certificate, but the "Disposition of Remains" box wasn't clear. I later learned that nobody had claimed her remains [for six plus months] ....until I called the undertaker listed on the death certificate. He told me that a group of women, who worked at the girls camp where my mother had taught swimming, life-saving, and red-cross first aid, etc., had come six + months after her death, and taken her ashes and dispersed them over some body of water. My sister and I have yet to reach consensus over which body of water that may have been. We narrowed it down to two possibilities: Conesus Lake-where the girls camp was located, and Lake Ontario--near where my grandfather had taught her to swim using the 'old Bavarian method'--at age 3, tossing her off a low bridge into a small bay on the south shore of Lake Ontario [near the north end of Manitou Road]. I'm grateful that my mother taught my sister and I to swim [gently and encouragingly] using the Red-Cross method, and not the "Bavarian method" my grandfather had used on her, and many other positive contributions: her musical appreciation and training at Eastman School of Music, singing in the church choir, playing in the hand-bell choir, her production of our church Sesqui-centennial celebration, taking our cub-scout den/pack for airplane rides..... The morning after her suicide, at Summer School, somebody commented as we waited outside for the school to open: "Hey, I heard your mother committed suicide; Ha-Ha-Ha-.." and one of my classmates walked up and punched him. I didn't really expect a Roman-Catholic classmate of mine to do that, but the "Stigma" seemed to have been 'short-lived' that day.