By Judi Merriam – former homeschool mother of three
An excerpt from Empty Shoes by the Door: Living After My Son’s Suicide by Judi Merriam
“Life is so very different from what I thought it would be. It’s fragile and amazing and terrifying and broken and glorious and devastating all at the same time, and it can change in a matter of seconds. A breath can continue a life, or a breath can end a life. Sometimes the ending of a life or the continuing of a life comes down to a choice that should not be ours to make.
On the afternoon of December 23, 2011, the sweetest, kindest, most loving, endlessly creative, intelligent, thoughtful, and polite young man I’ve ever known died by suicide and robbed my world of one of my most precious treasures. He’s my son, Jenson; my second-born, blue-eyed, smiling, eighteen-year-old. My life hasn’t been the same since he left this earth, and it will never be the same again while I’m here.”
Suicide – what a word; one that’s seldom spoken in Christian circles, or in churches, or in the homeschool community. We don’t talk about it because it’s not supposed to happen to followers of Jesus, nor in families who are trying to raise their children in a godly way – that way where we try to do everything right, which somehow guarantees God’s abundant blessings on His beloved. You know that way – we hear about it in our churches, read about it in parenting books, or see it in other families that appear to have their act together as they live their perfectly orchestrated lives. Those families don’t need to talk about suicide, right, because they’ll never experience one within their immediate members.
Throughout far too many years of my twenty-three-year long homeschooling career, I believed falsehoods about the “perfect” family and what it should look like. I obeyed all the rules for godly Christian living, as did my family. My husband and I never talked to our children about suicide. Why would we; suicide was something that happened to non-believers who live in majorly dysfunctional families. As it turns out, though, a suicide can happen in any family, no matter what they believe, or how the children are raised, or how wonderful they look from the outside.
It happened in my own family, and to this day, I still wish that I’d spoken about suicide to my three beautiful, loving, and exceptional children. I wish I’d said things like, “Have you ever thought about taking your own life when you were upset,” or “You may think about suicide, but it shouldn’t be a choice, and here’s why,” or “Even when we know Jesus, life is really, really hard, and I don’t want you to take your life because you can’t see beyond how you feel at a specific moment,” or a million other things I could have said instead of ignoring the possibility that even Christians contemplate suicide. I didn’t know this when my children were small, or adolescents, or teenagers, though, so I was silent about this topic.
But since then, I’ve lived through the reality of the suicide of my middle child, and I’m here to tell you it can happen in any family, no matter who you are, what you believe, or how you behave. For this reason, I want to encourage you to talk about suicide with your children. Please don’t ignore the topic or think you’re exempt from the possibility because you all love Jesus. In many ways, my family looked a bit like the poster family for successful homeschooling, and yet, twelve years ago, the December after my middle child graduated from high school, he took his own life two days before Christmas, and threw far too many people into turmoil and personal struggle. All of us who knew him – his family, his friends, his girlfriend, his doctor, our church, his acquaintances, his instrumental teachers, his college professors, and more, were blindsided by his tragic choice. Over 1000 people attended his memorial service, and not one of us could understand or conceive how or why we ended up there.
Suicide is a really difficult topic but one that truly needs to be addressed in a safe environment with open dialogue. Children and adults, who say they love Jesus, really do take their own lives, for a variety of reasons, and it’s not an unforgiveable or unpardonable sin. It’s a reality of living in a fallen and very broken world; one which doesn’t function according to God’s original plan.
If you don’t know how to begin a conversation about suicide with your young ones or teenagers, there are resources out there. Contrary to the belief of earlier years, when I was growing up, talking about suicide doesn’t make it more likely to happen. Discussing the topic has now been shown to have the power to prevent it. The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP) is a good place to start if you’re looking for information about suicide prevention and awareness. They have materials and resources on how to talk to your children about this topic. Their website is https://afsp.org/
I would also like to encourage you to read my book, Empty Shoes by the Door: Living After My Son’s Suicide, and reach out to me, personally, if you so desire. Feel free to reach out to me even if you don’t read my book; no questions are too hard or uncomfortable for me to address. My email address is merriamjudi@gmail.com and my author website is https://judimerriam.com/ where you may read more about the book, listen to podcast interviews I’ve done, or find information about events where I’m speaking. My book is available on Amazon, but please consider purchasing it from your local bookstore if at all possible; they should be able to order it for you.
I’d like to close with another excerpt from my book:
“If you want a happy ending according to the world’s standards, this isn’t the story to read. Although pain and grief aren’t all-consuming the way they once were, my family and I continue to walk with them, and I anticipate we will for the rest of our days on this side of Heaven. I suppose it would make everyone feel better if I could say ‘and we all lived happily ever after,’ but life isn’t a fairy tale, and I refuse to be delusional or live my days in denial.
We can’t escape reality no matter how hard we try; it always catches up with us and finds our heart’s hiding places. If we don’t accept truth early on, grief redefines itself into even greater darkness and devastation. Fairy tales aren’t true no matter how many times we cross our fingers or wish upon a star.
I believe truth is typically the best course, so I follow Brené Brown’s advice and ‘rumble’ with it, or have deep conversation with it, regularly, not wanting deception to claim victory. I’m convinced the only healthy way to deal with the factuality of a suicide is to meet it face to face from the heart-wrenching moment it happens and not redefine it into something more acceptable. We also need to personally dictate how we’ll deal with it so as to avoid any delusion that would capture our thoughts and change it into something it isn’t. It’s impossible to dress up a suicide death and be truthful at the same time! Some try, but I don’t believe them.
I desire that the truth of my own brokenness and survival shines a light on your personal path of grief if you need a pinpoint upon which to fix your eyes and from which to gain encouragement. And I hope this glimpse of one of my fine children allows you a small understanding of what this world lost the day Jenson died, as in the words of Charles Dickens, ‘And can it be that in a world so full and busy, the loss of one…creature makes a void in any heart, so wide and deep that nothing but the width and depth of vast eternity can fill it up?’”