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September 18, 2006 - The six middle-age
women in the back of the restaurant laugh one minute and cry
the next. They pass around pictures of their children, fret
about their husbands and mother hen one another about going
easy on the guilt and getting enough rest. Over the clatter
of a busy Saturday lunch hour at Charleston's, they vent,
commiserate, console and advise. It's an afternoon of support
for these mothers who share the tragedy of losing a child
to suicide.
Here, over chicken Caesar salads and iced
tea, they can cry openly without hearing, "It will be
OK." Here, they can ask a range of questions - was there
an autopsy, a lawsuit, a police investigation? Here, they
can talk about callous coworkers or kind ministers, about
antidepressants and people who tell them to get on with life.
Here, they can reveal wanting to die and struggling to cope.
How the shower is the safest place to cry. How their heads
jerk at hearing a child cry, "Mom." "I miss
her. I miss her voice," one newly bereaved mother said.
"I wonder if he knew I loved him," said a mother,
four years out from her son's suicide.
This de facto support group was started
five years ago by two mothers who needed more time together
than the once-a-month meeting of the grief group they had
been attending, Compassionate Friends. Laraine Peck and Diana
Rozmiarek, both of Omaha, started having lunch. The lunch
gatherings grew and gave birth two years ago to a new support
group specifically for parents of children who die by suicide.
Parents of Suicide Together, or POST, meets monthly at St.
Andrew's Episcopal Church, 925 S. 84th St. Some members are
proposing a similar support group for siblings.
Omaha has one other suicide-specific support
group for friends and family members called Survivors of Suicide.
Survivors' experiences show them this form
of support - from others who have walked in their shoes -
is crucial to their healing. Peck said she leaned heavily
on friends after her son Bryan hanged himself in his Drake
University dorm room nearly seven years ago. But she worried
that she was wearing out her friends, who empathized but couldn't
fully know her plight. "You start feeling like old fish,
and you want to talk still," she said. "But you
need to talk with people who understand why you need to talk."
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