October 8, 2004
A UMC.org Feature
By Susan Passi-Klaus

Clark Taylor, a recovering alcoholic, was 33 when he killed himself on a cold January day in 1992, leaving behind a wife, 3-year-old daughter and mother Judy Collins to wonder why-and forever imagine if only.

In the decade following his death, the singer and songwriter poured her grief into her journals. Those journals evolved into Sanity and Grace: A Journal of Suicide, Survival, and Strength, published in 2003 by Tarcher/ Penguin. In the book she writes, "Even as I put one foot in front of the other, show up for my life, and the lives of my loved ones, learning to survive, I shiver when someone's suicide is mentioned, and the chill makes its way from my lips to my heart as I speak of my own journey. ... Putting the journey into words is one of the only ways I have found to warm the chill in my heart ..."

Collins believes through her son's death she has learned to live a fuller life, and she finds comfort in sharing her grief with the loved ones of others who have committed suicide. It is how Taylor's spirit has managed to live on even after he took his life.

"Clark is still with me all the time," says Collins, 65, by phone from her home in New York state. "In fact, he's been very, very busy. He's like a little angel up there. He's very close. And I think he's present, so that's another gift of loss. You find out that you don't ever really lose anybody."

She is not alone. Clark Flatt is another loved one left to wonder why. The retired United Methodist pastor from Hendersonville, Tenn. found his 16-year-old son's dead body in his bedroom in July 1997. Flatt, like Collins, took his grief and used it as fuel for helping others. Within a year of his son's death, he established the Jason Foundation to educate parents and children about suicide and how to prevent it.

"Looking back, Jason gave us four or five signs that something was wrong, but I wasn't educated enough to know what those signs were," says Flatt, 53. "He had been a very laid-back, outgoing person, but he became more withdrawn and easily agitated and brooding. His grades dropped, and he stopped talking about football. ... His old self just changed dramatically, but we just thought he was going through normal adolescent changes.

"My guilt about that was in the form of anger that the church and the schools and the community didn't give me the facts-they didn't provide me with the tools and resources to prevent what happened," Flatt says. "It's like having a child with polio, and having that child die without you ever hearing that there was a vaccine that could have prevented it."

Every 18 minutes, someone in the United States commits suicide, Collins writes in her book. They sometimes are younger than 10 years old. Others are older 90. But the old, the young and the in-between who become the most obvious statistics commit the so-called "successful" suicides. Some 300,000 to 600,000 others also try to kill themselves.

For every endangered or abandoned life, there is at least one loved one, or two, or 20 struggling to make sense of the insanity.

Collins says she struggled with the idea that "if I had just done this, if I had just done that, if only I had called him earlier, if only I had talked to him on the previous day-it would have been different. Well, that's an egotistic illusion. We don't have control over other people's lives or how they live them or what they do. You know, we barely have control over our own lives."

Collins battled alcoholism, like her son, and she tried to commit suicide when she was 14. Taylor's grandfather, whom he never knew, also had killed himself.

"There are those of us who have that precondition," she says. "I tried to kill myself when I was 14, so I know what that feels like. I think I know some of the things that went through his mind."

Collins and Flatt never have met, but their lives intersect beyond their shared experience of loss and grief. Both have seen God use their son's tragedies for good.

"Time after time, I've watched as God took the heartache of someone else who had lost a son or daughter and turn it into something very positive for others," Flatt says.

Collins says her Methodist upbringing gave her a foundation of faith that sustained her as she grieved the loss of her son.

"I have a very, very deep faith, and my fervent prayer is always 'Thy Will Be Done," she says. "And I don't pretend to know what that is ... but experience has taught me that I'm better off in a surrendered state. I know that it's going to be all right-in fact, I know that it is already all right, and that's what helped me get through Clark's suicide."

When Collins and Flatt counsel other suicide survivors, their first advice is to encourage them to join a suicide recovery group.

"Talk about it with whoever you can." Collins says. "Don't let people tell you not to talk about it. And don't let people tell you that you're through grieving when you know you're not."

Eventually, they say, they found a greater appreciation of life.

"You deserve to have a life," Collins says. "You deserve to go on. You deserve to have friends. You deserve to have a wonderful, joyous life. It's not OK just to survive. I now have a determination to live as full a life as I can."

United Methodist News Service
Susan Passi-Klaus is a freelance writer living in Nashville, Tenn., and publisher of Cracked Pots, an inspirational newsletter for women.