Earlier this summer, a 45-year-old man with whom I had a deep bond took his own life. Usually I stop worrying about people so much after they hit their 30s, so this death shook me to the bone. A friend, sensing my grief, asked me how many people I have known who committed suicide. As I was compiling my mental list, those from my hometown and those from other places, those who had great potential and those who faced tragic difficulty, all loved unconditionally by an extended family, I was again shaken. I could not count them all. There were too many.
Here in Alaska, we talk about suicide a lot, but we are not consistent and we are not fixing much. There are good reasons for this. We all have our own lives to lead, for instance, and the news cycle is continually changing to the next compelling problem worthy of public discussion. One could go on with other examples, but all of these reasons are overshadowed by the discomfort and difficulty we feel whenever we really try to bore down into the root causes that lead so many to contemplate taking their own lives. The hurt and despair are hard to deal with. It is hard to articulate and confront problems in general and really hard when everyone has grown up together or when a community is struggling to find a healthy future. We try to help people heal, and they commit suicide anyway. We attend meetings and talk but there is no simple answer. We feel inadequate and impotent.
However, no matter how hard the personal, cultural and societal contributors to suicide are, we need to talk more. Not the talk as in this letter to the newspaper or the talk at a regional conference. Such talk is important and good, but it is not the talk we need. We need talk around the kitchen table and talk in local community halls. Only then will people start putting real words to the sadness and begin to reconcile core values with how people actually behave. Not that government, in all its forms, is without a role in trying to fix the problems that it most certainly helped create, but even smart and sensitive outsiders can only poke at the core issues. True healing must be grass-roots.
Since, like most of us, I do not have anything particularly original to say about fixing Alaska's dysfunctional parts, I want to further the conversation by reminding readers of a couple of recent commentaries published in Alaska Dispatch News that resonated with me and that would give people plenty to talk about.
In a commentary published online Sept. 10, Trevor Storrs highlighted the consequences of adverse childhood experiences and the stigma associated with those consequences. And in one published Sept. 1, Cynthia Erickson highlighted insidious effects of the welfare state on village life. That makes sense. I can easily think of a dozen old men, now long gone, who had nothing good to say about the direction in which they saw their world heading as welfare programs began coming around. I don't know why this subject was never part of a conversation I had with the old women, but I think it is safe to say that they would have asserted the same, in their own way.
When this recent wave of suicide subsides is exactly the time to increase the purposed conversation back home about suicide and its underlying causes. As I, too, am imperfect, I would not want to say how to do this. Every home and community needs to find its own way. Just regular trying will send a message to everybody. The many parts of the message will reveal themselves as the discussion unfolds.
Youths are certainly our future, and in youths we may see the seeds of change. But I think we are fooling ourselves if we think that they will turn out much different from us unless the adults in the room begin to lead that change. They need our guidance, and we demonstrate that guidance by getting our own house in order. Talk will help get that moving. We don't need a counselor or a meeting facilitator in order for us to talk to our kids. We are the ones who can make our kids feel important.
Though suicide certainly is an issue for all of us regardless of geography, I admit that it is magnified in rural Alaska. Consequently, some equate village life with the bleakness of suicide and abuse. Not me. In case anybody didn't know, beauty and joy happen every day in every community. And therein lies the strength to tell everybody often, even the marginalized among us, that choosing suicide is wrong.
Eric Morris spent most of his adult life in the Fish River country east of Nome and now gives Medicare a Homer address.
The views expressed here are the writer's own and are not necessarily endorsed by Alaska Dispatch News, which welcomes a broad range of viewpoints. To submit a piece for consideration, email commentary@alaskadispatch.com.