Panel Session: Suicide Bereavement
TRANSCRIPT
PANEL DISCUSSION: Suicide Bereavement
FEATURING:
Monique Faleafa (National Manager, Le Va - Pasifika within Te Pou)
Eliza Snelgar (Kaiarahi, Community Postvention Response Service, CASA)
Mark Wilson (Member of Solace, Radio Live Producer)
Mike Pehi (Funeral Director, AAA Colenso-Pehi Ltd Funeral Services)
Tricia Hendry (Deputy Chief Executive, Skylight)
Monique Faleafa: My name’s Monique Faleafa, I’m a Clinical Psychologist and a National Manager for a Pacific health workforce development organisation called Le Va within a non-government organisation called Te Pou.
We’re really coming from a strength-based approach this morning, so we want this session to focus on embracing hope and moving forward, remembering to ponder and reminisce those good memories.
We want to talk about what support is available, and highlight how friends and whanau find ways to continue on, and celebrate the life of their loved ones.
Mark Wilson: Good morning, my name’s Mark Wilson, I am a Coordinator for a support group in Auckland called Solace. It’s a peer support group for people who’ve lost loved-ones to suicide.
My own personal story – I lost my wife five and a half years ago. She was six months pregnant. And she lost both her sisters to suicide as well, so I knew a lot about suicide and the impact of suicide on a family, and when it happened to me personally it was the worst thing clearly in the world that can ever happen to anyone.
But I’m now in a new relationship, and I’m a father of a six month old baby, so I... I fully, and a hundred percent believe in hope. And the despair of losing someone you love to suicide, it goes. It’s... Zita sits with me, is with me every day, and will be until the day I die, but I have a new life, I have a wonderful life, and I had a wonderful life.
Zita, in a way, enabled me to be here today, standing to talk to, and listen and learn and share. Zita had set up Solace herself, along with a couple of other people in Auckland, following her sisters’ deaths, and I found myself getting more and more involved, and helping out in that. Given I’d had no personal experience, apart from the fact I was supporting my wife at that time.
And the sadness of all this is that Zita knew about the pain of losing someone, and she knew how painful it would be for me, but she’d given me so much to enable me – I had the resilience, I had the... I guess the resources to deal with this. And I think, to me, that’s so important that we have the resources for those of us who have lost somebody.
And I talked to probably many hundreds of people over the last seven or eight years who’ve lost a loved-one, and that’s often what they miss out on, is having someone who will listen. And it takes time. And hopefully Solace does that for people in Auckland; we’re not funded by any organisation, we’re a group of people who’ve all lost someone dear to us, but we meet monthly, and we have done for the last seven or eight years, and I think it provides a much-needed platform for people.
Tricia Hendry: I had a teaching and youth work background, and in that capacity had worked alongside families impacted by suicide, never thinking it would happen to me. And when it did, I remember the first thought I had, because my husband was a Church Minister, my first thought was ‘I’ll tell them it was a heart attack’.
And then I have this vivid memory of thinking I’m either going to walk through the next period of time with my head down, or I’m going to look up and I’m going to stare that suicide in the face. It was really scary, but I knew intuitively that’s what I had to do.
My children were very young, and as they’ve grown, two out of my three have, at different times, had suicide as a clear and present danger which has been extremely scary. My husband, similarly to your wife, he lost a brother through suicide himself and had a huge amount of loss in his life.
I guess when I started working at Skylight, it was just as a volunteer, because I knew that bereavement was tough, and I guess because I was a teacher, and information has always empowered me, I wanted to be a part of making sure that others got some information that really helped them shift what was going on in their heads.
So as times progressed, I now am the Deputy Chief Executive at Skylight in Newtown, Wellington. We’re based in Wellington, but have a national reach, and our specialty area is loss and grief and trauma, and supporting families and all ages through it, and that’s enabled me to be able to develop some practical resources and information around suicide prevention and postevention, and partnering with others. So that’s what brings me here today.
Eliza Snelgar: I’m here to support this kaupapa. Ko te reo, he tapu. Ko te reo, he rongoa. Ko te reo, he mana motuhake.
Now what I love about that, is that there is no... it doesn’t say we’re here to talk about suicide, it says we’re here to talk about hope, and life and self-determination.
I’ve lots of names with the Clinical Advisory Services or Aotearoa of CASA for short. Our mahi is around cluster suicides and contagions. And my mahi is to work alongside the very talented and amazing team of Clinical Social Workers and Clinical Psychologists, but more importantly it’s to work alongside iwi, Maori communities, who are suffering with the mamae, or the hurt of loss within their communities.
And what we get is that, you know, it’s not just a problem for the whanau, or hapu, or iwi, or the DHB, or the mental health services who respond, or the victim support – it’s a community challenge.
And I’m always amazed at the generosity and the aroha of the whanau and hapu and iwi as they come together to try and stamp out, or find out, or learn, or share with each other.
My passion is tino rangatiratanga, really, transformation, empowerment of all peoples. And for some reason I do get pulled into our Maori whanau, always. I’ve been in the health services for over forty years – how old am I? I’m sixty now. I’ve been a Nurse, I’ve been a Manager, I’ve been an educator, I’ve worked in transformation, I’ve led seminars, training, and always I am pulled back to empowerment and transformation and possibility. So in the midst of all this, there’s always possibility and transformation and positive things coming out, and we’ll talk more about that later.
I have three adult children, and three mokopuna. I have seven mokopuna. My eldest is twenty-two, and he has a few problems he’s dealing with that I’ve had to get some help for him, and my youngest mokopuna three weeks old yesterday. Her name is Te Wai Ora, or Te Au Marama. Princess Wai to us.
And I often... my strategy for their whanau is I often thank my kids for giving me such talented, beautiful, genius mokos. Of course in my eyes they are. My mokos are my life, my blood. And we are truly blessed.
Mike Pehi: Kia ora tatou. Just a little bit of an addition to what was written about me in the booklet – I hail from Ngapuhi, I come from a little family of twenty-three, ok, so we learnt from an early stage how to survive and how to help one another, how to support one another, the manake, aroha, and all that type of thing.
I was brought up in that situation. I was brought up holding on to the nannies’ skirts and all that sort of thing, and learnt from them. I’m a popular guy because everyone’s dying to see me. So currently I’m a Funeral Director, in that type of situation, so...
But I’m a bit like my colleague here, a bit of a Mitsubishi, you know, I’ve done this, I’ve done that, I’ve done a lot of things. And I’ve experienced a lot of things. I guess one could call myself as a Practitioner in many aspects of life, including suicide.
Being a Funeral Director, you get right into the nitty-gritty of the happenings, and to the prior of the happenings, and since I was invited to come to this conference, I have done four case-studies on suicide that I have been given the honour of taking care of the loved-ones. And that was a very, very interesting exercise which I would like to share with this conference today, because it’s quite diverse in terms of each individual cases that I actually interview.
I guess in one sense I’m fortunate to be commissioned to take care of a loved-one, and because of that, the legal documentation that needs to be filled in, we have to have all the details of what happened.
Being a Funeral Director, and a Counsellor, and a Consultant, I cover all this, eh. You know, I have a number of hats that I wear. I work with the Police, ok, training the Police in tikangi Maori, it comes pertinent to sudden death, and things of that nature. And with that, I believe it’s a doorway for me to be able to approach those families and to do the case-studies that I had carried out.
Monique Faleafa: I just have one question from the panel at the moment, and I’m just going to cut to the chase, because the topic is about hope and support after the loss of a loved-one, and it was mentioned that it’s really nice to have this positive spin on things.
So a key question for me was how do you look for positives among the tragedy?
Tricia Hendry: The first positive you’ll always find is there’s been a life that’s worth celebrating. The lifetime might not have been as long as we all wanted, but it’s a life of value and worth, and always worth celebrating. So the focus cannot be always on how a person died, but really how they lived and how they were loved.
Mark Wilson: I agree with that. I think in the early days the focus is on the suicide and how they died, and that relentless telling of that story that I think is required. But then... then... with... for me, for me personally, it was suddenly that horrible clichéd type time as a healer, it sort of... it dawned on me that there was hope – I had a brand new canvas, my life, I had to recreate my life, the life I was having with Zita and myself was over, so I had to start Mark and something else. And I took that one, it was a great challenge of just rebuilding, recreating, and forev[er]... always having that healthy feelings of Zita and how she would be responding to what I was doing, and then I went ‘oh, wait a minute’, often I would check in with myself and I would say ‘it’s my decision now, I’ve got to move on with my life, you’re no longer here’. I know that some things I did she probably didn’t like, the amount of money I was spending, and some of them... I was going out too much and all that sort of stuff, but, you know, that was a healing thing for me – I needed to go out, you know.
And I think connecting with friends and family and the community is so important, and you can’t do this alone. And the thing about suicide, to me, is it’s very isolating and you’re left alone, and you don’t... there’s no rulebook about what you’re meant to do. And I’d had a lot of experience with suicide grief prior to Zita dying, and suddenly I was having to start my life again without any really kind of... I’d never thought about it, I’d never imagined it would happen to me, but it did.
And here I am, five and a half years later, still, I think, with a wonderful life. And the suicide, the loss of Zita was a huge part of my life, but it’s not a negative part of my life anymore. And I think that’s the amazing thing about suicide, that perhaps it sets it apart from other deaths maybe.
Eliza Snelgar: Working with communities, it can be very complex. We have whanau... the individuals grieving, the whanau grieving, and it becomes a community grief. And the positives that come out of a tragedy such as this, because we’re dealing with more than one suicide in a community, and of course there’s a lot of grief everywhere, and we’re in... you know, working alongside them, the positives are coming together. Whanau, hapu, iwi coming together.
And not only whanau, hapu, iwi, but community groups – it may be for the first time they’ve actually talked to each other, because it is a coordinated response when we’re dealing with something as tragic as this, that we all must come together, that a contagion... or a... what we call a contagion, demands it, that we work together, effectively, and communicate with each other.
So the positives are huge, it’s a time of possibility and the tragedy that we get to know each other, we get to korero with each other, we get to manake each other, we get to... you know, it’s all around kotahitanga, self-determination – we can do it.
We don’t... you know, we have the tools and we have the ability to be able to look after our rangtahi, we’re... you know. And whakapono, operating from honesty and integrity, bringing integrity in a sense of... you know, making sense of it all. And it takes time, but there is always hope. Always. And exactly what Mike is saying, whether it’s from an individual community, whanau, hapu, iwi perspective, there is always hope, so the positives that come out of that.
Mike Pehi: From my own experience, interviewing in the cases that I had carried out, asking the right questions, make sure you prepare your questions, keep their minds active by your questioning. All the time ‘if only’. A lot... quite often they say ‘if only, if only, if only’. So you talk about hindsight. If you know what to look for in your questioning, think you could have helped, be honest, and I support. Trust is a very important factor when you’re interviewing these people, and unless you get their trust they won’t open up to you. That has been evident with the case studies that I have done.
Audience Member: Mike, my question... and it’s about the role of the tangiweto in terms of the positive processes as I understand it was of opening up a pathway, absorbing a grief. I come from a line of tangiweto, that’s our whakapapa, and my understanding of that role is that the woman held that role of tangiweto, and we’re able to absorb the grief of the hapu when somebody had passed away and then let it go.
And they were knowledgeable of the workings of te ao wairua and this spiritual world. I wonder about that practice, whether you see it in your work, whether there’s been any attempts to revitalise the role of the tangiweto in the contemporary times?
Monique Faleafa: Thank you.
Mike Pehi: From the case studies that I carried out, yes, that is evident, and yes the community contributes and they support iwi to the stage that one of them have invited me to go back to their iwi, to their hapu to talk about te taha wairua when it comes to suicide. And at this stage I haven’t said yes yet, but the chances are I will because I have a passion for this, this kapapai as well.
Audience Member: I’m here today because my younger brother committed suicide a year and a half ago, but my question is, not for a specific person, but for the whole panel – how do you change the viewpoint from being a victim, or almost a burden, to reaching out for support from family and friends?
Tricia Hendry: I think everybody’s different, we’re all wired for grief, it’s a natural part of life, but we’re all going to grieve in different ways. So some people might be ready for that at different times.
I think it’s true that when there is a giving out and a reaching out, that there’s a win-win, not only for yourself, but for those that are sitting at the ready, so desperate to have... you know, to give you support.
I remember vividly someone coming round to visit our family, and coming over and over and saying ‘is there anything I could do’, and I said ‘look, no, no, no, it’s fine’, and in the end my mother turned round and said ‘oh for heaven’s sake, let him mow the lawns’, because, you know, so many people want to be able to help.
It’s a personal journey, so maybe just encouragement and offers not just given once, but given more than once. I think sometimes people don’t reach out for support many months or even years later. And I work at Skylight; we regularly see people who have been bereaved many, many years, if not decades before by suicide, and it’s taken them that long for their heads to get into the place where they can reach out.
So I guess we don’t judge each other, we just keep being encouraging and supportive as best we can.
Audience Member: After an unsuccessful suicide attempt, what... how do we support those people well, and how do we talk about suicide with those people so that it reduces their risk of attempting again, basically?
Tricia Hendry: My gut feeling is that the more we learn about suicide, and the nature of suicide as best we can, we get some clues. So for example I’ve really come to understand the roles of things like serotonin, the brain chemicals that can play havoc with people’s ability to think through things clearly, and how easy it is for those of us who aren’t feeling that way to judge and say, you know, ‘pull yourself together and stop feeling sorry for yourself’, and, you know, ‘don’t you know how lucky and blessed you are’, etcetera etcetera, and forget that those who are suicidal and have attempted suicide, and perhaps are experiencing mental illness or a huge situational crisis, how dare we judge their pain. So we have to be very compassionate.
Mark Wilson: It’s a bit out of my territory, but I always say to people, because occasionally I’ll get phone calls, because there’s a lot of people out there, family members who are frightened of their loved-ones who have attempted and they don’t know where to go, and they often end up calling me at Solace, and I... which is always, I think, frightening that there isn’t really a place where a lot of people can go, family members, to get that much-needed support.
But anyway, I just run through that checklist of making sure that that person who’s vulnerable is getting the right immediate important attention that they so clearly need.
Audience Member: In your experience, are there things that people say that might be unhelpful?
Eliza Snelgar: I’d like to speak from a personal perspective here. What was unhelpful at times, my sister attempted suicide after... I’m going back a few years now, she’s since passed away, and the biggest thing, I think, for the whanau was that fear and that not knowing what to do.
We were absolutely terrified that she’d even tried to do this, and we didn’t know that we... that she was about to do that, which is what suicide is, isn’t it? We don’t know.
If they came out and told us that they were suicidal, we could give them help, and of course we would get them help. But I remember my mother in particular being really almost closing down, she was actually immobilised with absolute fear about what had happened. And we all came together as a whanau, not only us, and I remember my aunties and uncles and the whole marae coming, to awhi us.
It could have totally gone the other way where mum would’ve just shut it down and not told anyone, but she actually rang her uncle and the kaumatua at the marae and they came and awhi’d us.
But I remember going to the hospital – she was put in hospital because, you know, she was pretty close – and I remember sitting with her, and she’d just stood looking at the window and saying, you know, ‘I don’t know why I didn’t succeed’. She kept questioning her own reasons why it didn’t happen; ‘how come I’m still alive’.
And at that time what was helpful was just to be with her, just to listen – whakarongo, whakarongo, whakarongo, aroha, aroha, aroha, get rid of the platitudes, don’t say ‘I know how you feel’, you know, because you don’t, we don’t, I have no idea how she felt.
Not giving advice is unhelpful, like, you know, yes, you know, ‘why don’t we take you and do this’. And also telling others about your own, if you’re with somebody who is either grieving or has been through attempt... not going over our own past grieving is... can be unhelpful.
What is helpful is just being with them, and awhi the whanau, take kai, take koha, be with the whanau.
Audience Member: Hi, my name’s Denise. I’m here at the conference today because I’m a person who has mental illness and I’ve survived a lot of suicide attempts when I was younger, but about eight years ago... so when I was younger a lot of the suicide attempts were very impulsive, and as the gentleman up there said, they were a way of communicating, you know, I didn’t know how to... you know, they were reactive.
But about eight years ago I got to a different point in my life where I was very conscious about what I was doing, and I decided to commit suicide and I didn’t tell anybody. I knew that by telling anybody, people would stop me, and I was pretty determined, and I went about planning it for about three months. And as you can see, I’m still here eight years later, but there was some big changes in my family made a big difference, but the one thing I wanted... just the comment I wanted to make to the panel, and to get any feedback on it, was there was nothing my family could have done when I was at that stage. That was a decision for when I changed my mind.
There was actually some things that happened that made a difference to me at that point, but they were coincidental. Something that one of my aunties said, and something that one of the family members... a friend of mine said did make a difference. But... and the fact that I was aware of how it would affect my family made a big difference.
Mark Wilson: For me, personally, in my experience, I didn’t have any guilt. I had supported Zita, unconditionally, I felt, for a long period of her very difficult... and, you know, family experience and then her own mental illness. And I think, in a way, that was really helpful for me in my recovery was that I didn’t have that guilt which is... sits with a lot of suicide survivors. And people tend to perhaps focus on the last time they saw their loved-one, they might have had... words may have been said, or there was issues around that, and that’s very traumatic and can last a long time with the survivor.
But, yeah, I do sometimes think... for a while there I was... I would think about how could I have... what more could I have done for Zita, and I honestly believe that there wasn’t anything more. And that’s equally... that’s desperately sad, but it also shows her... where she was at, and what she did, so... and I had to respect that for her.
Tricia Hendry: I think, for me, I... I certainly came to understand that, but in the early days took it on myself to check that out, you know, was there things I could have seen. And one of the things I personally found helpful was really good information that helped me understand just what you’re saying, is that sometimes, you know, you can’t see. But that there are also other times, like you’ve suggested, that we can see indications, and there are things we can do to prevent it.
Talking about the if onlys. I think it’s important to remember that any kind of sudden accidental tragic death will leave survivors to have if onlys. You know, ‘if only I hadn’t got them to go and get the milk from the shop, they wouldn’t have been in the car and they wouldn’t have been in that car accident’ – it’s a natural response after sudden unexpected and tragic death.
And also it’s not just family of course, it’s... I had a fascinating conversation with our butcher down the road who said to me, you know, he’d been wracking his brains, you know, could he have said something to my husband when he’d last come to get meat from his shop. And I’m thinking ‘well why would you be thinking that’. But we all do it; it’s our way of making sense. We’re meaning-makers as human beings, and we want to make meaning on, and sense of what it is that’s happened.
And I think you’re right, there are things that families can’t do, and friends can’t do, but we still intuitively need to process that and think about it.
Just in case there is some meaning that can be made, and for myself, what I have gained is making sure that my three children understand the possibility of genetic flow through of depression through the family, and our need to be a family that has not so much pride, that we can ask for help when we need it, so that’s how it flowed through for us. So when my kids have struggled, I have been grateful that they have learned to ask for help.
Mike Pehi: Yeah, there is a possibility, or even the probability that you will get some cases where the indicators are there, and the family’s tried all sorts to try and help them.
I’m again speaking with the... one of the case studies that I did, where the spirituality was very, very strong. Very strong. Ok. The indicators were there that he’d spiralled down, changes in his whole mood, both the mother and the son... the mother was treating her son, trying to help, get help. She went to the medical professions and to be told there was an imbalance, given pills to try and help him.
Went to another section of the hospital to be told that he was ok, and she didn’t believe that, so she went back to her tohunga, went back to her people, and tried to get them to help and to be told... and this was something very, very new to me, I had no idea that this sort of thing was happening, that in this particular area, every five generations goes through a period of suicide, murder, rape and all those type of thing – every five generations. And she actually, with her son, was in that category, and explained to me that there were a number of families in that particular area that that sort of thing happened. And my next question to her was ‘is there anything being done about that situation?’
Audience Member: Just a question on relation to hope and support after loss of a loved-one, how important, how much emphasis or encouragement is given to the whole spiritual aspect of life, you know, like prayer, fellowship, worship, healing?
Mike Pehi: I create my own questioning. I derive my questioning from my own experience. And as you are dealing with the client, it’s there that the indication may show that spirituality needs to be included in the interview. It just happens during the questioning, and that’s why I said earlier on, get your questions ready, be sincere in your questioning, and make sure that you are sensitive to the whole situation, not there just as a... from a clinical approach so to speak – excuse me, I’m not disrespecting anyone here – but it’s a reality that more often than not, it’s as you are questioning, each question may change, it depends on how they respond to your question. But, yes, in two of my cases spirituality was very, very strong indeed.
Eliza Snelgar: And I’d like to tautoko that where the spirituality and the karakia is vital before we even talk about the kaupapa on the table, and when I’m... when we’re working with communities. It can, when you’re working with particularly mainstream communities, they can just launch straight in to the mahi at hand, and sometimes we have to stop them and say, you know, ‘karakia, mihimihi’. So it is vital if we’re to get the work done, to get... to have our karakia, our waiata, that mihi whakatau and to clear the air, clear the space so that the mahi can take place.
Tricia Hendry: Yeah, I think intuitively, when there’s been a suicide, people, their spirituality, however they define that, their place in the universe is challenged, and so people often will look to big spiritual questions; it’s a very natural way of processing what’s happened.
For me it was hugely supportive and helpful. For some people it might be enough to go and be in nature by themselves, and to think about everything that’s going on, just alone with nature around them, supporting them. Everybody’s so different. But you’re right, I think it sits right very close in the experience of many people bereaved by suicide.
Mark Wilson: Hmm. Definitely.
Tricia Hendry: It’s very important.
Mark Wilson: Definitely it was... for me it was a spiritual awakening, I guess, I’d never even contemplated life, the universe and meaning, and all that stuff, and then suddenly I was confronted with it head-on. So I have learned so much about myself, I guess, from that, and it challenged me like nothing else has challenged me, losing the person you love, and where are they, how do I sit with their memory and their loss, and that was... that’s made me a better person, I think, just getting in touch with that part of me, because it wasn’t something I’d ever really contemplated.
Monique Faleafa: Thank you very much. Unfortunately we’ve run out of time. Just a few thoughts. Thirty seconds on a few thoughts. In tragedy there is hope. Mike pointed out that after the loss of a loved-one there is a point in time where hope is created, and that can be a different point in time for different people.
Trisha mentioned there is a life worth celebrating and remembering how they lived, and good information is really, really important and a valuable source of support.
And as Eliza pointed out, a coordinated approach after the loss means that whanau and groups can come together, connect, and have collective support, whether that be spiritual or otherwise.
