ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, August 6, 1996 TAG: 9608060015
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DON OLDENBURG THE WASHINGTON POST
When Christopher Lukas was 6, his mother killed herself.
Now, 50 years later, pain and rage still well up inside him. He says he blames the lasting effect not so much on his mother's irrational decision to end her life but on how his father and other adults mishandled practically everything concerning her death and the children.
``I was sent away to camp the same day it happened without being told she killed herself,'' remembers Lukas, a television writer and director in New York. ``They simply told me she was sick. My brother, who is two years older, was already away at camp.''
The family had always ``protected'' the boys from knowing of their mother's manic-depressive condition. Neither knew she had attempted suicide once before. To them, their mother was the loving and caring parent, the one who was with them at their White Plains home when their father, a New York lawyer, was busy elsewhere.
Ten days later, Lukas anxiously returned home with his brother. Their father met them at the train station.
``Where's mother?'' he asked.
Their father said he'd tell them in the car. When retelling this moment, Lukas tries to repeat his father's words exactly. He remembers sitting in the front seat of the car, his brother in the back. His father said, ``You remember your mother was sick before you went away? Well, she died.''
For 10 years, the children never heard the word suicide. Not until one day when 16-year-old Christopher prepared to go to camp as a counselor did his father pull out a photo of his mother and ask, ``You know your mother killed herself, don't you?'' He had not known. He was devastated.
Only in the past decade or so have mental health experts researched how best to cope with the impact of a parent's or loved one's suicide on a child's life. Though more than 30,000 people die from suicide in the United States each year, shame and guilt often motivate families to treat it as a burden to bear but not to air - certainly not to the children.
So culturally biased is our society against talking openly about suicide that when a prominent public figure such as Adm. Jeremy Michael Boorda tragically ends his life, many parents find themselves at a loss for words when their children read newspaper headlines or see TV news reports and ask questions.
``Nobody knows quite what to say so nobody says anything,'' says Linda Goldman, a certified grief therapist at the Center for Loss and Grief Therapy, in Maryland. ``Between 7,000 and 12,000 children a year have a parent commit suicide. It is the second leading cause of death of young people between ages 15-24. And yet for young children, there is no way to talk about it.... The parent thinks it is unspeakable to tell the child.''
The author of ``Breaking the Silence,'' a guide to helping children with grief that is complicated by suicide, homicide, AIDS and other traumatic deaths (scheduled for publication in July), Goldman believes bottom-line coping with suicide - for adults and children - starts with talking honestly about it. ``Not only will it help the children whose families are affected, but it will also help the at-risk children.''
Telling children the truth about a suicide helps to guard them from imagining more damaging things. Henry Seiden, a psychologist in Forrest Hills, N.Y., who with Lukas wrote the 1988 book ``Silent Grief: Living in the Wake of Suicide,'' says that ``covering it up, denying and lying, or not dealing with it, only opens the door for the kids' own fantasies and speculation about what happened - which invariably are as bad or worse than the situation itself.''
Seiden cautions, however, that you ``don't want to cram it down a child's throat. You offer a little to a child, and then when they have questions, you respond to their questions.''
When working with children traumatized by suicide, Goldman says helping them to separate the person who died and their love for that person from the way that person died is critical. She recalls a sixth-grade girl she counseled who had been told the truth about her father's suicide but not helped through the rest of the trauma. ``She'd say to me, `I can't tell my friends that my father died because then I'd have to tell them the``Nobody knows quite what to say so nobody says anything.' Because she couldn't speak the truth, she couldn't grieve the death of her dad.''
Compounding a child's problem when a parent commits suicide is that the surviving parent usually is overwhelmed with guilt, anger and grief, and can't function fully as a parent. ``In the short run, that parent is not going to be available to the child in the same loving and caring and nurturing way as before the death,'' says Alan Berman, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based American Association of Suicidology.
``So the child is at the same time losing the second parent. Neighbors and friends generally don't have a repertoire of comfortable responses to suicide.... People who are severely wounded very much need to be accepted and supported. That means not treating this like a typical death. It means recognizing that the family is going to have a longer and harder time getting over this. In the best mental health sense, the more open one can discuss the suicide, the better.''
LENGTH: Medium: 91 linesby CNB