How I Survived My Daughter's Suicide

Photo: The view straight down from the Royal Gorge Bridge.

Transcript of a TED-style talk to suicide loss survivors at the first annual "Walk With Hope" sponsored by Building Hope Summit County, Frisco, Colorado, September 15, 2024.

THE LAST TIME MY DAUGHTER, BETH, was seen alive, was at 8:01 a.m., July 18, 2018. I know this from the time stamp on a grainy, black-and-white surveillance video taken inside the visitor’s center of a popular tourist attraction in south-central Colorado. 

She had traveled a very long way to get there—12,000 miles, in fact. From Nampula, Mozambique to Johannesburg, South Africa to London Heathrow and, finally, to Denver International Airport, where she rented a car, drove two and a half hours south, and checked into a cheap motel.

The next morning, Beth was literally the first visitor to arrive at the 360-acre park. She purchased a ticket with cash, strolled casually across the empty lobby, pushed open the entrance doors at the back, and disappeared from the camera’s view.

Ironically, at almost the same moment, 170 miles to the north, in Longmont—after I had discovered a series of terrifying clues and was desperately trying to locate her, believing she was still in Africa, where she had recently served in the Peace Corps—I finally allowed myself to think the unthinkable, to say it out loud, even, standing in my living room: 

I think she’s going to kill herself.
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Shortly after eight o’clock, with no one in sight, my daughter scrambled over a four-foot metal railing near the center of the park, stood for a moment on the other side, dazzled, no doubt, by the view, and then . . . jumped from the highest suspension bridge in North America—the height of an 80-story building—and died roughly ten seconds later at the bottom of the Royal Gorge. 

She was 28 years old.

Life as I had known it—my life—ended that day, too. 

My daughter’s suicide was the single most devastating thing that ever happened to me—like descending into the darkest depths of Dante’s Inferno. It felt like the torment would go on for eternity.

Yet, six years later, here I am: alive and well. Permanently scarred, of course, but no longer bleeding from any open wounds. 

I’m hoping, in fact, to offer you a hint or two of insight or inspiration that might ease your own healing journey through unspeakable grief and loss. So, briefly, here are five strategies that I used to survive the trauma of my daughter’s suicide. Things that worked for me. 

Feel free to take ‘em or leave ‘em, as you see fit. 

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ONE: EXPOSURE THERAPY

​The first strategy is what they call “graded exposure” in the pain management field, where I worked at the time. In psychology, it’s also known as “exposure therapy”—which involves moving carefully, in small steps, toward things you normally fear and avoid at all costs. It’s one way to prevent or to heal PTSD in the aftermath of a traumatic event. 

Here’s what I did to expose my shattered heart, one step at a time, to the brutal reality of Beth’s death.

First, I begged the county coroner to let me see her body. I desperately wanted to be near her, one last time, ideally, to touch her—to say a proper goodbye. But, no, he wouldn’t let me and I was too intimidated to insist. 

So, I never saw Beth again. She was just gone. 

As a result, part of me simply could not believe that she was dead. I mean, all the evidence was second-hand, circumstantial. In my head, of course, I knew it was true. But I couldn’t feel it, in my body. I needed something to make it real. 

​Three days after her suicide, therefore, I went straight to the Royal Gorge and walked out on that bridge, deliberately—to look over that rail myself, to see the last thing my daughter ever saw, to experience in my bones the sheer horror of what she had done.

It was awful, to say the least. I had a breakdown, right on the bridge. And I fled the scene weeping. But, ultimately, it helped. It took me one step closer to accepting the reality of her suicide.

A month later, I took another small step. I ordered copies of the sheriff’s and coroner’s reports, which included both verbal descriptions and photos of the scene at the bottom of the Gorge. Although I never looked at those photos, I did learn two valuable things from those reports: 

Why, exactly, they hadn’t wanted me to view her body. It was worse than I imagined.

And where, exactly, she had died among the brush and rocks, near the base of a cliff, 150 feet north of the Arkansas River. 

Three months later, I returned and—armed with this new information—I was finally able to locate the exact spot along that quarter-mile-long bridge where she had jumped. This time, I was able to remain present and “grounded,” despite my fear of heights, and—more importantly—to mark the place, in my heart, like a cross with flowers by the roadside. 

Finally, at the first anniversary of her death, I stood on that bridge for the third time, with her brother now, gazing sadly over the rail at the terrifying drop below. 

I asked him if he realized just how much pain she must have been suffering, to resort to . . . this. And, for the first time—right there, on the bridge—I was able to forgive her for what she had done to me, to our family and, most of all, to herself.

I let go of my anger, gave her my long overdue blessing, and set free my own tormented soul.

That’s what exposure therapy—moving toward what I’d normally fear and avoid—did for me, that first year.

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TWO: SOCIAL CONNECTION & SUPPORT 

Now, if you ask me why my daughter killed herself, I’ll tell you that she felt unbearably alone in the universe and, in the end, she became dangerously isolated. On the other side of the planet, in her case. 

Beth was, like every other member of her family (myself included), an introvert. A shy girl, a very quiet person, she had developed a life-long habit of not talking openly about how she was feeling, withdrawing into a prison cell of suffocating silence when she felt hurt, overwhelmed or rejected. 

And she had just been thrown out of the Peace Corps, unjustly, for a single stupid mistake. Which effectively severed all of her most precious social bonds—stripping her of everyone and everything that had given her meaning, purpose, and direction.

In the aftermath of her suicide—deep inside my own black hole of grief and despair—I could easily have followed her down the path to social isolation. 

But I had just witnessed the destructive power of loneliness. 

So, I decided to do the exact opposite of what my daughter had done—I resolved to reach out; to ask for help; to speak openly and honestly about what had just happened to her, and to me.

My second strategy was, simply, to seek social connection and support anywhere I could find it. It went totally against the grain of my fiercely independent “masculine ego.” But it proved life-giving.

One thing I did was tell all of my colleagues at work that my daughter had just killed herself, and asked for the space and time I needed to recover. 

I used very straightforward language, too (as you may have noticed): “killed herself” rather than “passed away,” mysteriously, as if by accident. I chose not to hide, sugarcoat, or add shame and stigma to her suicide. 

I spent untold hours going over Beth’s story—and mine—with a few close friends; my boss, even; chaplains at the hospital where I worked; anyone willing to listen. I saw three different therapists and visited seven grief support groups that first year, including several for suicide loss survivors. 

The more time I spent in the presence of caring people, the more I talked, and the more others listened with empathy; the safer, stronger, and more connected I felt to the world again and to the possibility of rediscovering a life still worth living.

Ultimately, what I learned from my daughter was: Don’t try to “go it alone.” Don’t be too proud or embarrassed to ask for help, to turn to others for solace and support. 

As trauma specialist Bruce Perry says: “Humanity’s most fundamental unit is not the individual; it’s the clan or tribe.” We are naturally social creatures.

We need each other to survive.

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THREE: A VISION FOR THE FUTURE

Speaking of survival . . . Viktor Frankl, an Austrian psychiatrist who wrote the famous book, Man’s Search for Meaning in 1946, discovered my third strategy as a prisoner of Auschwitz and other Nazi concentration camps. 

He wrote: “The prisoner who lost faith in the future was doomed.” 

He tells the story of a fellow prisoner who had dreamed their camp would be liberated by the end of March 1945. As the day approached, when there was no sign that Allied forces would arrive in time, the man became dejected, fell ill, and declined rapidly. He died the last day of March.

As Frankl observed: “The sudden loss of hope can have a deadly effect.”

I believe our loved ones felt something like that prisoner. Trapped in some unbearable situation from which they saw no apparent escape, they, too, lost hope—just as many of us find ourselves, in the aftermath of their suicides, feeling trapped in hopelessness about our own futures.

But Frankl also learned what it took for prisoners to survive even the most horrific, life-threatening conditions in a Nazi concentration camp.

He said, the people who realized that “life was still expecting something from them”—that there was at least one thing the world still needed them to do, something only they could do, in the future—those were the ones who could endure almost anything the world threw at them, in the present. 

Frankl himself survived by visualizing a future in which he would travel the world giving lectures on, of all things, “the psychology of the prison camp” and write a book about it—which, in fact, he did after the war. That simple vision not only kept him alive, but saved the lives of countless others.

For months after Beth killed herself, the future—for me—just disappeared. Gone. Like her. 

But because I knew Frankl’s story, I kept asking myself: What is life still expecting from me? What does ‘the world’ still need me to do, that only I can do . . . now that my daughter is gone forever? 

I realized, for one thing, that my surviving child, my son, John, would never have another father. He still needed me—now and in the future—to just go on being his dad, to be there for him in his own grief and struggle. After all, he had just lost his little sister.

My wife, Barbara, Beth’s stepmother, still depended on me, too—for love, if nothing else.

And I suspected at least a few patients at the hospital still needed me, in some regard. So, I needed to survive, as much for them as for myself. In other words, there were people I still cared about, work I still wanted to do, and dreams I still hoped to fulfill one day—in the future. 

I realized, finally, there was something even Beth still needed from me:

Only I could tell her story now. 

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FOUR: NARRATIVE THERAPY

Within one week of my daughter’s death, I knew that I would write a book about what happened to her, and why. I’d been a professional writer for decades. Writing was how I made sense of things. 

And, god knows, I desperately needed to make sense of Beth’s seemingly senseless self-annihilation.

Besides, I was keenly aware of the healing power of storytelling. I had taught dozens of older adults how to write their life stories. And I had published three memoirs myself—each one at an existential turning point in my life. Like this. 

In psychology, it’s known as “narrative therapy.” And suicide bereavement specialists tell us that “constructing a coherent narrative” that helps us “make at least partial sense of the suicide” is “a central healing task for most survivors.”

So, my fourth strategy was to throw myself into that task. 

I began by asking two questions. 

First: Why did Beth kill herself? I mean, really. Superficially, I thought I knew—the recent external factors, at least. Even the “last straw.” But I could not grasp what had happened inside her head, in the end. I had never had a suicidal thought in my life, no matter how bad things got. 

So, my second question was: How had Beth become—over time--the kind of person who could react to the facts like that? 

I spent the next three years conducting what I called my “forensic investigation” into my daughter’s life and death, laboriously retracing the twisted path—the puzzling sequence of events and branching points—that led from Beth’s first breath in a Houston hospital to her final, fatal act at the Royal Gorge, 28 years, three months, and six days later. 

To do so, I read everything Beth had ever written—which was a lot. I obtained all of her medical and psychiatric records and Peace Corps documents. I interviewed friends and colleagues. And I studied hundreds of scientific papers and books on suicide, grief, mental health, social pain and trauma. 

Then I spent another whole year writing “the book”--Girl of Light & Shadow: A Memoir of My Daughter, Who Killed Herself. And believe it or not, I found the writing process surprisingly energizing, at times even joyful. Despite all the tears I wept over my keyboard, I also laughed and smiled—a lot. 

By constructing this long, creative, emotionally and intellectually “coherent narrative”, I accomplished (at least) three things that proved immensely therapeutic:

First, I actually got inside my daughter’s head and understood, at last—from her perspective—why she had chosen to end her life. I “made sense” of her suicide.

Second, I created a written memorial to Beth that captured both the beauty and complexity of her deeply wounded soul, so she would not become just another statistic.

And, third, I laid the groundwork for a whole new career, helping others make sense of, and recover from, the loss of a loved one to suicide, as I have.

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FIVE: HOLD OUT YOUR HAND

Which brings me to my fifth and final strategy: One of the most healing things you can do for yourself is a kindness to someone else. And who better to show kindness to than those who experience the same suffering that you do? Your “clan or tribe.”

In a tiny poem called “The Uses of Sorrow,” Mary Oliver writes: “Someone I loved once gave me / a box full of darkness. / It took me years to understand / that this, too, was a gift.”

Nine days after Beth died, I published a poem of my own on LinkedIn entitled “A Box Full of Darkness”, in which I reflected on the deeper meaning of Mary Oliver’s observation that sorrow, like love, can be an unexpected gift—to you and to others who suffer as you do. 

I’d like to close by sharing that poem and inviting you to ask yourself: To whom can I hold out my hand, with love and kindness?

A BOX FULL OF DARKNESS