Michelle L. Rusk's Blog, page 19

Peace in the Continued Sort of Chaos

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While things are much calmer than they were a year ago, we are still processing much change around us. And the grief of the life and ways that are no longer part of our routines. There have been many losses, not just deaths, but in the way we do things and, for some people, the loss of relationships with people who have chosen different routes.

We don’t grieve overnight, get up the next morning, and forget what once was. Grief is a process and it’s a journey. Some people are afraid to venture out after so much time alone or without having the responsibility to leave home. Other people are still afraid of what virus lurks among us.

We have all lost something, many things. While not to the virus, I’ve had quite a few deaths of people in the outside orbit of my life. My sense of time has changed in a way I can’t explain– for some reason it feels like the days are spinning faster. I even said to Greg yesterday, “How did an hour go by?” when I realized the tomatillos I was roasting in the oven had been in there an hour already.

But we all also have had the opportunity to find peace within ourselves. Our days are never perfect commercials on television where everyone is happy and having a great time. There is alway a bumble, a hiccup, and usually a person causing havoc.

One thing we should be taking away from this pandemic experience is how to find peace inside ourselves. Have you done that? We can’t control the outside world but we can control our reactions to it. Some people remain reactive to it, others have learned to step away from the world (or just their phone which in many ways can be one in the same).

I’m finding I don’t want to be on my phone, not because of the chaos of the world, but because it keeps me from being more creative. I want to write, to sew, to paint, to draw. I don’t need to keep looking things up, checking the newsfeed. It all will be there later when I’m ready to share what I’ve created.

This morning there was a road runner on my front porch ledge, definitely a reminder of the peaceful pace as he stood and looked around, not in a hurry to go anywhere. Instead, he stood and surveyed the scene as if to stop and smell the roses.

This week's video: Supportive Actions

National Mental Health Month

As summer has transitioned to fall, I can see the light changing. The days grow shorter, but with all that hot weather behind us (and hopefully all the fires, too), the air and sky are crisp again here in the desert Southwest.

This month our focus is on mental health, a topic that has gotten much more awareness since the pandemic began. It’s boggling why we haven’t given it much attention before– while I believe in holistic health (mental/emotional, spiritual, and physical), making sure our minds are in a good place is key to accomplishing so much. And that includes guiding us into healthy relationships (and maintaining them).

While we always should have some focus on our mental health, this month I’m asking you to take a closer look at what helps keep you mentally healthy. Maybe you don’t know, maybe you know you need to work on your mental health but you don’t know how or what to do. Acknowledging work to do is the first step. After all, we all should take the time to reevaluating taking care of ourselves. Sometimes we need to make tweaks but we don’t do it because we think it’s easier to keep rolling along in our comfort zone.

I was fortunate to be made aware early of mental health because of my competitive running career, working with a sports psychologist. My interest in mental wellness predates my sister’s suicide by quite a few years.

My challenge to you for this month is to think about the things that help you feel mentally healthy. And if you feel your mental health needs work, create a series of steps to make changes. We are all works in progress and there is nothing wrong with stepping back and revisiting how you take care of your mental wellness.

And there is no better time to do it.

Saying Goodbye to AAS

I know this isn’t a great photo, there are other better photos of Jim Rogers and I, but in this one he’s handing the gavel to me, the handing of the presidential leadership from one president to another. It was one of the most significant and meaningful events in my life, becoming president of the American Association of Suicidology nearly ten years ago.

I have put off writing about this because I didn’t want it to interfere with any messages this month regarding National Suicide Prevention month. And I waited to see how things would roll out, but I know now that I have severed my last ties with the organization that brought me so much, that gave me a new family, that connected me with people around the world, and was my professional home even before my first book was published. In fact, AAS led me to the publisher of my first book.

But a leadership grab that quite honestly makes no sense to me has forced me to cut that final string and shut the door.

Most people will say that I severed ties a long time ago because I tried to walk away from the work. What many people don’t realize is that since my sister died, my parents died and it changed the “place” of my sister Denise’s death in my life. I felt it was time for me to do other things.

And there was something else– when I went back to a conference, this particular one in Phoenix, I was dismayed by what I saw. This was not the professional organization that I had joined back in 1999, a group of people who made me want to do better, to be better. Instead, I saw bashing of people and a lack of respect from one particular group to another. The leadership that had gotten us where we were was gone because the people who came in chose to blatantly disrespect others. And the bylaws.

I didn’t tell many people what I saw; I thought maybe it was just me. But it turns out, what I saw was the beginning of the end and where we have handed today.

I grieved the loss of AAS then and I grieved it again in August. I would not be who I am or where I am without AAS. I’m glad I walked away when I did, that I chose wisely not to rejoin several years ago and watch the demise from a closer seat than I needed to sit.

I don’t like it; part of me is angry, knowing the work of so many that is gone. But I do understand that change happens and somewhere in this I’ll find my way forward. Like I always have.

And I hope everyone else does, too.

Taking Care of Ourselves

The Tribute to My Sister

After the event at church Wednesday night for those whose lives have been touched by suicide, a woman placed her circle on the tree and then caught me before I left the church. She told me she had lost her sister to suicide and wanted me to sign her copy of my book, Do They Have Bad Days in Heaven? Surviving the Suicide Loss of a Sibling. The cover was bent back, proof she had read the book, and before we parted, she told me how she tried to pay tribute with her husband to her sister each year. Then she asked me if I pay tribute to Denise.

I’m not sure why, but the question caught me off guard and I didn’t know how to answer. Finally, I said, the book, and pointed to it. She nodded and we parted. But I realized later that the book is not paying tribute to the life I had with Denise. The book is about her suicide, about moving forward and, to me, paying tribute would be about remembering the life Denise had, not her suicide. And the life I had with Denise.

My tribute to Denise is all of this– what I create, what write, everything you see on this web site. It’s a tribute to the childhood we shared, the creativity we explored together through coloring and making clothes for our Barbies on our grandmother’s old Singer sewing machine. It’s the inspiration I find in my daily life.

That’s my tribute to Denise.

Home

I don’t believe I can ever write enough about the importance of home because I don’t believe many people understand how important home is related to who we are/who we become. And the choices we have about making home a place that makes us happy.

While I understand that life isn’t about physical objects so much as it is about what happens inside our minds, nourishing all sides of ourselves, home is our shelter, our rest, our inspiration. Home is a place where we live the routine moments of life that make up more than the big events.

Someone taught me long ago that you sow your seeds where you are planted, that no matter where you are, you make the most of it. Her words have always echoed in the back of my mind, even when life wasn’t what I wanted or that I wasn’t really where I wanted to be. Still, it was important to take care of home.

And it’s why I spend the time making changes, updates, surrounding myself with what makes me happy. I love to explore the world, but I also love to come home and just be.

Watching the pandemic play out, I saw many people who realized that home wasn’t necessarily what they wanted it to be so they made changes. Others chose not to. To me, it was an opportunity to make home better because that bodes well for the future, especially for the others who share that home with you. It might not be obvious, but you’re giving something to them, too– a piece of yourself.

The Ripples from Suicide

On the even of National Suicide Prevention Month, I am reminded of the stories I have told through the years since my sister Denise’s suicide, the stories that show how deep the ripples of suicide run. Many times I have not named the people whose stories I am telling to protect the privacy of their grief reactions to my sister’s death, or to another way that suicide had touched their lives. I believe it’s important to let people tell their own stories– if they choose to.

But last week a high school teacher of mine, Mr. Foerch (his first name was Brad but he was always “Mr. Foerch” to me) died. He was 62, not an age at which we expect anyone to die.

I’d had Mr. Foerch for consumer education and economics, but I also had been a sports writer and the sports editor of the school newspaper so I had gotten to know him some time before I had him as a teacher because he was the gymnastics coach. But in the spring of 1993 when she died, my sister Denise was a student of his in his consumer education class, the last class she needed to graduate, all her other requirements having been completed.

At her wake, another teacher, who I have known much longer, told me that Mr. Foerch had been gone from school, that he was taking the day of her funeral off (it was the following morning) and that he wasn’t doing well.

There was nothing I could do at the time, however, at some point I wrote him a letter. The response took a very long time and it was only then that I learned the depth of his grief over Denise’s suicide.

A girlfriend had found my letter to him and asked him if he had responded. When he said no, she had questioned him why not, telling him that he needed to.

It was in that letter that he told me how much pain her death had brought him– how he thought Denise was too smart for her own good how he didn’t want to face the classroom (where she had walked in my steps and become another current events queen). without her.

I have the letter– it’s packed away somewhere. I don’t know how many times I saw Mr. Foerch after Denise’s death– I know the last time was around 2008 when I was there at the high school with a friend who was having his class reunion. We didn’t talk long; he didn’t really have time between classes.

But when you move on from the people in your life, you wish them well, you hope that life has brought them happiness. And you hope the grief they might have experienced has been processed. I hope that for Mr. Foerch and that perhaps he and Denise will get to meet in heaven for coffee. Her pain from this life is gone, any pain over her suicide that he had, is also gone. Maybe they can pick up where they left off before she died.

Be Present

Be present.

Seems impossible for many of us, doesn’t it?

How often do we find ourselves distracted from the moment, even a great one, by something else?

But being present is important, it’s a key to life in many ways, or at least to functioning in life. What we often don’t realize, however, is that not being present is the source of much of our pain. We’re always looking one way or another– in the rearview mirror at what we had– or looking forward to what we want but can’t seem to get. Then we find ourselves in a downward spiral of pain.

There is pain in the present, of course, but present moments don’t last forever. The sun always has to come up, light must return.

Whether we have lost someone to suicide and can’t stop looking back at what we didn’t do or what we will never have, or we’re contemplating ending our lives because we can’t bear to face a future, we need to stop walking one way or the other.

Stand still, be present, look around. What’s surrounding you? Life has pain, it’s a reality, Yet by stopping for a moment and just being, we’ll find our perspective changes. By being present.

That Stupid Word

No no no– I’m not referring to believe. We all know I like that word so much that I made t-shirts and stickers from my painting of it.

We’re two weeks from Suicide Prevention Month, Suicide Prevention Week, and Suicide Prevention Day which means it’s time for me to start addressing not just suicide, but the state of where things are. I dusted my soap box off and I’ll be using it for the next few weeks.

Usually, each time this year I have some sort of message that I believe people should know about. This year, probably in light of everything that’s happened, I didn’t feel anything that hasn’t been said before so much as maybe some things that need to be rehashed.

I also thought about something that is getting better, but still needs more work.

The used of the word “committed.”

That’s the stupid word.

I never felt comfortable using that after Denise died by suicide. It never rolled off my tongue and it took me time, processing, to understand that “committed” in that sense means sin or crime, neither of which she had done.

Denise died by suicide. She believed her pain to be insurmountable and I have never tried to judge that because I wasn’t walking in her shoes.

For many reasons- church reasons, law reasons– the word committed has stung the bereaved in a negative way. The good news is that I hear it less often– less on television, less in the newspapers. The bad news is that I still hear it in my orbit.

There are many things you can do for suicide prevention and there are a number of things you can do for the bereaved. One big one is to change your language and those around you.

Died by suicide.