Synopsis:
On 31 October 2002, Jan Andersen's 20-year-old son Kristian found a permanent solution to his unhappiness. He left two suicide notes alongside his favourite jacket, before injecting himself with a lethal dose of Heroin. He spent his final night alone, propped against the wall in the stairwell of an ice-cold, dark and inhospitable concrete landing. He died on 1 November 2002 at 12.20pm.
In Jan's frenetic search for understanding and support, she had difficulty finding any resources that truly connected to her raw grief. The very nature of suicide, the stigma, the helplessness and the unanswered questions that accompany the self-murder of a child can isolate grieving families and send them into the wilderness of relentless, silent torture.
Whilst many books on bereavement talked about the range of emotions that one can expect to feel, such as guilt, anger and disbelief, few of them explain how these feelings can truly manifest themselves through uncharacteristic and frightening thoughts and actions. They may talk about stages of grief and recovery, but anyone who has lost a child to suicide will agree that it is a brutal ordeal from which you will never fully recover.
Chasing Death attempts to put honest, but heartrending words to the often incommunicable pain that suicide survivors endure, not only through the telling of Kristian's story, but through the stories of other parents mourning the loss of children who have killed themselves. It will also be an enlightening resource for anyone who knows of someone who has experienced the loss of a child to suicide, by helping them to respond more appropriately - and less insensitively - to the suicide survivor's grief.
Your heart will break as you read this book, but it will provide some sort of solace to other child suicide survivors in knowing that their thoughts and feelings are normal and that they are not alone. This book clearly demonstrates how debilitating the grief that follows suicide can be and how it can still cripple a survivor, ten, twenty, thirty and even forty years or more after the event.
When Chasing Death is published, you will be able to purchase a copy through this site.
"September 2002 was the last time that I saw my son alive. He visited me with his daughter Kayla, who was just beginning to walk. He looked extremely well and showed absolutely no signs of being under the influence of drugs. He was a tremendously handsome young man with such huge potential that seemed to have been lying dormant for the previous six years.
This visit was just a few weeks after he had been attacked, so I was relieved to see that his face was back to normal, with the exception of a scar and some bruising where his ear had been stitched up. When I asked him why he hadn’t told me about the attack, he said, “Mum, I didn’t want you to worry.”
These were some of the last words that my son would ever say to me.
In response I said to him, “Supposing something like this happens again and you don’t tell me about it. Can you imagine how I’d feel if a policeman were to turn up on my doorstep and tell me that something awful had happened to you? I would always feel that I could have done something to help, had I known about it.”
These were some of the last words that I would ever say to my son.
Five weeks later he ended his life."
Excerpt from Chasing Death - Losing a Child to Suicide
