We must all become bereaved



Kids are the best part of this existence, and most parents would die for theirs
so let's all strive to make their world safer for all of them, because regret is
the hardest emotion of all to cope with...



The motivation for me to create this blog was my discovery of the shocking number of teens who are committing suicide due to bullying. I started to read about all the cases, and to see the faces of the kids who had killed themselves to escape the emotional torment that bullying brought to their lives. There was a month when I was immersed in all these stories, when it filled me with a profound and deep depression unlike anything I had ever experienced before. On one hand, it so overwhelmed me that it almost drove me to the brink myself,  but on the other hand, it gave me such tremendous empathy for the victims that I became determined to add my voice to those already shouting for a better tomorrow.

But in order to survive the powerful anguish for these kids that I was feeling, I needed to distance myself from them a bit. So I made a conscious decision to step back from their stories for a while. To spend my time studying reports on bullying, and legislation, and to see how schools were implementing policy, and to see how others were approaching the problem. And I was shocked and disgusted at how quickly my urgency to act started to diminish. As soon as I took the emotion out of the situation, it started to become just another sad thing that was happening on our planet.

But damn it, bullying isn’t just another sad thing, because it’s so preventable!

I started to look deeper into what bereaved parents had done after the loss of a child, and many had taken action to bring about changes on a local or national level, and many of them continue to fight 5, 10 even 15 years after their tragic loss. In fact, for many, campaigning and education have become the new purpose for their lives, enabling them to give meaning to the loss of their kids. Their bereavement gives them a powerful and emotional voice in appealing for change, but it also gives detractors an easy way to dismiss them.

I never read a case of teen suicide where the parents didn’t have a “What if..” “What if we’d recognised the magnitude of our child’s pain”, “What if we’d fought harder to make the school realise this was serious”, “What if we’d arrived home ten minutes earlier”, “What if we hadn’t kept guns in the house”.

There’s also a powerful and completely understandable need by parents to apportion responsibility or blame, so that their child’s loss was more than some cruel and unavoidable random event. Bullies drove their child to depression; poor anti-bullying policy at school prevented it from being dealt with adequately; judgemental policing meant that incidents were trivialised; even vindictive or defensive school boards refused to act out of personal malice. From an outsider’s perspective, it’s all-too-easy to glance at the public facts of the case, and see (or think we see) where all sides could have done better, and to dismiss the parents as guilt-motivated people without a real understanding of the problem.

And yet, many of these amazing parents are effecting change: change in perceptions, change in school and police policy, even changes in laws at every level. But how much more credible they would be standing shoulder-by-shoulder with others who had no motivation beyond the wellbeing of kids.

It amazes me that we live in a world that values youth more highly than anything , yet which allows this tremendous cancer to exist in their midst. Kids are subject to endless constraints upon their lives as they grow towards  adulthood, yet they are not universally afforded the most basic right given to every adult – the right to live lives unharrassed by their peers. Kids HAVE to go to school, yet the authorities and teachers don’t HAVE to do everything in their power to guarantee their safety. How is that right? Sure it's difficult, time-consuming, costly. Get over it. Lives are at risk.

All of us need to push for change. Talking about the reticence of the authorities and even other parents, Tammy Epling, mother of Matt Epling put it best in the book Bullycide in America when she said, “If any of these people had to live my life for just one hour, I know all of their policies would have changed in the second hour.” I feel her pain, I really do. Because it’s only when the suffering becomes personal, that one realises the depths of the problem, and the anguish it causes.

This how childhood should be. Don't trust it to others to fight the battles
for your kids, because they might not either raise your voice now

It seems to me that this cause needs people who are not suffering and not bereaved, to add their calm, credible voices as forcefully to the powerfully emotive voices of the parents; to show that this is an issue that all compassionate, sane people should consider the highest possible priority.

I never wanted this blog to dwell on the lost, because their stories are so painful, and I know that their parents want us to remember their beautiful lives, not the pain of their last few days or months. But it’s hard to feel the emotional motivation to persist without thinking about them. I’ve talked before about the need for a Road to Damascus experience for everybody - something that would lift the blinkers from everyone’s eyes, and let them realise just how serious this problem is for so very many kids. Maybe I should call it a “If you could walk a mile in the shoes of a bereaved parent” experience. Because I’m beginning to think that the only way to get the perspective, and the passion, and the determination to follow these campaigns through to effective action, is if we all become bereaved, if only for a while.