Concerns

Finding my voice related to queer suicide has turned out to be a slower process than I expected.

Bumper-sticker answers

As much as we may wish for clear explanations, suicide attempts and deaths are known for raising more messy questions than simple answers. I cringe when I read of a devastatingly tragic death and a message left behind describing bullying, harrassment, abuse, or hatred. My heart breaks at the crushing despair of the loved one now borne by family and friends.

Living with (and learning from) my grief and loss after Dale died, and sharing my journey with other survivors of a loved one's suicide, suggested to me that it takes more than a single trigger to cause a suicide. I had to acknowledge my anger about the people and events that had contributed to Dale's despair, but it would have been an injustice to Dale's life to reduce his death to a bumper-sticker's worth of blame.

Poster-child / milk-carton victims

Coming to terms with that complexity, I also found that I needed to avoid morphing Dale into a poster child for what is wrong with the world. I hoped to speak to the lessons to be learned from his life and his death without making his image into something it had never been by pasting it onto milk cartons or billboards.

Whose voice?

One of the recurring themes during Dale's last year was that he was living increasingly openly as a gay man. He was not a public figure, though, and his coming-out was not part of a larger social campaign to change the world. He left behind no legacy or vision for me to carry forward on his behalf.

This is another layer of the complexity which often follows queer suicide: What does honoring and respecting my loved one mean? To what degree do I feel called to speak to his life, his challenges, his gifts, his death? Which parts of our shared experience are mine to speak to, and which do I feel called to honor privately?

After more than 6 years, I'm starting to get a sense of my voice as it relates to cherishing Dale and losing him.  It's not unlike finding my voice as a gay man (which arguably took twice as long), and in some ways it's felt more complex.