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 visitors 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.”
Minutes after exiting the visitors center, 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.
Six Ways I Coped After My Daughter Killed Herself
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, without a guide. It felt like the torment would go on for eternity.
Yet, seven 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 guide your own healing journey through unspeakable grief and loss. So, briefly, here are six 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. I would never presume to tell you what you should or should not do.
1. 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 didn’t look at those photos until years later, 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 had 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.
2. Mindfulness of Grief
When Beth was nine years old, we moved from Texas to Colorado and, for complicated reasons, had to leave her two beloved dogs behind. She cried for months, night after night after night. Her grief was so deep and all-consuming, she was utterly inconsolable until, one day, I had an idea.
Ever since the firestorm of my divorce from Beth’s mother, five years earlier, and the catastrophic grief of losing the daily presence of my beloved children, I had been studying and practicing various forms of meditation to work with my own, often overwhelming emotions.
I decided to share one of those methods with Beth.
I took her to a rock shop and, together, we picked out a small stone heart, a lovely translucent quartz, for her to hold in her hands. I showed her my own stone heart, carved from hematite, an iron mineral, that I had been holding for years when I felt unbearably sad.
Cradling it in the palm of my hands, I explained, was a way of holding my heavy heart with kindness and love.
“Hold your feelings gently,” I told her, “your sadness, your loneliness and memories—as if they’re baby birds and you’re their mother.”
We sat together, then, in the quiet of my meditation room, our hearts in our hands. We gave her unbounded grief a container, a safe place to rest. I didn’t try to “fix” her or cheer her up.
And for the first time in three long months, she stopped sobbing hopelessly every night. Her broken heart began to heal.
Throughout the fourth grade, Beth carried that little stone heart in her backpack, to school and home again. Our little secret.
The second strategy, therefore, that I embraced after her suicide 19 years later, was to hold the deafening cacophony of my emotions and reactions with complete, unflinching acceptance, moment by moment, day after day…
A practice widely known as mindfulness.
I consciously allowed everything that emerged in the sudden vacuum of her absence to flow through me without avoidance or resistance—but wisely, in “doses”, so to speak, and safely, so that no one else, including me, would get hurt.
I tried never to judge or criticize myself for how I felt, no matter how ugly or extreme.
To facilitate this difficult yet healing process, guess what, I carried a small, stone heart in my pocket—and in my hands—everywhere I went that first year after Beth died.
The day before she had joined the Peace Corps in 2017, Beth, her brother, her nephew and I had visited Rocky Mountain National Park. Afterward, we wandered through a rock shop.
As we were leaving, I saw Beth pick up a blood-red stone heart from a small basket at the checkout counter. She gazed at it intently for a few seconds—no doubt remembering the heart rock from her childhood—then set it back down and headed for the door.
On an impulse, I strode up to the counter and bought the same little rock, deciding that very moment to carry it with me every single day while she was in Africa, holding her in my heart until the day she would return home, safe and sound, and I would tell her this silly story and give my heart back to her, imbued with all my love and longing.
Sadly, Beth never knew about that stone heart.
In the end, I gave it to her anyway, at the Royal Gorge on the anniversary of her suicide—a symbol of acceptance and forgiveness from her heartbroken father.
3. Social Connection and 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 third 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, sugar-coat, 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 support groups 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 writes in The Boy Who Was Raised As A Dog: “We are social mammals and could never have survived without deeply interconnected and interdependent human contact.”
We all need a clan or a tribe to survive.
4. 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 fourth 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.”
For those of us bereaved by suicide, 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, I had so many reasons for living. 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.
5. 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 in the book Grief After Suicide 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 fifth 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 voluminous. 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) four 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, by doing so, I effectively averted most of the symptoms of trauma, depression and complicated grief, which are common among suicide loss survivors.
Third, 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, fourth, 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.
6. Kindness to Others
This brings me to my sixth 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 wrote a poem of my own 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
1
Is this not what everyone we care for
gives us—a box full of darkness—
the moment we cross the risky threshold of love?
Once we perceive that he or she has captured
our lonely, longing and long-suffering hearts.
Certainly, at first, we are aware of light alone,
the soft surprising glow or sudden flash,
the blazing incandescence of the
more apparent gift. We feel
the warmth and wonder as the spark
leaps eye to eye, or skin to skin.
We barely notice the presence of the box,
slipped quietly on a dusty shelf within
the storeroom of the soul.
Waiting for the day that we must open it and peer inside,
the day we must receive the dark and second gift of love.
My son, born six weeks early—so tiny, still and purple,
I could barely breathe, as if I too were being born
and striving for my first uncertain inspiration
—arrived bearing such a box.
He gave it to me for safe keeping
as the nurse placed his little body in my hands
and I received him into my astonished heart.
Blood and angels singing in my ears.
My daughter, too—with face averted from the fearful passage;
so determined to remain inside her safe and quiet room,
we had to cut her out against her will—offered me another box.
One that I was forced to open, far too soon.
So small they seem, at first, these boxes full of darkness.
Once opened, though, they deepen to a bottomless abyss
in which we fall headlong, and cry with fear.
When love turns into loss or pain
and suffering that we cannot relieve.
When light blinks out or slowly fades…
and all we see is darkness.
There we rest until the ancient light of stars begins
to penetrate the gloom. However long it takes.
2
Emerging from a chrysalis of sorrow, then,
transformed into something else completely,
we finally grasp the second gift of love:
We can feel the pain of others, even strangers,
who have loved and lost or languished in the night,
and this might not have happened had we
not endured the emptiness ourselves.
We link our hands and hearts and wrap with care and kindness
more boxes full of darkness; exchange them with each other.
These promises of pain to come, so priceless for
the beauty and the purpose they afford us
in the here and now. Who could complain?
Throw open wide the door to this repository.
Stock the shelves with joy.
We will, of course, lose all whom we hold dear,
whether it is we who must let go or they,
I fear we cannot bond without one day being broken.
And, oh, the token of our interwoven love
is this small box of darkness either
we or they must open.
Yet darkness is essential if you want to see the stars.
And eyes attuned to night can see much more than ours
when we are willing only to receive the light.
If you want to find a home in this fragmented world,
to take your place among the family of things,
you must accept these boxes full of darkness.
Each one is a gift, just as the poet claims.
You know it when you look into the eyes
of one who has descended into that abyss,
and flails about for solid ground.
You know the way. You can hold out your hand.
They’ll only trust you if your hand is warm,
the love that gave the gift still living on in you,
still reaching out to form another link
in this great chain of being, binding
past to future, passing as it must
through this most precious,
present moment.
The only time you ever breathe
or weep or touch the fragile web
of life, which your sad soul
shares with mine
on this, our lonely island
in the deep black box
of space and time.
© 2025 Jay E. Valusek. Adapted for Speaking of Suicide from a TED-style talk to suicide loss survivors, September 2024.
Wow, Jay, this was beautifully written. I’m so sorry for the loss of your daughter. The Peace Corps can be very tough, and very lonely as well. I can’t imagine how difficult it was for your daughter to be so physically isolated, and then mentally isolated as well after she was kicked out for such a petty reason. I’m glad you took the steps to help yourself heal.
Thanks, No One, I appreciate your kind thoughts and support. Sounds like you might have some firsthand experience with Peace Corps?
I read the whole thing and come to realize that some people’s hearts and souls are too sensing for this world. I’d like to join with them and help them. Sounds like a prescription in voluntarily calcifying your soul.
I’m curious, Phil. How would reaching out and joining one’s heart with those who are sensitive and suffering constitute a prescription for voluntarily calcifying your soul? My impression is that your desire to help would be a prescription for honoring both your soul and another’s, a real human connection. Have I misunderstood?