58 minutes
Posted on SoundCloud (Charles’ account, actually). I suppose I should get my own account.
On a segment of WRIR Zero Hour, three parents who’ve lost a child to suicide talk about their grief after that event, what they want all of you to know, and how they’ve managed to move forward and process this loss years after the fact. The segment is about an hour. Suicide is the second leading cause of death for 10-34-year-olds in the United States.
Dave Matthews and his wife lost their 32-year-old daughter, Allison Goldstein who was a veteran and had just had her first baby, a four-month-old when she took her life. Dave founded Allison’s Reach, a Maternal Mental Health Foundation created to raise awareness for Postpartum Depression in loving memory of Allison who died in June 2016. Allison has since become the face of postpartum suicide (PPD) and the post he wrote on here about her death is one of the top ten posts on this site reaching some 6,200 people per year from all over the world.
Ginger Germani lost her 21-year-old son Austin Germani who had almost finished his first year in college at CNU, Christopher Newport University. She wrote this story about her younger son’s grief. I met Ginger shortly after her son’s death. I drove up to Charlottesville from Richmond to meet her for a screening she set up to show Kevin Hines’ Movie, The Ripple Effect. She, too, struggled with PPD and has since struggled with her own thoughts of suicide since her son’s death which she talks about on the show. Austin died in April 2017. Her TV segment on her story. And if you are a parent struggling with thoughts of suicide after your child’s death.
Anne Moss Rogers has written thousands of blog posts on this site in addition to a book called Diary of a Broken Mind about her son, Charles Aubrey Rogers. He was 20 when he took his own life in June 2015.
“If your child suffers from mental illness and thoughts of suicide, you are in the position of management, not fixing. If you look at it from a ‘fix it’ position, you’ll always feel defeated.” –Ginger Germani
“Grief is not always fun but you have to find a way to work through all of it.” –Dave Matthews
Due to schedule conflicts, Ricky Rash (lost son Eric Rash) Gray Maher (lost son Whitten Maher), and Georgia Wiley (lost son Breslin Wiley) were unable to make the date of the recording.
