In Survive Your Child’s Suicide: How to Move Through Grief to Healing, Peggy Green taps into her own experiences after her son Connor’s suicide—as well as the grief coaching that she now provides to other parents—to offer guidance.
She breaks down her system into three phases: acceptance, overcoming your fear, and recovery, each with sub-components. Throughout, she offers plenty of practical information, including suicide statistics, warning signs, and risk factors; signs of anxiety during the grieving process; symptoms of good and poor mental and emotional health; and so on. The 14 grief affirmations she provides seem especially helpful, including “I have changed as a result of my grief,” where she invites grieving parents to acknowledge the reality of a new normal.
Green also offers tips on journaling through your grief, ways to eat and exercise to build up your physical health, and more. Some of these strategies will be familiar to readers, but because they’re offered through the lens of an experienced grieving mother, they seem more powerful.
This book would be especially helpful to people who embrace a traditional Christian faith; Green writes that God heals all wounds and that it’s important to surrender yourself to Him. She cites the Bible as the source of wisdom. (Atheists, on the other hand, may not find the same sort of comfort, nor would people who seek to reconnect with their loved ones, post-death; Green has concerns that mediumship is ungodly, even Satanic.)
Support groups for grieving parents could use this as a workbook as they discuss the suggestions and their feelings. Additionally, this book contains many suggestions that could help parents who have lost children through other means or those simply grieving the loss of a loved one.
