BEYOND HOPE, LIFE
BLESSING FOR
ONE WHO
HAS TAKEN
THEIR OWN LIFE
You decided
to leave us
but we can never
leave you,
not in our minds,
not in the inner
recess of our
wondering hearts,
nor in the long twilight
horizon where you
will always walk
in our memory.
Above on
the mountain
the lark will rise
from the summer grass
to the sky above your home
and the song it sings
will forever carry
the mystery
of your going.
You turned away
from all our help,
so that we have to
ask for your help
now, not in answers
but in asking
the difficult
and beautiful
questions your life
bequeathed.
We are still not sure
if you ever asked
for the helping hand,
but still we hold
our hands out now
to take yours in ours,
to reassure you
in the quiet of the morning
or the silence of the night
and in all the days
to come
when in our minds
you still need our care
to help you go on
where we can’t go,
to see you safe
beyond the quiet line
of our understanding.
​
To walk with you now
arm in arm
with our regrets
and our affection
that one last mile
along the way you
wanted to go, the quiet
in which we wave
goodbye, only the sign
of our secret promise
to you, the continued
and helpless testament
of our unspoken love.
​
​
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A BLESSING FOR ONE WHO HAS TAKEN THEIR OWN LIFE
by
DAVID WHYTE
from
The Bell and the Blackbird
2018© Many Rivers Press
“Love is the essential ingredient that makes it possible for us to remain present and to endure human life’s suffering and sober realities. Without love, it is difficult to value our lives; our natural response is detachment from life as a means of coping with its intrinsic physical and emotional pain. If we bring our love forward, after long standing patterns of safe retreat, we will inevitably upset that comfortable homeostasis of our life situations, and create disturbance and crisis in our usual (and often destructive) ways of adapting to love’s absence. Thus, we must be respectful of the potentially overwhelming experience of opening to loves energy when we have sustained unhealthy, yet functional, ways of surviving without it.”
From: Kenneth R. Lakritz and Thomas M. Knoblauch’s Elders on Love, p. xvii
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Action To Prevent Suicide CIC originally established in February 2017 is a not-for-profit or profit with a purpose community interest company. It is run by a range of part-time directors, freelance associates, university interns and project workers, who feel drawn to making a difference in suicide prevent mental health and wellbeing, therefore promoting life.
COVID-19 and the year 2020 has called for us to revise our organisation offering more online style courses, a support services and greater collaboration with other organisations and a range freelance trainers and people of lived experience echoing the mantra that:
Suicide prevention is everybody’s responsibility “ability to responsed”.
Our collective vision is “a life-affirming world freer from suicide”. We wish to raise awareness, breaking the stigma and taboo. In order to prevent suicide by helping people recognise and support those with thoughts. We do this by offering a range of services such as consultancy, briefings, training, advice, collaboration, support and signposting. Intervention services through learning and skills and postvention services (after suicide support services with those bereaved.
Sadly though today still every 40 seconds someone takes the life by suicide leading to nealry a one million deaths by suicide worldwide. The impact is devastating for those left behind, seeking answers and doing what we can to stop any others going through the pain and loss felt .
Action to prevent suicide response has been to develop a website where people bereaved by suicide and the pandemic can create a unique memorial page to the person they have been bereaved by.
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BEYOND HOPE, LIFE
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Our original simple idea was to publish a book of certain people who had died by suicide utilising colour a black & white picture and a colour one. As one bereaved person said the black and white photograph was to symbolise the colour being taken out of her life and the colour beyond hope into life..How could we choose whose life was more important or valued in this way .
So it was decided to work with a broader reach of a website where people can write a BLOG (Biographical Life of Gratitude) or a LOG (Life of Gratitude).
The site will be free to use and if so moved donations will be appreciated. Any profits we make will be donated to the charity to support training, respite befriending and other programmes and projects, to help create a world freer of suicide.
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Goodwill in Action to Prevent Suicide is UK based charity, who mission is to provide support for people with thoughts of suicide and sponsor initiatives that help reduce suicide.
ATPS, CIC and Goodwill In Action To Prevent Suicide, CIO are partnering in this initiative with a range of individuals & organisations who understand the essence of what we are trying to achieve . We hope that this can help spread the word worldwide that Suicide is everybody’s responsibility and we can all do so gracefully.
Whilst we recognise and appreciate suicide or a pandemic death has a ripple effect of loss to family, friends and beyond . We would like to offer a range of resources to help with supporting your healing after suicide. In the UK.
In you have information about support services in the UK in other countries that you would like to add please email us at:
info@actiontopreventsuicide.org
