Telling Patrick’s Story

From very early after Patrick’s death…

From very early after Patrick’s death by suicide I knew that I had to tell his story. In fact, the morning of the funeral I woke up and decided that I was going to speak at the funeral. The words came easily, though with such pain, I had to challenge those at the funeral to help me make some good of this most tragic loss of life.

I spent the first couple of years processing Patrick’s death, turning it over in my mind a thousand times. Asking the eternal questions, “How could we have known?”, “What could we have done to save him?”, “Was he suffering depression all this time and we didn’t know it?”

I read books about death, about suicide, about recovery. I went to grief groups. I was blessed to meet my dear friend and grief buddy, Marguerite, within about a month of Patrick’s death so I had her to lean on. We shared resources, we held each other up for every infernal anniversary, one week, one month, three months, it seemed like everything was a reminder of the loss.

But as time went by, I started to settle into the goal of finding a way to tell Patrick’s Story. I believe he was a pretty typical GT kid. If this could happen in our family, it could happen to anyone. People hate that idea, but it’s true.

So about two years after Patrick passed, I sat down to create my first PowerPoint deck about his life and death. I named it The Quiet Storm, to focus on the overexcitabilities he exhibited as well as his introversion. The presentation was accepted by the Colorado Association for Gifted and Talented annual conference and I gave the talk that fall. The Quiet Storm goes grade-by-grade through Patrick’s school years, medications taken, etc. It is my hope that viewers will ‘see’ their loved ones in Patrick and be alerted to behaviors and patterns to watch for.

Since the publication of the Psychological Autopsy by the William and Mary team, the focus of the presentation has shifted to include the suicide prevention models promoted and developed by Dr. Tracy Cross. These presentations focus on sharing our lessons learned in the hopes of saving more lives of GT students.

The pages that follow include links to many of the presentations that I’ve given to Tell Patrick’s Story.