SASKATOON EXPRESS - November 17-23, 201417, - Page Volume 11, Issue 45, Week of November 20141
Saskatoonʼs REAL Community Newspaper
Cathy Campbell (left), Pat Dubets and Jennifer Stolz suffered losses to suicide in their lives and are now making a difference in the lives of others (Photo by Sandy Hutchinson)
Suicide Grief Support
Saskatoon group helps those in need
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Cam Hutchinson Saskatoon Express
at Dubets, Jennifer Stolz and Cathy Campbell have all suffered lifealtering losses. For Pat, her son completed suicide. For Jennifer, it was her sister. For Cathy, her husband. The three are part of a group of six women — Suicide Grief Support Saskatoon — that have turned their grief into supporting those suffering similar losses. ***** Pat Dubets lost her 18-year-old son, Tom, to suicide in 1997. Tom struggled during his teenage years, like so many do. She said an assault when he was 11 “radically changed him.” “During his teen years he would be angry and then just fine. And then he would go into using drugs and then quit the drugs — back and forth, a lot like teenagers.” Things seemed better during the last two years of Tom’s life. He was an honour roll student and winning awards for leadership. He had a wit that could have taken him places in the comedy world. His parents reinforced that during their last conversation with him. He’d come up from his downstairs bedroom and was preparing to go out. “He was so clever, so witty. It kind of reminded me of my days in the ’60s,” Dubets said with a smile. “He used to watch the Royal Canadian Air Farce with us. They would make something really, really funny and he’d
come back with an even better one, right after it, in reaction to it. He just had that wit. I said to him, ‘I bet in 10 years you could be writing for the Royal Canadian Air Farce.’ “He goes, ‘Really. Do you think so?’ “And his dad (John) said, ‘Yeah.’ ” On Tom’s last day, he and his parents talked again about his sense of humour. Everything seemed so right. “He was off on his way to a meeting and we gave him a hug. We said, ‘Bye,’ and he said, ‘Bye, I’ll see you later.’ Instead he went to the bridge and jumped. “We were the ones that put the pieces together to find out he had done that. And then police got involved and double checked things and they agreed that there was a suicide. “I remember right away (thinking), ‘We have lost our son.’ We are 99.99 per cent sure he’s in the river. The police agree. How do you have a funeral? What do you say? What do you do?” Dubets said losing her son to suicide was difficult to process. “I remember thinking, ‘I know how to grieve the death of a parent or an animal or friends, but I don’t know how to grieve the death of a child — and especially by suicide. How do you do that?’ ” ***** Jennifer Stolz lost her sister, Colleen, to suicide in 2006. “She was my best friend,” Stolz said. Life has been difficult without her. “When things happen, I think about how she would take it in. Since we lost
her, we’ve had a lot of additions to our family; people have gotten married. Her daughter has been married and had a child. “I’ve had two children. She loved children so much, so it would have been really great for her to be around. There is some comfort in enjoying the things she enjoyed. Maybe the sadness, with the passage of time, has turned to comfort now.” Colleen was 39 at the time. Her death seemingly came out of the blue, until family members traced some of her steps. “Going back you can put the pieces and time line together. She had problems, but everybody does. There wasn’t, to our knowledge, any hospitalization or that she had any diagnosis. We found out later, through journals, that she had been seeing a therapist to no success. She didn’t get any help from anybody.” Stolz is grateful there were people there for her after Colleen’s death. “It was a group of people who consistently understood you. At the time you lose somebody to suicide, you don’t have words to explain what is going on and you aren’t in a position where you want to be reaching out to people. “Because it is such a unique loss. To be understood by people without really having to explain it means a lot. At the time I was at university and didn’t have any family here. Nobody really knew what I was going through, so to have some people that did and could tell you that you’re going to survive, believe it or not, it’s what got me through.” Stolz went through the group’s program
just months after Colleen’s death. She said the benefits weren’t immediate. “I don’t know at the time if I really gained a lot from going through the more intensive therapy group. But when I came out of the fog and some time passed, I had some tools to fall back on. If I hadn’t, things would have been a lot harder for me.” ***** Cathy Campbell lost her husband to suicide on Dec. 17, 1988. They had been married for 18 years and had a 15-year-old son and a 12-year-old daughter. Campbell said the couple’s relationship was strained at the time of his death. He was ready to retire from the military and his job search wasn’t going well. He kept being told he was overqualified. After his death, she and her children were allowed to remain on the Cold Lake military base until the end of the school year. She didn’t know where she was going to go when time was up. Regina? Her parents lived there. Saskatoon? “I had cousins here. I decided to come to Saskatoon because I wanted the kids to have the opportunity of education, whether it was tech school or trade school or university – whatever they chose.” Things were difficult. “Six months later, I found I was very depressed. I didn’t know the word depressed at that point, but the kids would come home from school and I’d still be sitting on the couch in my housecoat with the paper in front of me. (Continued on page 4)