Robert Lesoine - Unfinished Conversation: Healing from Suicide and Loss

With a vulnerable and generous heart, Robert Lesoine shares the mindsets and heart-sets that contribute to healing in the aftermath of a loved ones suicide. Written in compassionate and practical language, this book invites you into a journey of restoration, reminding you that you can still laugh, love, and come full circle with your departed loved one.

Reverend Michael Bernard Beckwith, Founder and Spiritual Director, Agape International Spiritual Center, author of Spiritual Liberation

Suicide is a pain that never quite disappears. This eloquent book is a personal companion for those left behind, a friend nudging us forward with compassion and wisdom to see below, behind, and beyond the limitations of our current understanding. Highly recommended for anyone who wishes to keep the heart open after losing a loved one in this way.

Christopher Germer, PhD, Clinical Instructor, Harvard Medical School, author of The Mindful Path to Self-Compassion

An extraordinary piece of work. This book is tough to read and impossible to put down. Recovering from a loved ones suicide requires nothing less than everything we have. We need courage and real tools to approach the wounded heart unflinchingly, with love and wisdom. Marilynne Chphel and Robert Lesoine provide those real tools, abundantly. It is possible to start again. Reading Unfinished Conversation will prove that over and over.

Richard Heckler PhD, author of Waking Up, Alive

Thank you for the courage to look into this well of darkness and despair plaguing modernity and the world as a whole. More importantly, thank you for your courage to excavate the tragic and for making it yield the healing gems hidden within. May this gift serve as a map and a guide to numberless people trapped in this dark landscape of sorrow, and longing to come home.

Malidoma Patrice Som, author of Ritual and The Healing Wisdom of Africa

A welcome interdisciplinary resource for addressing the devastating impacts of suicide that facilitates the all-important healing process of grieving.

Joseph Bobrow, PhD, Founder, The Coming Home Project, providing support for Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, service members, and their families

A wise, deep, and powerful book pulsing with honesty it offers a path through suffering to some resolution and understanding. The authors handle a difficult topic with Grace.

Fred Luskin PhD, Director, Stanford Forgiveness Project, author of The Nine Steps to Forgiveness

A comprehensive toolbox for managing the sudden, violent loss that is suicide. We need all the help we can get to stay sane in the face of suffering.

Marilyn Pittman, actor, radio host. Creator of the award-winning 2011 Off-Broadway production Its All The Rage

This is exactly the kind of book I was looking for when I experienced the heart-wrenching loss of my daughter to suicide fifteen years ago. Robert shares his personal journey through grief with a profound and anguished honesty. Unfinished Conversation offers hope for healing and the possibility that great suffering can be transformed. I recommend this thoughtful and heartfelt book to other survivors searching for a way through the dark valley of grief.

Nancy Coughlan, Bereaved Parents Support Group Facilitator

UNFINISHED CONVERSATION

This book is dedicated to all survivors.

May your unbearable loss give rise to great compassion and courageous love.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

UNFINISHED CONVERSATION invites us to take a journey directly into the pain of our loss. This may be a journey we are reluctant to go on. After what weve already been through, to remember again, to awaken our lost loved one inside us, can feel like opening wounds. Yet the saying is true: The way out is through. As we walk through the feelings and memories weve been left with by the suicide, facing rather than fearing them, allowing rather than holding back, shining light into the darkness, we find our way out of the wrenching grief of our loss. This book skillfully guides us on that journey.

There is no loss quite like having a loved one take his or her own life. Our hearts are ripped open by knowing that those we cared about were in a darkness and despair so deep that they violently turned against themselves. We may want to shut down, withdraw, perhaps hide from others what happened. We may have trouble sleeping as we lie awake reviewing over and over again the circumstances of the suicide. Scarcely an hour may pass without tragic memories of our loved one arising in our mind. The days and hours leading up to their end may haunt us as we, like skilled prosecutors, question ourselves to see what we might have done differently. Their end is tragic and final, and now we belong to a club we never wanted to be inwe are survivors.

Some say we never get over the suicide of a loved one. We certainly never forget it, but we can heal our shattered hearts and even develop a new relationship with the one who is now gone. In Unfinished Conversation, Robert and Marilynne offer us the opportunity to do just that. Robert opens his own journal to reveal how, after the death of his closest friend, he was able to move over time from raw pain, sorrow, and anger to deeper love and forgiveness of both his friend and himself.

We may come to this book with our own unique stories of lost parents, husbands and wives, sisters and brothers, children, teachers, friends, and coworkers. The details of our stories may be very different from Roberts, but the process of grieving is the same. We walk through the same dark corridors toward the light of healing. Robert and Marilynne expertly and compassionately guide us in creating our own journals, knowing that as we remember our loved ones, as we delve into and explore their lives and ours, as we talk to and with them, we write our way into and out of our deep grief. Whether we lost our loved one recently or years ago, this journey can bring back to us the parts of ourselves that were also lost and join them again in wholeness.

I first read Roberts story nearly twenty-five years after my sister Carol took her life. Writing and crying my way through the questions and suggestions wove a new and profound element into my ongoing healing. I picked up the unfinished conversation with my sister where it had left off. I joined a support group with other survivors. I could finally say the word sister without wobbling. Her suicide was no longer always the first thing on my mind on waking, nor did thoughts of her and her end continually intrude upon the hours of my days. I felt returned to life, not diminished by the loss but strengthened by the healing.

One of my favorite metaphors for profound healing comes from the traditional Japanese tea ceremony. Special pottery bowls are used in this ritual of communion. If a tea bowl breaks, its pieces are joined together again with gold. These mended bowls are considered to be the most valuable and prized, because theyve been broken and made whole again. Remembering, reflecting, forgiving, and loving is the gold that mends our brokenness. It isnt an easy path to healing, but its a sure one.

As we read these chapters and write in our own journals, as we open the door and the pain of memories and feelings rush out to meet us, its important to remember that were here now in this present moment. Were not back there, trapped in the horror. Were breathing this air, sitting on this floor, looking around this room. The feelings of the past may be alive in us, but the circumstances of our lives are different now. We are connected to this present; we have this tool to guide us; we can reach out for support. As Marilynne puts it, we do this work of remembering in order to heal, not to retraumatize. By keeping one foot in the present as we enter the past, were able to be