Books/Film
Journey of the Heart: Transforming the tragedy of a family suicide into healing, beauty and discovering God
“Journey of the Heart” by Katie Williams, Living Water Publishing, 2005
“Journey of the Heart: Transforming the Tragedy of a Family Suicide into Healing, Beauty and Discovering God” is the exploration of a survivor of suicide’s life after the tragedy, during a time when emotions overflow and pages can barely contain them. But author Katie Williams does just that. She contains her feelings and beats a path of discovery within the pages of her journal, which she bravely decided to publish in the form of this book.
The first journal entry takes place a year and a day after Williams’ 17-year-old brother, Gabe, took his own life with a handgun in the winter of 1999. This first entry introduces her feelings of loss and realization that her brother was gone. Here she relives the funeral, and we begin her four-year journey of self-discovery and mourning.
Within the 121 pages, the reader is aware that Williams’ process for healing is largely spiritual. Williams goes through a spectrum of emotions through her writing and endures her journey with God’s help and prayer.
In fact, in the preface of the book, Williams says that she and God wrote the book. She writes, “my ‘journey of the heart,” which began with me wishing my brother Gabe was in my arms, and ending up with me in God’s arms.”
Even with a spirituality taking a strong stance in the book, Williams makes a point to tell readers that the book “is not meant to force anything on you.” Instead she says, “I would ask that the reader look at what I went through as a mere suggestion or option, not a request, for how you may handle your grief and loss.”
Readers can relate to the real language and candid emotion of the book and use Williams’ words as tools to get through their own loss and understand their own journeys as they go through the mourning process. Williams said that by reading her book, people will be able to work through their own emotions as they see the firsthand account of her journey to recovery into a more positive view of life, even through tragedy.
Williams, in high school while writing these journal entries, seems to have a sense of maturity and wisdom well beyond her years in the way she intelligently and honestly analyzes the events, causes and effects of her brother’s death on the family.
Williams begins her journey in sorrow. Her brother, once full of life and always pushing the limits, was gone. Then anger wells up in the remembrance of negative events and her family’s struggles to deal with Gabe’s Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. As the book and time progresses, strength exudes from the pages and Williams tenderly accepts the good and the bad, writing a list of memories of Gabe.
Remembering Gabe meant accepting his shortcomings. One of them was Gabe’s problem with authority. Whatever his parents told him to do, he did the opposite. That led to him attending boarding school.
Once he returned, things seemed to settle down for a while. Then he began experimenting with drugs when he began high school. Later he went to juvenile hall where he finally received counseling. He was diagnosed with ADHD and prescribed medication, but continued to act out against authority and even seemed like a stranger to his sister.
Williams, who was just two years younger than Gabe, describes the two as a brother-sister team that kept one another in balance. Katie was “Ms. Perfect” while Gabe was mischievous.
In a lighter moment, Williams describes a good memory of their relationship. Katie was awakened by her brother in the middle of the night. With a playful smile, Gabe said, “Do you wanna take the car out tonight?” Out they went, with Gabe laid back in his seat, and Katie on the edge of hers, for a midnight ride. The next morning the brother and sister shared knowing glances across the breakfast table trying to conceal the elation of their shared secret.
A pivotal moment in the book for Williams, as well as the reader, is when she realizes that she cannot endure her pain alone. Williams has always relied on herself, but after the death of her brother, she came to see that she needed help as she moved from anger towards acceptance.
As Williams writes, “this is my journey and how I discovered lovingly that God was a part of it all along.” Williams looked to God for help, and came out a stronger person from her tragedy.
“Journey of the Heart” does not claim to be a clearinghouse for answers about suicide, but it does include information for how to help those struggling with suicide through referrals to organizations that can help. It also offers help for those who mourn. If you have lost someone to suicide and read this book about Williams’s journey through pain, you will see that you are not alone. Those emotions you’ve felt, those questions you’ve asked, are not yours alone. Williams’ strength through her tragedy leaves a strong legacy of hope.
If you wish to obtain a copy of Journey of the Heart visit:
Will’s Choice
Nobody in Will’s family anticipated what was to come. The 17 year old had grown up in a comfortable, upper-middle-class family in Washington, DC, with countless blessings: a loving family, attendance at a prestigious parochial high school and a delightful new girlfriend. Though Will suffered from depression, he had been put on medication and his mood seemed to have stabilized. Despite his medicated stability, one summer morning, his mother found him lying on his bed, unconscious, rambling and deathly ill. At first, she refused to admit it, but eventually she had no choice but to face the facts: her son had attempted to end his own life.
A Secret Best Not Kept
“A Secret Best Not Kept” is the first feature-length documentary film by suicide survivor Dara Berger. The film’s website, www.sayitoutloud.com, offers the following introduction: “A thirteen-year old girl’s life is shattered on a summer day when she comes home to find her mother has committed suicide. Eighteen years later, she embarks on a journey in search of answers.
The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression
Marcel Proust, the French writer who was recurrently depressed (but did not suicide) wrote: “Just as a lover listens to his beloved, so too does a person in pain listen to his body.” People who die by suicide do not want to die; they simply want to end the pain often caused by depression. If there were another way to end the pain, they would seek it. Failing to find a source of reprieve, they become hopeless. More than depression, hopelessness predicts who will die by suicide.
No current book could be described more aptly as a discussion of the anatomy of melancholia, a term used by Robert Burton for his 17th century treatise on his own depression, than Andrew Solomon’s Noonday Demon.
