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Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Retreat offers a path to get past tragedy

Suicides leave families wondering where to turn for emotional guidance

C. Karen Covey Moore, left, and Anne Cronin Tyson will lead a spiritual retreat

People who lose family members and friends to suicide understand the words of lamentation contained within Isaiah 61: 1-5, words such as “broken-hearted,” “mourning,” “ashes.”

The Bible verse, however, promises relief from those lamentations.

The broken-hearted? They’ll be healed. Those who mourn? Comforted.

And the ashes? Beauty shall arise from them.

The spiritual journey from mourning to joy, from ashes to beauty, can be a long, complicated one for survivors of a loved one’s suicide.

Those survivors courageous enough to attempt the journey need guides.

In two weeks, at the Immaculate Heart Retreat Center in Spokane, experienced guides will be present, using the powerful words of Isaiah 61 to focus the journey.

Anne Cronin Tyson and C. Karen Covey Moore will lead a two-day retreat for those who have lost family or friends to suicide.

The two women have degrees in pastoral care. They are also longtime spiritual directors and retreat leaders. And both have lost family members to suicide.

They understand the complex emotional healing process that follows a loved one’s suicide.

“Healing is not to be confused with the end of pain,” Tyson said in a recent phone interview from her Texas home.

“So often we think of the word ‘healing,’ and we think it means taking things back to the place they were and everything being OK. But healing in this context means finding a way to live again. Learning how to re-enter life and be open to God’s grace.”

About six years ago, the two women met at a spiritual director’s conference in California. In a cosmic coincidence, they were assigned as roommates. They soon discovered that both had lost their youngest sons to suicide.

Tyson’s son, Ted, killed himself in 1994. Moore’s son, Charles, committed suicide in 2001.

Moore, a United Methodist minister active in suicide prevention efforts in the Pennsylvania-Delaware area, was no stranger to the aftermath of suicide. In 1951, Moore’s mother killed herself.

“Before the weekend was over, we had come to a place where we knew we were going to do this together,” Tyson said. “Survivors themselves are an at-risk population.”

Since that time, the two women have averaged about one retreat a year, and they have teamed up for dozens of shorter presentations throughout the country and in Canada, including workshops for professionals who work with suicide survivors.

After the two women began their work together, suicide struck Tyson’s life once more in 2005, when her niece killed herself.

Despite a culture more conversant about suicide, misconceptions abound, Tyson said:

“People will almost automatically look for a reason: ‘The girlfriend left him. The husband was cheating. There was a divorce in the family, alcoholism .

“They want to tag it to a life event. Although those (life) events can be the trigger, the cause does not lie there. The research shows that people who take their lives are suffering from depression or some other form of disorder that overcomes the basic instinct to survive.”

The exact causes of suicide remain a mystery to the scientists who research it, the psychologists who work to prevent it and the spiritual directors who minister to those left behind.

“Beauty for Ashes: Transforming Loss” is the first retreat of its kind at Immaculate Heart Retreat Center.

Sister Mary Eucharista, program manager, said survivors from all over the country have signed up for the retreat – people from Illinois, California, Montana and Missouri, for instance, as well as the Inland Northwest.

Though Immaculate Heart is a Catholic-run retreat center, participants are both Catholic and Protestant and some have no faith tradition, Sister Eucharista said.

“My hope is that these beautiful people find the tools to process the deep grief and inner savagery that has gone on,” she said.

“I want them to go forth into life, not with a resolved mystery, but with a calmed mystery.”