Live Through This is a collection of portraits and true stories of suicide attempt survivors across the United States, curated by Dese’Rae L. Stage, a photographer, writer, and suicide prevention activist. Stage was one of the participants in CNN's Finding Hope town hall special.
searching for answers
June 27 is National PTSD Awareness Day
In memory of Josh Fetter.
befrienders worldwide
Today I'd like to point you to the website of Befrienders Worldwide. [They are one of the resources I learned about from the CNN Finding Hope page.] Under "Help & Support," there are sections on Helping a Friend, Bereaved by Suicide, Listening Skills, and more. I'll be adding Befrienders to our suicide prevention resources page, which you can find on our website by clicking the photo of Rader on the bench on our home page.
finding hope: battling America's suicide crisis
Last night, I watched a live CNN town hall special on suicide prevention. It was hosted by Anderson Cooper, who lost a brother to suicide 30 years ago. The hour-long broadcast is available for streaming, and CNN also put up a page full of videos and resources, which I have linked to here. I'm still in the process of following up on all the resources referenced in the show and on the page. I'll continue to share them over the next several days, and also will add the best ones to the suicide prevention page on the website.
lost wax casting
There are so many life lessons in art, and I’ve found particularly in my four sessions of metalwork summer camp over the past years that the metaphors are rich. In this one, I see the red wax leaf as who I was before Rader died.
Scroll through the photos below to see my process, start to finish.
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The wax is hard, unyielding, a red cylinder a little larger in diameter than a crayon. I break off a piece and begin to work it. Slowly it warms to my touch and I can bend it in two. I start to flatten it out in my fingers until I have an oval about the size of the pad of my thumb. There's a valley down the center where the edges I folded together don't quite join. It reminds me of the vein in the middle of a leaf. I take the scissors and trim just a bit from the edges, encouraging it into a leafy shape. Then I roll the scrap pieces carefully, like when I was a child making a snake from clay. The snake becomes the leaf's central vein, and then the veins forking off from it. I heat my metal instrument in the flame of the alcohol lamp and use it to seal the veins to the leaf, a wax-weld. I use the heated instrument to score gentle valleys in between the veins, turn the leaf over and mark the back in the same way. I twist and bend the leaf to give it more dimension, more life. My wax sculpture is complete.
After fixing my sculpture by a wax "sprue" onto the flexible end cap of an open-ended metal flask, I fit the flask down over it. Then I fill the cylinder with a liquid plaster-type substance called investment. The investment hardens around my sculpture, and I'm ready for the first wave of destruction. The end cap is removed, revealing the button of wax sprue that held my sculpture in place inside the flask. The flask goes, button side down, into the kiln, where with heat and time, my leaf sculpture melts, and the wax runs out and burns away. Lost. Where my wax leaf once was is now a negative space inside the investment.
The next stage of creation begins, as much primal creation does, with fire. Bits of metal—pewter, for this first leaf I've made—melt in a crucible under the relentless flame of my torch. Once it's molten, I pour the metal, still firing it with the torch, into the funnel-shaped hole the end cap and sprue made in the investment. When it fills up, I extinguish the torch, remove my protective goggles, and watch the metal begin to cool.
And now the final destruction. This kind of lost wax casting is not for the sentimental. To get to my piece, I must demolish the mold. The investment, which held up so solidly under the blazing heat of the kiln and the glowing liquid metal, begins to dissolve when I quench the flask in a bucket of water. With my fingers and an old kitchen knife, I dig away at the softening investment until my piece detaches from the flask and falls with a chunking sound to the bottom of the bucket. I feel around for it in the cloudy warm water, find it, and bring it to the surface.
The wax is gone. The mold is gone. Those two iterations of my idea are utterly destroyed. But my creation has survived both fire and flood. I hold the leaf in my hand.
exploring the arts, working through grief
Monday I posted that I was attending summer art camp at Explore the Arts. I spent five days learning lost wax casting from Katy Cassell at the Fine Arts Center. It was an amazing week of creativity and discovery! I haven’t posted much here about grief, but I believe art is one important way to “do the work of grief.” I focused my work this week on leaves, expressing the idea of growth and renewal. (Thanks to my friend and classmate, Cynthia Caraway Hudson, for helping put words to that concept for me.)
all atwitter!
spreading the word
Today on Facebook, I asked people to share the Facebook page and the website:
We want to help as many people as possible and save lives by providing suicide prevention information and resources. The more people who like and share our foundation Facebook page, the more people will find our website, and the more people we can reach with this vital information. Today is my birthday🎈, and what I would ❤️love❤️ for my birthday is for you to share the Facebook page or the website, raderward.com.
When you visit the Facebook page, under the photo of Rader on the bench, click the three dots ... and choose "Share" from the drop-down menu. To share the website, just type raderward.com in your post where you see the prompt, "Say something about this ...". It will create a link automatically.
Thank you!
about THE LATEST
It's been almost two weeks since we launched the raderward.com website. I've added a new feature to the top navigation menu. When you click "THE LATEST," you'll find whatever I posted to Facebook or Instagram that day, and if you scroll down the page you'll go back through time to see what the previous daily posts were. So whenever you visit the website, there will always be something new to see. When we have major news to announce, such as receiving our IRS approval as a nonprofit, or opening up the scholarship application window, THE LATEST is where you'll find it.
Sam Eaton is recklessly alive
Today I want to share one of the links from the suicide prevention resources page of our website. Recklessly Alive is a suicide prevention ministry founded by Sam Eaton. He approaches the topic from a Christian perspective, but he offers encouragement and insight that transcend faith.
You can find our resources page at raderward.com by clicking the home page photo of Rader on the bench, to check out what else is there.
Rader Ward scholarship awarded at Fine Arts Center camp
Today I started a week of Explore the Arts summer art camp at Greenville County Schools' Fine Arts Center. This is my fourth year as a camper. Camps serve all ages: elementary school to adult. Rader enjoyed several camps over the years, from spin art to improv. He was signed up for Photoshop camp last year as a high schooler, but died before camp began. The Fine Arts Center generously created an Explore the Arts scholarship in Rader's name, which will be given each year to one participating high schooler.
in honor of Father's Day
William and Rader (age 13) in our canoe, July 2014, Highlands, N.C.
the urge to end it
Since I read this article from The New York Times Magazine when a friend posted it a week ago, I haven't been able to get it out of my mind. “The more obstacles you can throw up, the more you move it away from being an impulsive act. And once you’ve done that, you take a lot of people out of the game. If you look at how people get into trouble, it’s usually because they’re acting impulsively, they haven’t thought things through. And that’s just as true with suicides as it is with traffic accidents.”—Dr. Matthew Miller, associate director of the Injury Control Research Center
the urge to end it all
understanding suicide
teen depression doesn't always look like we expect it to
Today on the Facebook page, I posted a link to this story written for Grown & Flown by the mom of a depressed teen. It's a great read.
signs of recovery
I've been writing daily as a way to put my grief to work. I get weekly writing prompts from author Megan Devine of Refuge in Grief. Today's was about the prickly concept of recovery. There are a few pieces of my writing in the "writing my grief" section of the website, if you'd like to read more.
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Signs of Recovery
Rader William Ward, June 13, 2001-June 7, 2017
The first anniversary of Rader's death, soon followed by his 17th birthday, passed much as I imagined they would, and maybe not so much as others suggested. Grief is unpredictable, but I found I responded the way I expected to: I was not significantly more bereft than any other day; all days are at least tinged with sadness. What I was surprised by was how energized I felt in the days leading up to those bitter dates. There were two ongoing tasks in particular—one I chose for myself and one was thrust upon me—that kept my mind and body occupied, so there was little room for rumination.
First, I made up my mind in mid-May that I would start working daily on the Rader Ward Foundation website. I had begun work on it months ago, but at the time found it to be far enough outside my skill set that it provoked a lot of frustration, and I avoided it to avoid the feelings that working on it gave me. But when I decided in May I wanted to debut it on the June 7 anniversary of his death, and therefore I should open it up and do at least some small thing every day, it gave me a positive direction in which to concentrate the emotional energy that was building up in anticipation—or dread—of that day. And I discovered that when I worked on it every day, I understood what I was doing. I didn't have to try to remember how I accomplished something after a several-week gap of attending to it. The tools grew familiar with use. I learned the limitations of Squarespace and myself, and how to work around them. The site is still a work in progress, but I picked a state at which it would be "complete enough" to publicly announce, and worked steadily toward that state.
The second task came on like a flood, literally. We spent Memorial Day weekend at our mountain cabin. After a couple weeks of unusually intense rain (for an area that's already classified as a temperate rain forest), we were dismayed but not entirely surprised to find water coming into our kitchen at the foundation on Saturday night. My husband and I started soaking it up with towels, and as the rain stopped for the night, so did the water intrusion. Sunday's weather was nice, and we did what we could outside the home to clear drains and gutters and make sure incoming water was being directed away from the house. At that point, everything was OK even with a little rain coming down. But tropical storm Alberto was looming. So my husband and daughter returned home, as he had to go back to work Tuesday, and I stayed up in the mountains to handle whatever Alberto had in mind.
The storm was relentless. The ground was so saturated from the earlier rains, that once the storm arrived, the drains and gutters we had tended to were quickly overwhelmed. The water started coming into the house again in earnest, and by Wednesday night, I was barely keeping pace with it. As soon as I could get a load of towels through the dryer, I needed them again on the floor. I slept, fitfully, in between. Finally Thursday mid-morning the storm passed, and I was able to rest at last. Once I was awake again, in the light of day, it was clear the flooring was going to have to come up. So I set to work with my pry bars and contractor trash bags, and pulled up the old engineered hardwood that had been glued to the slab. Thankfully time or moisture or both had loosened the glue bond, and the work wasn't as hard as it could have been. But that and related clean-up work kept me busy in the mountains a week longer than I had planned to stay.
I returned home—to what passes now for my regular life—just four days before the anniversary. There was still more work to do on the website, and so having that goal kept me focused on accomplishing it, rather than on myself and my feelings, and my feelings *about* my feelings, and all the rest of that spiral it's so easy to get pulled into. Signs of recovery? I don't know about that. But in these weeks surrounding the one-year mark of Rader's death, I've created and I've demolished. And I'm proud of both.
Rader's 17th birthday
We are observing Rader’s 17th birthday today by playing Super Mario Odyssey. 🎈
remembering Josh Fetter
Today on Facebook, I shared a post from the Facebook page Stop Soldier Suicide in honor of my friend's son, Josh Fetter, who ended his life in December. Pictured above are Josh and his mom, Kris. Ms. Kris was one of Rader's upper elementary teachers at Montessori.
Rader's games
Today I'd like to invite you to check out the "Rader's games" page of our website! He started making board games as a little guy, and then in elementary school, made his first video games. From our games page, you can access and even play many of the games he published, and see how they increase in sophistication over time.
today on our Instagram
The Rader Ward Foundation seeks to give imaginative students the freedom to create and learn.
