Chicago Tribune - November 19, 2004
Gina Kim, Tribune staff reporter

For more than three years, Stan Lewy has begun his days at Chicago's Montrose Beach. With black-and-tan Welsh terriers, Marco and Miles, in tow, Lewy walks along the waterfront and thinks of his son, David.

He reminisces on how the triathlete loved the water. He wonders if the organic chemist might have helped cure AIDS with his HIV research. And he reflects on how life has changed since a phone call on May 22, 2001, telling him David had slit his wrists.

"For the first year and a half, I just couldn't stop crying. I'd just go out there and wail. And it was someplace where I could just scream and feel comfortable in doing that," said Lewy, 64. "I don't scream anymore. But I still cry every day."

While the morning ritual is helping Lewy heal, he credits his life to support groups and other suicide survivors' organizations. He's still alive, he said, simply because he learned he was far from alone.

"I had no reason to live. I had no desire to live," Lewy recalled believing after David, who suffered from bipolar disorder, died. "By talking to others, I saw I wasn't alone in the way I felt, that there were people who were going through the same thing and were able to get beyond this incredible pain."

In 2002, the most recent year for which statistics are available, 31,655 people died by suicide in the United States, 1,145 of them in Illinois, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"There's an enormous amount of stigma surrounding suicide," said Robert Gebbia, executive director of the New York-based American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. "When somebody dies of another illness--cancer or heart disease--it's tragic, and people feel that loss. But they're not ashamed of it. In our society, there's still shame involved with someone who dies by suicide."

To help pull back that cloak, the foundation has sponsored 25 community walks and fundraisers around the nation. Titled "Out of the Darkness," the last one this year will be held Saturday in the Cook County Forest Preserves' Bemis Woods. It will be followed by a national teleconference of speakers on the subject, seen in more than 90 communities, for the sixth annual National Survivors of Suicide Day. Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.), whose father shot himself to death in 1972 after suffering from depression, started the day in 1999.

After Lewy's son's death, Lewy dedicated his life to helping other survivors of suicide. He founded the Midwest chapter of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention and is chairman-elect for the Illinois Suicide Prevention Planning Committee. While Lewy's life is now about sharing his experience with other suicide survivors, his morning walks are always about David.

"I just think about him," Lewy said. "Sometimes I think of things he did. Sometimes I think about things he won't do. It's been rough lately, because my daughter got married, and he wasn't there."

For more information, go to www.afsp.org.

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