By Gene Beresin, Executive Director, Khadijah Booth Watkins, Associate Director and Anthony L. Rostain, M.D., M.A.

Posted in: Multimedia, Podcast

Topics: Mental Illness + Psychiatric Disorders

If you think your child is thinking about suicide, take them seriously, stay with them, help them remove lethal means, and Call 988 | National Suicide Prevention Lifeline

Today is World Suicide Prevention Day: a time to bring global attention to the urgent public health crisis of suicide and to reaffirm our collective commitment to prevention through compassion, connection, and community.

In this special episode of Shrinking it Down: Mental Health Made Simple, Gene and Khadijah are joined by Dr. Tony Rostain for a deeply moving conversation about love, loss and healing. Dr. Rostain shares the story of the tragic loss of his son, Julian to suicide – a bright, talented young man who battled anxiety and depression, which were greatly intensified by the isolation he experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic. Through his story, Dr. Rostain helps Gene and Khadijah explore the healing power of community, love and remembrance while also reflecting on what helped him process the grief and continue his work in mental health.

Media List

• World Suicide Prevention Day 2025 (World Health Organization)
• Anthony L. Rostain, MD, MA (Cooper University)
• Sara Rian Books
• Julian Memorial – Remembering Julian Rostain
• Pack Up Your Sorrows – Richard & Mimi Farina (YouTube)
• I Love You Dad: Words A Father Will Never Hear Again (MGH Clay Center)
• Loving the Gone (Amazon)
• Home | AFSP (American Foundation for Suicide Prevention)
• The Jed Foundation (JED)
• Resources for People who Think About Suicide (National Institute on Mental Illness)
• Preventing Suicide (CDC)

 

Additional Resources from Dr. Rostain:

• Sara Rian Books
• Bearing the Unbearable: Love, Loss, and the Heartbreaking Path of Grief (Amazon)
• It’s Ok that You’re Not Ok (Refuge in Grief)
• The Wild Edge of Sorrow (North Atlantic Books)
• Some observations on the process of mourning (National Library of Medicine)

Episode Transcript

SPEAKERS: Gene Beresin, MD, MA; Khadijah Booth Watkins, MD, MPH; Anthony Rostain, MD, MA

[INTRO MUSIC PLAYS]

Gene 00:28

Welcome back to Shrinking it Down: Mental Health Made Simple. I’m Gene Beresin

Khadijah 00:32

And I’m Khadijah Booth Watkins.

Gene 00:35

We’re two child and adolescent psychiatrists at the Clay Center for Young Healthy Minds at the Massachusetts General Hospital.

Khadijah 00:43

Every 11 minutes, someone dies by suicide in the United States and in 2023 alone, nearly 49,000 lives were lost, and that’s more than any year before matching the nation’s peak rate. These numbers are even more alarming for our teens. Last year, one in five students seriously considered attempting suicide girls more than boys, so one in four girls consider this. And for boys, about this, the numbers about one in seven. And for black youth, they have experienced the highest rate of suicide attempts compared to any other group.

Gene 01:16

That’s an incredible those are incredible statistics. You know, it used to be that white boys top the list those one in five considering, seriously considering. That’s part of the considering suicide, that’s part of the Youth Risk Behavior Survey that’s done every two years, grades nine through 12. But the numbers are changing, and they’re going up, right?

Khadijah 01:40

They’re changing demographically and definitely going up, which, which is alarming for us, as I’m sure child psychiatrists, but families who are supporting these young people who are struggling,

Gene 01:50

yeah, well, today, we’re not going to talk about data. We’re going to talk about a father’s account of the loss of his son. So behind these numbers are names or stories and faces, sons and daughters who are deeply loved and now deeply missed. So in this special episode of shrinking it down for Suicide Prevention Day, we’re going to be talking about identifying kind of kind, this kind of loss that is a loss of a child to suicide and to help navigate this difficult but important conversation, is my dear friend Tony Rostain. Uh, Doctor Rostain is nationally recognized as an expert in lifespan neurodevelopmental psychiatry with a clinical and research focus on ADHD, autism, learning disabilities and related conditions. He’s an accomplished author, the great blues heart player. He co-wrote,

Dr. Tony Rostain 02:54

Thanks Gene.

Gene 02:55

He co-wrote the adult ADHD toolkit and cognitive behavioral therapy for adult ADHD, which are two essential guides for managing adult ADHD, his book The stressed years of their lives offers critical insights for parents navigating the mental health challenges of college years. So Tony, I can’t say how great it is for you to be here under such dire circumstances so well.

Dr. Tony Rostain 03:25

Thanks for having me, both of you. It’s very meaningful to me to be able to share my story, to be able to reflect with the two of you on the journey that I’m on, one that I didn’t expect to be on, never wished to be on, and it’s a healing process never over. But you know, just to say, apart from all the great things that you know about me, you know, one of the things I’ve treasured most in my life is being a father. I’ve been extremely lucky to have two beautiful children, and Julian was just an amazing, amazing person. I’m here because when he died, my life changed forever, and I’m still trying to figure out what to do with it in light of the loss. So I want to, before we get into talking about him, I just want to read you a mantra that I wrote for him, that I read every day when I wake up and this is the mantra for Julian, mourn his death, honor his memory, cherish his heart, live with his spirit, love him always. There’s also a poem I’d like to read, because it sets the tone, in a way, to all of the things that I’m going. To say, and I happily, happily discovered this. My daughter Isabel, who also has been going through a terrible journey, as everyone in our family has discovered this poet named Sara Rhian, whose book, loving the gone is a collection of very powerful short stories. And I just want to read you one, because it captures a lot about what we go through. Those of us that lose someone this way, I was dragged into a new chapter that day, one that started when your life ended. I grabbed at the previous pages, but life ripped them away. New chapters have come, and many of them good. I still find myself wanting to go back to stay with you, bookmarked in the part of my life where you are still living. So on, May 19, 2021 Julian was 32 years old, and his life came to a tragic ending. I can’t even begin to describe the horror that emerged in all in all of us. It just erupted pain beyond words. But what I want to say most of all is that in the time that’s happened, that’s occurred since his death, what I have focused on the most is the time when he was alive, the time when he was part of our world. And I just want to say a few things about him so that you can understand him as a person you know he was. He was filled with life, with energy, with creativity. He loved people. He was a loving soul. He would walk into a room and say hello to everyone and just look them in the face and beam at them, and they would feel seen, and they would just appreciate his presence. He was an amazing dancer. He could when we would have when we’d go to parties like family events, weddings and stuff, and he’d start to dance, everybody would just look over and see how amazingly fluid his movements were and how infectious his love of music was. He also was an avid listener of music and all kinds of music. Loved the music that I played at home with him. And then he developed his own musical taste too. But I’ll never forget, he would always say to me, whenever he’d like want to laugh at me, he’d start breaking into Neil Young going, old man, look at my life. I’m a lot like you were. And he would do that little vibrato of Neil Young, you know, and so he also had a talent for cooking. He had trouble staying in college, and ended up coming to live with us after he left college and developed a skill and became a sous chef eventually, and that was his. That was his. He decided that was going to be his career. And, you know, it’s funny, he would talk about it a lot, like what it was like to work in the kitchen, and how he learned all the different ways to make food taste amazing. And then he’d come home and cook for us. You know, during the time that he was training to be a chef, because he was living with me and with my wife, Michelle, was his stepmom, and oh my god, the things he created for us, the tastes, the way the seasoning. And then, of course, he’d participate in the gatherings like Thanksgiving or the Labor Day cookouts or Memorial Day. And he would be there at the grill, you know, I was used to be the grill Meister. He took over. He was the grill Meister. And you know, he would, he would just enjoy the, not only the making of the food, but seeing people eat it. And he always used to say that for him, you know, cooking was important because it was, it was a way of him showing love to the people he was cooking for. So he was, I guess, only thing to say else about him was that he was troubled throughout much of his life, with periods of anxiety and depression, and you know, he battled mightily against these, but towards the end of his life, you know, he got very depressed, and we knew about it, and we tried our best to help him get help. But in. His own way. He wanted to do it himself. And ultimately, I think what really pushed him over was that the covid pandemic came along. He lost his job, he lost his community because he wasn’t able to go and to the dance and the raves that he was part of. He was living in an isolated area about an hour and 20 minutes outside of Philly with his girlfriend, but he really didn’t get to see us much. In fact, the last time our family got together was as a whole, was Thanksgiving of 2020, which we had to have outside, you know. And it was so strange to be at a Thanksgiving meal where we all used to just hang out for hours and eat and talk, and here we were under a tent in the cold, you know, unable to get close to each other. So there were a lot of losses for him as a result of covid. And I think his isolation and his loss of a job led him to go into this dark depression from which he didn’t he couldn’t emerge. He couldn’t survive it. So that’s a little bit about him. So Tony,

Gene 11:18

maybe you could tell the audience a little bit about how you survived the immediate aftermath and the first few months.

Dr. Tony Rostain 11:36

Well, the first few days, I will have to tell you was, as I look back on it, I think I just it was sort of a form of psychosis like this can’t be real. This can’t be happening. You know, what is up? What is down? I was crying constantly. I was just talking to my close family the night, the night that I learned of his death, a close colleague, Rick Summers, who, you know, who’s a psychiatrist that I’ve worked with for years at Penn and who lost his niece to suicide a little more than a year earlier. I called him up and he said, I’ll be right there. I’ll be right there, and I’ll never, ever be able to thank Rick enough for just being in in my presence in my living room and just talking with me and letting me cry and letting me talk about how, not only how horrible I felt, but as a father, you know, and as a psychiatrist, you know, what could I have done to stop this? I mean, I was just obsessed with, what did I do wrong. What did we miss? How could we How could we have, not, you know, brought him into hospital. I mean, just every fantasy you can imagine to rescue him. And Rick just kept shaking his head and saying, Tony, Tony, you loved him. You did what you could. But yeah, it’s, you know, horrible. So, he bears, he bore witness. The next day, my whole family, in the close family, came and stayed together. I had to write an obituary. In the obituary, I didn’t say cause of death. I just said he died suddenly. And then it occurred to me, well, should I say more or not? So that following Sunday, we had a family gathering, and it was led by a close friend of mine, who’s a pastor at a chap he was a chaplain at Presbyterian Hospital. John comes and brings us all together. And there’s about 30 of us sitting outside my home in our garden, and he says, Look, we’re here because we love Julian. We’re here because we wish he was with us. But we’re not here to talk about why this happened. We’re not here to talk about any of that. We’re just here to talk about our love for Julian in whatever ways we can express it, and for the next hour and a half, we held this family gathering that transformed, in a way, my sense of total isolation and devastation into something that I would call the shared grief that a family begins to have together, where we all just told stories about him, laughed, cried, you know, just conjured His Spirit. And at the very end of when we stopped having much to say, suddenly, a breeze picked up through the through the garden, and birds started to sing. And, you know, at that moment, it just felt like this spiritually transformative moment, that in the midst of grief, that I was surrounded by love, that we were all there. And that evening, I went and wrote to all my friends, the communities of colleagues at Penn and Children’s Hospital and Cooper where I. Work, and everyone I knew, and I wrote them all a letter, and I said, Listen, Julian died by suicide, and I want you to know that we’re having a Shiva, and I just want you to know that I’d love it if you could come. And there was this outpouring of the next for the next three days, of not only my friends and friends of my ex-wife and but also colleagues from work. There were also letters from his and people his friends from childhood came, and his friends from childhood were the most amazing. I mean, they we hugged and cried, and they told me stories, and that whole Shiva period was really important, because I got to feel people’s love in person. And thankfully, by then that the pandemic had subsided so we could be in the same space together, even though it was outdoors. And I’ll just share one thought that someone shared with me that I hold on to a colleague from chop named Chris Futner, who looked at me and he said, Listen, you’re on a boat now on the ocean, and the storms are all around you, and the sky is dark and it’s raining and there’s winds that are unbelievably difficult, and the waves are like throwing themselves over the side of your boat. He says, But, but, but keep your boat going towards love, point your boat towards love, and hang on, and just steer that boat towards love. And suddenly that gave me a vision of what I needed to do and have continued to do in this work that I’m going through the grief work, because it’s about love. It’s about loving Julian. It’s about also sharing my love for my family and translating the grief. By the way, grief comes from love, if the simplest definition of grief is loving someone who’s gone. And what do you do with that love? It’s actually the most unrequited, unselfish thing humans do is when we love the ones who are gone and allow ourselves to grieve their loss, their loss that we really become, I think, the fullest expression of being a human being. So right after that, we created a website for Julian that people can still go to and visit. And that took energy from all of us, but we worked on it collectively. I went back to work after two weeks, and I was able to start to focus. I couldn’t focus for the first couple of weeks on anything related to work. Fortunately, one of my colleagues took my weekend call for me and just a shout out to Punit Sahoda, because she said to me, I know you’re not going to be able to do this, so I’ll do it for you. And so, she took my call, you know, and that would have, would have been hard for me to go and work in the hospital, Cooper hospital, and take care of very sick people, many of whom are there for suicide. And then, you know, what I realized was people like Eugene, you and other members of pink Freud, David. David flew down from Buffalo, you know, just talking to you. I remember the time we talked in the garden. I was in the garden, and you said to me you had lost a patient. And you would talk to me about toxic shame and about how it stops people from getting help, because at that moment, I was just thinking, like, why didn’t Julian get the help he needed? You know, I was still, at that stage, just trying to fix it, right? I was still trying to fix it. Couldn’t be fixed, but I was still trying. And you just said, Hey, you know, Julian was struggling, and he just didn’t have the ability to overcome, you know, not just his depression, that’s depression is one thing, but when you have depression and you were also filled with shame about being who you are and what’s wrong with you, it keeps you away from help, and that was also very helpful for me, is to thinking about the ways in which I you know, Julian’s experience of his own life was both too difficult for him, his depression was too hard for him to deal with, but he kept trying to. Do it alone. He kept he kept it to himself. He only let us know a little bit of it. He didn’t know how. He didn’t let us know how bad it was. The last thing I’ll say about how the first, first few weeks went, few months, is that I kept going back to the night before Julian died, he and I had a long conversation, and in it, because I knew he was depressed, I was trying to focus on the future with him, and I kept saying him, you know Julian, you’re down now, and you lost the job that you love, but there’s still other things for you to do, and I can help you. Maybe we can find you want to start open a restaurant, or, you know, we will, we can, we can figure out, maybe you want to go back to school, to school and learn about, you know, the business of restaurants, because he was super smart guy. I mean, he was one. He was so smart about everything. And he said, Dad, that’s really a good idea. And he just kept, you know, responding like, yeah, yeah, that sounds good. And then, you know, I, I, I sang him Bridge Over Troubled Water, all right. And he, he knew the song. And then I ended the conversation. I said, but there’s one more song I want to sing to you, Julian, it’s by Mimi and Richard Farina, and it’s pack up your sorrows. And the refrain goes, if somehow you could pack up your sorrows and give them all to me, you would lose them. I know how to use them. Give them all to me. And he, afterwards, he just said, Dad, that’s so beautiful. Thank you. And that was the last time we spoke, and the next day, he was gone. So that that’s how I guess I’ll leave you with that idea of remembering the conversations has now become something that occurs daily for me, thinking about the time this happened or that happened, and I began to write about it, and I began to send my friends letters about my memories of Julie and the stories. I even wrote him a letter on my 70th birthday, saying how much I missed him and wanted him there with me. And just being able to say how much I missed him to people really, really made a difference. I was really important as part of what I think is how we get through this is just acknowledging how we’re feeling.

Khadijah 22:53

I mean, this has been incredibly moving, and I just really want to thank you for sharing your story. I obviously didn’t know Julian. I’m getting to know you through Gene, but to hear how you talk about him, and we’re not focusing on the end of his life, but really celebrating his life and talking about him as a person, as a sibling, as a son, you know, as a chef, and talking about all of the things that we remember about him and that we celebrate about him is incredibly kind of moving in a different way than I often hear people talk about this. And I think thinking about again, how hard to it’s hard for me to hear it and imagine for you as a parent, going through this is kind of against the natural order of losing a child in any way, how you have been able to kind of focus on so much of the positive, and how you have been able to kind of create that beautiful mantra and reframe, kind of Again, the way you think about him, the way you talk about him, the way you share about him. I’d be I want to hear a little bit about how this has impacted the work that you do as a child psychiatrist, as a person, and also how this has impacted or what your grief work has looked like.

Dr. Tony Rostain 24:18

Well, thank you, Khadijah. You know, one thing I want to say is that your response sometimes, people who lose a loved one to suicide, especially a child, you know, we’re mindful that we don’t want to bum people out, or, you know, make them get upset. By the same token, many people are afraid to ask us, you know, like, what? What’s up? You know, how are you doing? And what I realized was, number one, people want to hear it, then I’m ready to tell them what’s up. And also, if they want, if they want to say something, you know, what they need to say is from their heart, like this is hard. To hear, but not to have them try to comfort me, because that’s not what I need. You know, I don’t want pity. I don’t want sympathy, and I don’t want to be given nostrums. You know, that’s the thing that people who lose someone they love. The last thing we want to know, we want people to tell us is, well, he’s in a better place. No, no, no, no, no, don’t tell me he’s in a better place. That’s not what I need to hear. What I need to hear is Tell me about your son or tell me about how you’re doing with the loss. And that way I can now bring him up in a casual way, right? I can say, oh, you know Isaiah. Look, we were talking about the football the Dallas Cowboys and the Eagles. Oh, my God. I used to watch games all the time with him, and we hated the Cowboys. So, you know, whenever I whenever I watch a football game, Julian is sitting there in my den, and I’m like, we’re arguing about it. We used to go to Sixers games. He was an incredible basketball avid basketball player and fan. He knew and saw all the moves he told taught me a lot about the game. So again, whenever the Sixers are playing, especially when they’re having a bad game, this is really an interesting Julian thing. Julian would get so pissed off when the players weren’t running the plays properly, or when they were kind of, he’d yell at them. And I can I laugh when he would do that, because he was, like, trying to be the coach. So, I would always say, “hey, Coach, what do your think’s happening now? What? What should we do? What does? What would you tell you know, Joel and B to do right now?” And so that’s how he lives every day. Um, how it’s affected what I do? Well, first of all, let me say, I think my work, I feel blessed to be a child psychiatrist, okay, and be a psychiatrist. I feel like it’s a privilege to listen to stories every day of people going and struggling with mental illness, and working with families, working with adults, with ADD and all these, all depression. I feel like I was lucky enough to have a gift for this and find a place to work and colleagues to work with. So my work has been sustaining, and now I’ve, started to talk about suicide, and I’ll never forget about maybe it was about a maybe almost two years after Julian’s death, we were discussing a case with the medical students in a small group format that we have at Cooper called the active learning groups, and the leader of that group actually had introduced me to the class by asking me to talk about my career and why I became a psychiatrist. So, there was, like this vibe of being little bit informal. And when we talked about this, this case, about suicide, someone started talking about youth suicide and what it was like and quoting some of the statistics. And I don’t know, for whatever reason, I said, Listen, I just want to share that. I’m a parent who lost a child to suicide, and if you want to know what it’s like, I’m happy to share it. And they wanted to, and at that point, I was able to talk, not just cry. And after that, um, you know, my students just were silent, and then they said, thank you for sharing that. It’ll help us be better at what we do. Now I don’t talk about this, about Julian with my patients, although many of them have found out I still talk with the father of one of my former patients who died. My former patient died by suicide about three and a half, four years before Julian died, and I did grief counseling with the parents. Every week, they met with me, and they shared their journey. So, I learned from them about what it’s like firsthand to lose a child, but I was in the professional role, and now as a father. How do I bring Julian into my work. Well, when the Spirit moved me, moves me, or when it looks like it’s appropriate, I’ll say something like, you know, parents really need you just to be with them, just to accompany them, not to try to fix it, but just to listen and just to be present and respect that their grief is what is important to be bearing witness to. So, I have a whole, you know, approach to what do we do as therapists? But also, what do physicians or any all healers do when we can’t fix something is we just have. To focus not on what we can fix, but just on being present, and that’s been one of the deeper insights I’ve had. Being a chair has also been a great job for me. I moved to Cooper in right before the pandemic, and it’s really brought me into a different role, where I can actually get people to think about the impact of mental illness on all kinds of patient care. So, and again, my, my, my job’s tough. I won’t say it’s an easy job to run a department, especially in these in this day and age, but the people around me who were present when Julian died, you know, they walk into my office and they go, Oh, I have a picture of Julian in my office, or I gave out pictures of him and my daughter made up some beautiful cards, and people Share that some of them actually have told me they lost a sibling or a parent to suicide. So, there is this community out there that is sub-Rosa, almost because people don’t bring it up. But once someone knows that you’ve lost a child suicide, if suicide has affected them, there’s a different understanding we have. It’s like we’re members of the same club that none of us want to be a part of, which segues into the work I do with the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. From the prior to Julian’s death, I would take residents from Penn and students to go on the walk my former chair Dwight Evans, Dr Evans was who was one of the founders of the American Foundation of suicide prevention, and he believed in the walks. And he and his wife Jan Evans were big and organized the Philly chapter. So, I would walk as a as a participant, as a professional participant, like a support, like allies, you know. But suddenly, when I said I wanted to form team Julian Rostain in the summer of 2021 the organizer of the march said, would you come and talk about it and talk about Julian? Talk about whatever you want to talk about. So, I gave a talk. It was really hard to give, but I expressed what I felt really deeply was that this community that we are forming here together every time we join here, is really important to our survival, okay, our psychological survival as People who’ve lost loved ones to suicide depends on this community being together and being together to honor the memory of each individual whose life was lost to suicide. You know that that March, that that March, had close to 5000 people there. There were 500 people’s faces rolling on the screen behind me with love you, love you. John, love you, Jimmy, love you, Jane. And so, it’s voice after voice, crying and grieving together, but also celebrating our love that was really for me, anyway, buoyed me because it really pushed back against the isolation and the loneliness that we feel. And the other thing I spoke about was this idea of how we listen when we hear the word preventing suicide? You know, obviously we all want to prevent suicide death. That’s by suicide. I mean, there’s no question if I if there were treatments out there that worked better, if there was a way to get people to help all of that needs to be supported. That’s the work of the AFSP. So that’s why we’re there to support the effort to prevent suicide. But by the same token, suicide is complicated. There’s no one way that people reach that end in their lives, and to sort of, you know, think that we can reach zero suicide or that it’s preventable. There’s a way that it hits on us that’s kind of worsens our experience of the guilt of the loss, because it makes us feel like, oh, well, we missed something, right? If it was like, you didn’t buckle your kids seat belt and then they died? Died in an accident. Obviously, that’s a really horrible thing, right? That is horrible to live with. I think of parents who’ve lost kids in other ways besides suicide, parents who’ve lost their kids to substance use, overdose to accidents, and that sense of guilt prevents us from grieving properly, because we don’t. We can’t let go of our own fear of we did this. We didn’t do our job as a parent. We should have protected this child from this outcome. But what I’ve come to understand is, no, you know suicide, they’ve been around for ages. Legions of people have lost their lives to suicide and will continue to and even though the medical model is what we use and try to describe it, no, there’s an existential truth about human experience that I think it’s so complicated as a phenomenon that I don’t want to be reductionistic and say, Well, if you just contribute more money, we’ll be able to end suicide. No, and nobody thinks that way. But that’s kind of what the deeper messaging, I think needs to be, you know, we’ll say some instead, what I like to say is, suicide is sometimes or maybe often, preventable, and we have to reduce it. But, you know, sometimes it’s not preventable. The other thing I want to talk about in terms of rituals, is that we still have gatherings of our family around important events. Zoom calls. So, on Julian’s birthday, we get together. And again, it was to talk. At first was all about talking about Julian. Now it’s remembering Julian, but also talking about how we’re doing, what’s happening in our lives, the things that have important. We get together for Thanksgiving, as we always did. We do get together at the earth site, which is the anniversary of his death, and we talked together around the time of the suicide walk. So those are, those are important ways of remembering Julian and marking his absence by coming together. I was lucky enough to get a bench built in or not built commemorated. The bench was already there about half a mile from, not even a quarter mile from my house in the park, was a bench that Julian and I used to sit on when we’d go walk our dogs. And that bench had always been commemorated to someone else, and I decided I wanted to make a bench for Julian, because we didn’t, we don’t have a grave site for him, but this was our way of having a place to sit and ponder and be close to him. And it turns out that, again, this was during the pandemic. It was hard to get a new bench built, but it turned out that the previous bench commemoration supporters stopped supporting that bench. So the plaque was removed. And I looked at this the bench, and I said, Oh, my God, the plaque is gone. So I asked the Friends of the Wiscon, the organization that keeps the park beautiful, and can is that bench available? And they said, Sure, so that’s where Julian’s bench is. Now, it was the very same bench that we used to sit on after we would walk the dogs, and it’s a beautiful spot. So we go there every weekend. And those are the ways we observe and how we keep them alive. I guess that’s the point. Khadija, you know, his memory lives, lives on, and like they say in the Jewish tradition, you know, may his memory be a blessing. You know, his death is never anything other than a searing, terrible, traumatic thing, but his memory is comforting to us.

Gene 39:32

So Tony, we’re going to be putting in a blog of a guy, Joe Hopper, and how he lost his son. It’s an interview that we did with him. One of the things he said was he has the question, Why did Ford make the windshield big and they were small? So move. So moving forward. I mean, the idea was, it’s something, it’s more important at a stage to look forward than it is to look back. So using that, that analogy, what is your ongoing commitment in terms of looking forward in terms of your life, dealing with grief, dealing with trauma, dealing with friends, What? What? What’s your windshield looking for?

Dr. Tony Rostain 40:32

Yeah, so personally, you know, I’m at that stage in life where I know that I don’t have forever. So what do I do with the time I have to be this present as possible to every facet of my life? So for me, anyway, my appreciation of spirituality and meditation and mindfulness has deepened, my connection with my family has deepened and with my friends, I think I’ve learned to be vulnerable and ask for help in new ways. I’m still working in therapy, believe it or not, my therapist, Sid Pulver, is 97 years old and still going strong and together. We’re looking at like life, like, Okay, how do you live life as fully as you can at every stage in life? Got my grandson here year and a half. He’s a bundle of joy. And what’s amazing to me is that Isabel and Jeff, her husband named him Jonathan Elliot, which are the same initials as Julian Edmund, and Isabel, put together a book called My uncle Julian. And the book is pictures of Julian at doing different things, how he loved to dance, how he loved music, how he loved to cook. And it’s a beautiful little book, and she she’s read it to Jonathan, and Jonathan points to the book and wants her to read him about his uncle, Julian. So just from the personal side, that Julian’s life still lives in our family’s memory, that we just feel him with us. I’ve had incredible dreams. I write my dreams and send and send them to people when I’m ready to share them. And then, in terms of the work we’re doing in psychiatry and in mental health, I think the work that you do at the Clay Center really embodies a fundamental value I have, which is that we have to share what we know with each other. We have to help each other face the tough times that people have to endure in life in general, but especially when you’re struggling with mental illness. And we have to have compassion, and to me, compassion, which is empathy in action, is what I’ve devoted my life to, and I was doing that before Julian’s death, but now it’s a sharper focus. It’s a sharper focus being able to talk about trauma and traumatic loss, being able to talk about the darkness that descends on people that may lead them to not be able to help themselves out of where they are, the need to just really walk the walk with people who are suffering. That’s what that’s really part of my work. And what I love about you guys is that you want us to share our stories. You know that, as you said earlier, at the outset, for every fact, every statistic, every objective description of any problem, whether it’s depression, suicide or anxiety or what have you, there’s human beings that are suffering. And maybe the deeper realization, then, is to be human and to be alive is to have to suffer. And how do we take that suffering and make it work for us? John Dewey once said, it’s not experience that teaches us, it’s reflection about experience that teaches us how to live. So how do we reflect on our experiences? That’s what we do every day. That’s what the blessing is. The last thing I want to say going forward is the importance of poetry and music like Gene, you know, pink, Freud, and all of the music that you share with people, that we share with people that makes life worthwhile, you know, music is one part of life that I know I couldn’t live without. And then the other thing I’ve discovered and bring into my work is poetry. So. Every time we have a department meeting, I start the department meeting with a poem. Now I’m going to read you. The final thing I want to do is read one more Sara Rihanna poem. But I will say that when you read a poem to people, just like when you play them a song, the moment becomes richer, and that’s all we have right all we have are the moments. That I think is why where I’m going right now is deepening, as much as I can, the capacity to be present and to fully, fully be aware of all of the things that are going on. So this, this last poem, is actually the first poem in the in the book that I’m reading to you, from which I’m reading to you, the book is called Loving the God, and it’s Sara Rian. Hearts don’t stop at the same time, so every love story must have grief, but it doesn’t end. The love expands. The story deepens. Time means nothing, and memories pierce through the decades. The greatest love story is watching a Griever loving the gong.

Gene 46:29

So Tony, I want to make a commitment to you. I forget how soon it was after Julian died, but one of two of us in the band, Carrie Groff, your student, your resident, yes. Wrote a poem about Julian Yes, and I said it to music, and we haven’t finished it, maybe because I just wanted to get it right. But I, I promise you, we’ll, we’ll, we’ll finish it.

Dr. Tony Rostain 47:06

I’m looking forward to it. I mean, I love that you started it. I love the, you know, I love the poem, and I love the way you were, you were you were putting the music behind it. But, yeah, that’s, that’s going to help me heal. That’s the best we can do, right is, is create something of our lives that helps us heal through the suffering.

Khadijah 47:30

Well, I wanted to thank you for having this conversation with us. Thank you for you know, sharing your journey and your words of kind of inspiration and what has helped you, it has been incredibly, you know, powerful and moving. And before we started, you mentioned, everyone has to reckon with who they are when they’re faced with a loss like this. And for so many people, their experience is still incredibly, shout shrouded in this shame and silence and secrecy and hearing your story and how for you, focusing on love, connection, community, really kind of set the stage and made the space for you to have your healing and recovery journey. And so hopefully, you know this will resonate with someone who is kind of struggling or feeling alone or loss. And so that’s really what, our hope is. And as we wrap up, you know, are there any other resources that you’d recommend to a parent that’s helped you? You know, we at the Clay Center recommend using, you know, our site, of course, as a resource. But there’s also the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. There’s the Jed Foundation, the National Alliance for Mental Illness, and the CDC, and we really, really want to emphasize to people that they should really be making sure that they’re using and going to, you know, reputable sites, evidence-based sites for these kinds of resources and help.

Dr. Tony Rostain 48:53

Absolutely, I think traumatic loss in whatever form it comes needs. Everyone in this society needs to be aware of how many of us are suffering from traumatic loss, and bring it out of the darkness into the light by talking, by listening, by creating sacred spaces in which we can reflect on that and where we give people a chance to share their journey, their loss, because the more we allow that to happen, like obviously, clinical services are important, right? And going to good care and going to groups that are well run or one fashion but even more importantly, at workplaces and churches in community centers where people gather, when we remember the dead together, we feel lighter, and we feel strong. Hunger. I was vacationing on Martha’s Vineyard a few weeks ago, and there’s a poster all over Aquinnah where I vacation, which is the native the Wampanoag Native people’s reservation. And the slogan is, community gives us courage. Community gives us courage. So, Khadijah, I would thank you that what you’re doing is building community through what you do on the in the Clay Center, but everywhere in America, people need to find their community and bring the community together to hold on and through the tough times, right? That make us feel overwhelmed, and that’s how I see the future for all of us. Because we have to, we have to, we have to endure a lot of suffering in this life, but when we have each other, it’s our family, but it’s also our community that will get us through.

Gene 51:01

And as we say at the Clay Center, don’t worry alone, exactly. So, for those of you at home, if you like, or I would say more than like, if you’ve been moved, as we have by what you’ve heard today, consider giving us a review, and as always, we hope that our conversation will help you have yours. I’m Gene Beresin

Khadijah 51:30

and I’m Khadijah Booth Watkins, until the next time,

Gene 51:34

As we conclude this episode of shrinking it down on this World Suicide Prevention Day a day to focus our global attention to the tragic public health challenge of suicide and uniting communities and governments with the shared belief of suicide prevention, we wanted to share a clarification about the story you just heard. So, to share in this clarification, here’s our guest, Dr Tony Rostain.

Dr. Tony Rostain 52:03

I was thinking about the description I gave during my interview about Julian’s state of mind during the pandemic. I mentioned that he lost his job cooking at a restaurant he really loved that he had lost a lot of connections because of the pandemic and wasn’t able to do the things he really enjoyed that he became more distant from the family. What I didn’t mention was that, after a period of not working, Julian found a job at a restaurant that he really didn’t like at all. In fact, he came to hate it, and he, yet he kept working at the place out of his own commitment to staying employed. You know, his family, his friends. We all told him that if he was feeling, you know, so much difficulty staying at this place, that he should just quit. But Julian felt this pressure to keep working, and he kept working, and this made him feel more and more trapped and more and more hopeless. So, I think that really is an important addition to the facts, as you’ll hear them later, about Julian and his difficulties right before his death.

[OUTRO MUSIC PLAYS]