October 3, 2023
Scattering Hope:
A Guide for Healing After Losing a Loved One to Suicide
Crystal Partney
Aviva Publishing (2023)
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-63618-293-3
E-book ISBN: 978-1-63618-294-0
New Book Provides Healing After Losing a Loved One to Suicide
Scattering Hope: A Guide for Healing After Losing a Loved One to Suicide is a heartfelt and helpful new book by Crystal Partney, who knows what it is to have a loved one take their own life.
Crystal’s older sister Gina was someone she looked up to and learned a lot from. They had a strong relationship. Gina even gave her helpful parenting advice when Crystal had her daughter. Then one day, the day before Crystal’s birthday, Gina took her life. Crystal shares all the wonderful things about her sister as well as the difficulties in her life that led up to that devastating day when she learned she no longer had her sister. And then she details for us her journey of how she sought to heal from her grief. Now, four years after Gina’s death, she has written Scattering Hope to share what she has learned and to help others who have also lost a loved one to suicide.
Crystal explores the pain of loss and how grief can rise up on you unawares, such as on holidays and anniversaries, or just strike you when someone says something that sends your thoughts to your lost loved one. She admits there is no easy answer to how you heal. The process will be different for everyone, and while there are stages of grief, they do not happen linearly but ebb and flow as we try to get to the shore of inner peace and comfort. To heal, Crystal largely relied on her belief in God and read the Bible, but she knows a faith-based approach may not work for everyone, so she invites people to replace God in the book with words like Spirit or Higher Power if that works better for them. She then walks readers through each chapter of the book to discuss a different aspect of the process of healing.
Crystal discusses the various stages of grief, including denial. She explores how dramatic such a loss can be and how it can affect different people in different ways. She states:
“My life and my entire family’s life had changed instantly. No longer did I have two living sisters. No longer did my mother have three living daughters. No longer did my sister’s children have a mother to take care of them. No longer did my aunts and uncles have a niece to hold and love. No longer did the neighbors have a friend to rely on. No longer did the community have a member to enrich their lives.
“You see, when someone takes their life, it doesn’t just affect the family; suicide has a ripple effect on all the people who come in contact with that person throughout their life.”
Crystal encourages the reader to learn to take baby steps. These are simple actions you can take and that you must celebrate to keep you going, such as eating when you don’t feel like eating or just getting out of bed in the morning. One of the biggest and bravest baby steps is to allow yourself to feel your emotions and process what has happened. In fact, Crystal devotes an entire chapter to how to feel your emotions.
Other baby steps include developing a routine to follow so you don’t get lost in your grief. You also need to extend grace to yourself and others. People want to help but don’t know how and they may end up annoying you with their efforts. Crystal discusses how not to become your own barrier to letting others help you heal. She discusses how easy it is to blame ourselves for our loved one’s death or hold onto regrets, but we also need to extend grace to ourselves in these areas. The most important baby step of all is deciding you will heal and committing to finding the time, space, and energy for your healing journey.
Throughout the book, Crystal also validates what we are feeling in our grief. One passage I found very meaningful was that she reminds us that in the Bible Jesus wept when Lazarus died. This passage reminds us that crying and grieving are natural, so we need not be ashamed of our feelings or try to repress them. Crystal also reminds us that being angry at God is normal, though she firmly believes God gives us the power of choice, and our loved one, not God, made that choice to take their life. But God is there to help us heal if we ask for the help.
Throughout, the advice Crystal offers is positive and affirming. For example, she’s a huge advocate of journaling to release your emotions from your brain so it doesn’t store them. At the same time, she warns against negative ways to cope with grief. Retail therapy is a huge no-no that you will regret later when you get your credit card bill. Comfort foods might be okay for a day or two, but then you have to return to eating healthy food. You are not making the world better because you are not taking care of yourself.
Part of Crystal’s healing was inspired by having her young daughter to care for. She realized her sister’s death was her daughter’s first experience with death. How Crystal handled the death would teach her daughter how to grieve when future tragedies struck. Rather than crumble under the weight of her despair, she knew she needed to rise up and be “a catalyst for moving forward with hope.”
Another chapter is devoted to the topic of forgiveness. Crystal encourages us to forgive our loved one, forgive ourselves, and forgive others we might blame. We also need to extend grace to insensitive people who might make disparaging or just improper comments about our loved one’s death.
Ultimately, when the worst of the grief has passed, Crystal explains how we can focus on the good memories rather than just how our loved one died. That gives us the chance to celebrate the person our loved one was. She explores ways to honor our loved one’s memory. These do not have to be big showy celebrations. They can be simple things like cooking foods our loved one enjoyed while we think of them.
Each chapter of Scattering Hope ends with exercise prompts for the reader to help them in their healing. There are also powerful affirmations that Crystal recommends saying out loud to help us heal. Additional resources are offered, such as how to help raise awareness of suicide prevention.
Having lost a friend to suicide myself and a brother to an unexpected death, I have used many of the tools Crystal offers and know that they can help with healing. I hope if you are suffering, you will read this book and it will help bring you the comfort and peace your loved one would want for you.
For more information about Scattering Hope and Crystal Partney, visit Amazon.com.
— Tyler R. Tichelaar, PhD and award-winning author of Narrow Lives and The Best Place
