(8-22-16) I’m taking a week off but I want to share this important story with you. God bless the Shoener family for their courage in speaking out about their daughter’s illness and death.
Inspired Life
She ‘loved life:’ A grieving father wrote openly about suicide and mental illness in daughter’s obituary
By Colby Itkowitz in The Washington Post
Reprinted courtesy of The Washington Post.
Only hours after he learned his only daughter was dead, Ed Shoener sat down to write her obituary. It felt like one way he could still take care of his little girl.
He and his wife, Ruth, had been steeling themselves for this day since Katie’s first hospitalization more than 11 years ago. He knew immediately why the police were at his doorstep the night of Aug. 3. Yet nothing prepares a parent for the moment they learn the details about how their child ended her life.
But if Shoener, a deacon at his Catholic church, learned anything watching his daughter’s long struggle with mental illness, it’s that the disease that plagued her is tragically misunderstood. The last thing he could do for his daughter was try to help others understand.
So, with stunning candor, he began her obituary like this:
Kathleen ‘Katie’ Marie Shoener, 29, fought bipolar disorder since 2005, but she finally lost the battle on Wednesday to suicide in Lewis Center, Ohio.
Then, overwhelmed by the fatherly pull to protect her, he wrote this:
So often people who have a mental illness are known as their illness. People say that “she is bipolar” or “he is schizophrenic.” Over the coming days as you talk to people about this, please do not use that phrase. People who have cancer are not cancer, those with diabetes are not diabetes. Katie was not bipolar — she had an illness called bipolar disorder — Katie herself was a beautiful child of God.
