For those who didn’t get a chance to listen to the archives of the Eric Hipple. Heidi and I wanted to give you some of the special things he said on the show. Please listen to the March 15th archives and let us know what you thought.

Gloria (see quotes below.For the entire transcript choose “Past Show Transcripts from the sidbar on the right)

…our topic today is Real Men Do Cry and our guest is Eric Hipple. Eric Hipple was quarterback for the Detroit Lions from 1980-1989 and he lost his 15-year-old son, Jeff, to a self-inflicted gunshot wound in 2000. On this show, Eric shares with us how his professional life and his training as a supreme athlete have both helped him and hindered him in dealing with the death of his son. Eric has gone on to help others recognize the risk for suicide and to deal with the aftermath of the event. Eric serves on the National Advisory Board of the University of Michigan’s Depression Center and has become a presenter on depression and suicide prevention at middle schools, high schools, and colleges throughout Michigan. Eric has always been an inspiration to others both on and off the playing field. Welcome to the show, Eric.

E: Well, thank you for having me. I really appreciate the opportunity. Thank you, Heidi. Thank you, Gloria.
G: Thanks.It’s great to have you on. Before we get started, could you tell us a little about Jeff and about your journey.
E: Yeah. You know, as I look back, of course, now most of the thoughts I have are all good thoughts and very positive thoughts. In fact, I was going through for another project some 4-1/2 hours worth of tape of old home movies over the weekend. Yeah, and just watching the kids grow up and stuff and seeing there’s still a little tug of the heart strings and going back and watching the fun of him and enjoying him when he was younger and then, of course, the flash to when he was older and started having the difficulty, and then that’s where it’s kind of still a little bit painful and I think it always will be but the good certainly outweighs that tinge of the heart a little bit when you think that his life will no longer go forward.
G: Yeah, only 15 years. How many children do you have?
E: I have four total and the rest are girls. He was my only son.
G:Yeah, it was the same with us. Where did he fit in the family?
E: He fit second to the oldest, so he’s number two.
G Uh huh, your second son, yeah.Well Eric now, could you tell us about him He was four when you quit playing ball, right?
E:Yeah.And so he doesn’t remember much about me playing except for the fact that from ’95 to 2000, I was working with Fox Pre-game Show, so for his ages 11-15, he was involved in that side of it so he could still see the involvement in the football and everything else that was going on. So he got some of that stuff where he got to go in the studios and see as stuff was happening and so on.
H:I would imagine he loved that. That would be a boy’s dream, wouldn’t it, to have a father that was doing that?
E: You know what, I don’t know how he did You know, he was great at basketball. Basketball was his sport, not football, which was interesting. He was better built for basketball. Loved basketball and so he was more of the basketball player. In fact, he was captain of his freshman basketball team.
G:So tell us did you have some idea that he was feeling depressed?
E: That’s one thing that’s real difficult looking back on and I used to beat myself up really bad about it because I knew something was wrong but I didn’t know what. I compare this this way if you’ll give me the time to explain it. This is how I dealt with the guilt. You can only deal with what information you have at the time. It’s like blaming a surgeon back in the Civil War days when they used to amputate legs and not wash their hands and go to another person. Well, they had more people die from the operation from bacteria and infection than they did actually from the gunshot wounds. So you would look at that nowadays and say how could somebody operate and not wash their hands? What were they thinking? But, you know what, tha’s all the information they had. So I look back on when Jeff was experiencing his symptoms and what he was going through.I only had the information I had to deal with in going through with that and so I took him to the general practitioner several times because he had aches and he didn’t feel well, but that’ the only way he could explain it. It was he didn’t feel good. He didn’t feel well.
G:Now did he take his life with a gunshot, then?
E:Yes, he did.
G: I know some of the guys who hunt or some people who are policemen that I’ve talked to whose kids have taken their life with their guns feel very guilty about that.
E: Yeah, that’s part of it, but in the same token, he was well versed on how to use a gun because we would go skeet shooting and so he had gone through gun management where they’re trained on how to use them and so he had his certificate and stuff like that.Â
G: So, you’d say to those guys out there, look. What?The ones whose kids have shot themselves. What would you say to them?
E: I would say first of all, protect the gun very well. I mean and even at the best protection
G: Yeah, they all feel that way. Even the best protection.
E: I think the stats run that of those that die by gunshot wound, 90 percent of the guns are already inside the house. Only 10 percent of the people actually have gone out and bought a gun to take their life. It’s like 90 percent of them are done, and a lot of times, you’ve got that impulsivity phase that’s in the immediate that there’s no going back after a gunshot wound. If somebody overdoes or something like that, or you’ve got some time, there’s a time frame there.
H: So teenagers can be impulsive. Teenagers are impulsive and they can do impulsive things in the spur of the moment. Was there something in his life like a break up that you think triggered this or was it just a lot of things?
E: I think it was overall degradation over a period of time because the previous year around spring time, he started not feeling well and not wanting to go to school and then the year that he died, the same thing happened to him except it was a little more severe. It seemed like he was just going through the blues or something like that that’s happening to him but it was around spring time and one thing that a lot of people don’t realize is that one of the highest suicide rates is the first week of May, which is, well, that’s weird because it’ spring time.
H: You’d think it would be winter.
E: Right, I mean, in the wintertime? Spring’s okay, but I don’t know why it is.
H: Isn’t it because people are feeling better and they’re feeling like they have the energy to do it now?
E: That could be.
G: Or maybe life should be better. Well tell us, you’ve talked about the taboos connected around suicide, can you talk about that for our audience?
E: The taboos that surround it?
G: Suicide. Whether people talk about it or not.
E: Well, yeah. I think one of the myths that you don’t talk about it because you’re afraid to put it in somebody’s mind is certainly a myth. The fact is usually that if you are able to come to an understanding that this is what the person is thinking about, that there actually is a trust tha’s built up and they understand, the anxiety is lessened. They’re more apt to seek help and to look for support.
G: But how about people talking to you about it after Jeff took his own life? Were people willing to talk to you about it?
E: That was one of the most difficult things because it is a hush-hush deal. If there is an accident, for example, when somebody is losing their life either through any type of loss is tragic when it’s sudden. I don’t care what kind it is. The only difference is if you’re at the viewing or the funeral and people come up and say, ‘So what happened?” and that somebody has lost their son or daughter to a tragic traffic accident, for example, and says, “Oh, they lost control of the car.” You know, they will describe it. With suicide, not many people come up and say, “So what happened?” In fact, people don’t know what to say. The best thing that anybody can say is just give their condolences and a hug or do like that because I think that quiet understanding, I’m here for you, whatever you need to know, I think that’s brave. But a lot of times people are afraid to even associate with it because they don’t understand it.
G How did you feel about people who said, “How did he die?” and then you said, “With a gunshot wound,” and then they said, “Well, tell me about it.” Did anybody do that? How would you have felt?
E:Those that are immediately associated, that I knew personally, knew how he died. Those that read about it or came or, you know, afterwards that didn’t know exactly the circumstance behind it, I felt compelled to explain to them, you know, this is what was going on in his life. I tried to explain to them that this was what was going on and this is a serious thing. For the last three or four weeks, he was complaining of headaches and stomachaches and not feeling well. His grades had dropped. So I found myself explaining the symptoms of depression to them over and over again as a prelude to the thought so they would understand that it wasn’t just an impulsive act that was done. I mean, this was a plan that was enacted out.
H: So you felt the need to educate people, which I love that you felt that need, and let people know this is depression and this is what it looks like and these somatic complaints are part of depression.
E: Right, especially in teenagers—agitation, withdrawal, and all the sleep problems and all the stuff that went along with it. Like I said, if you could go back and paint that picture, then it kind of is understood.
G: One thing we talk about a little bit is that sometimes men don’t talk about loss as much as women do. They tend to have more of a society. Did you feel that way because I’m wondering because you were a football player if there was some kind of a team mentality that you had any way? Do you think you talk more than other guys did?
E: I don’t know because at the early beginnings, I felt compelled to talk to try to explain, like I said, because you still want to celebrate his life and it’s really hard to do when people aren’t asking about his life because they’re afraid because of the way he died, and so I wanted to explain that away so people understood no, this is why this happened. It’s like somebody dying from an illness. This is what happened. Somebody dies from cancer, they get sick first and they prelude up to it.
H: But I do think you’re unusual that like my mom said, you were willing and able and wanted to be so verbal and vocal and I think it’s so important. They just had something on Newsweek magazine this week, the cover is about men and depression and how they don’t talk about it enough.
G: On that point, let’s take a break on talking about men and depression. So we’re coming up for break and I’m your host, Dr. Gloria Horsley, and please stay tuned to hear more from Eric Hipple on Real Men Do Cry and you can access the archives of this show from our website, www.thegriefblog.com. Please stay tuned for more.
When we went to break, we were talking about the magazine article on men and depression and this show is pre-recorded so I think that you’ll have to look at where’s it from, Newsweek, Heidi?
H: Eric, have you seen it?
E: Yeah, it was in Newsweek, I believe, yeah.
G: Our show will be on and you might have to look back a couple of weeks to get the right Newsweek. I wanted to ask you one thing about men and depression but also, Eric, now were you married to Jeff’s mom at the time?
E: No, I was not. In fact, I had been remarried for 14 years at the time.
G: Yeah, let’s talk about that for our audience out there. For the guys who are remarried, were there any issues that came in around that and did Jeff live with you or with his mom?
E: Actually, and that’s one of the things – when you talk about depression, that’s one of the issues that was one thing I did not know about was the stress factor that enacts on the biological side of someone who might be predisposed to depression which runs in my family and also happens to run in my ex-wife’s family. But we were divorced back in ’90 and so he lived with his mom in Utah and would come out. So he was with me for a year and then moved back with her for a year, then came back out with me for a year, and what’s strange is the fact that we had a great relationship and still do.
G:You mean with your ex-wife?
E: With my ex-wife, yeah, and so there was never any fighting or anything. In fact, my oldest daughter explained it – both Jeff and her were from Jan they explained it this way, they said no matter what we did, we were homesick because when we lived with you, we loved living with you but we missed mom. When we lived with mom, we loved living with her but we missed you, and so this idea of having this great compatibility was still very disruptive for kids.
G: Now what about guilt connected with that? For the guys out there that are having this, did you feel some of that?
E: Certainly. Yeah, I do and there’s no getting around it. There will always be a little bit there because in his growing up, and I think – what was he when we divorced? He was at a young age.
G:Probably like one, right?
E:Um, three, I think. Yeah. And so he’d spend all the summer times with me and then go back out and then all the Christmas time, summer time. So we never had an issue with badmouthing each other or anything else. There never was a tug of war. You would think that that would be the best situation you could ever have.
H: And the thing about it is, Eric, and you did bring up the point that genetics plays a big role in this, and the reality is 50 percent of all marriages end in divorce and 50 percent of all teens are not killing themselves. So it’s easy for people to be armchair quarterbacks, and I know you like that term because you were a quarterback, and say well you could have, should have, would have done this and this and that, but the reality is, you did what you thought you were doing and you raised him in a good home with two loving parents in two different houses and this happened.
E: Right, and I think that’s one thing that people don’t understand is the fact that these major stress issues, they can act on the genetic predisposition and so that’s one thing we know about depression is the fact that stress factors is what kind of stimulates it and we know the major onset of depression is age 15 to 19.Â
G: But what about you, Eric, for our audience out there? You said you’ve got some depression in your family. How did you deal with it after Jeff died?
E: Actually, that’s what’s got me in the mode that I’m in right now was to go back and finally get some education to understand what’s going on. I finally asked my mother what was wrong with my Aunt Joanne.I found out at age 16 my Aunt Joanne was institutionalized with schizophrenia at the time. We knew something was wrong but nobody ever talked about it at all.
G: So you went back and did some family talking.
E: Yeah. Well, I went back and tried to recreate what would happen to me and some of the feelings I had and then when I found out what depression was and started looking at all the things, I went back in my own history and said, oh, my gosh.I could paint the crying spells at nighttime and having trouble sleeping, some of the procrastination stuff until it got to a crisis moment and then you handle it then. All those things and the mood feelings that I had that I realized oh, my gosh, it runs in our family.
H: You had some of the same things as Jeff it sounded like.
E: Yeah, and one of the problems is if you’ve had it and you’ve lived with it, i’s hard to ever recognize unless you’ve already discovered it, have gotten treatment for it, then you can recognize it. Otherwise, you’re saying, well, I was like that when I was young, so
H:That’s normal. You might think it’s normal.
G: Well, Eric, one of the things I’m interested in that we’re hearing here is some of the things like sleep problems and those kind of problems are normal grieving so do you have any thoughts on how if a guy has had a child die, how they might know if it’s normal or not? What did you do? Do you have any thoughts for them?
E: Well, actually, first of all, anybody that does have a death, especially a quick tragic one, any death is bad enough but a quick tragic one, it slams you and just halts everything. There’s no time to prepare for anything else and all of a sudden that just takes over and then trying to deal with normal functioning in that grief process is very difficult and in fact clinicians won’t even try and do a diagnosis with somebody that’s grieving for the first year.
G: Some of them won’t.
H: Hopefully they won’t.
E:Yeah, hopefully they won’t because a lot of the things that go on with the doubt feelings and the crying spells and all that stuff and agitation and I’m feeling out of sorts, all those are part of grieving.
H: And how about being angry?
E:Being angry is huge.
H:Now were you angry at Jeff?
E:No, now that’s one thing I never did. In fact, the moment I got the phone call, in a weird way, I understood it and maybe because of what I was dealing with. When I got angry was when I found out. First of all, I became very destructive. I really didn’t care much about living or myself and I went through that process for a while.
G: Talk about that a little more. What kinds of things did you do?
E Well, you know, impulsive things. Like my driving. I didn’t care how I acted. I started self-medicating pretty heavily.
G: Were you drinking or doing drugs?
E: Yeah, well, about anything that helps to get my mind somewhere else, but I ended up getting pulled over for a DUI and then with that, the programs they had available to go to and everything else to stay out of trouble, I didn’t care.I didn’t go to them. So about every chance the judge gave me, I didn’t really care. So I ended up doing 58 days in jail and that 58 days was spent a lot of time sleeping and thinking and reading so between those three things, I think about halfway through I decided well, I can leave this and do what I’m doing or I can take my life or I can fix it and find out what’s going on. And that was the third choice that I decided to take was let me research this. Let me understand it. Let me get my hands around it.
G: What kind of stuff were you reading?
E: About actually anything I could get my hands on just to get my mind away from anything and I would end up reading myself to sleep. And that’s including the Bible, its including Newsweek, Time, anything else, any book, any novel, anything else that was there trying to get my mind away from everything else that was there. Just trying to focus on something else than my thoughts and I found out you can’t run away from your thoughts.
G: Was religion helpful for you?
E:Â I’ve always been pretty religious in my life and so it was helpful. Trying to get redirected was helpful. I think everybody has to have sort of a purpose in life and I kind of had lost mine, and I have a family left over that I could either walk away from or pull things together and survive it.
H: So it was in jail that you decided look, I’m going to pull myself together and try to figure out wha’s going on with me.
E: Yeah. And when I did come out,
G: I want to ask you one thing. Did you have any counseling when you were in jail?
E: Yes.
G: Was that helpful?
E: But I had had counseling beforehand, too. One of the greatest things that I did that really helped me that I refocused back in on was some of the grief counseling that I received right after Jeff died.
G: So you went back to it even though it didn’t help you at the time. You still did this wild behavior and all that even though you had the information.
E: Yeah. The first phase I went through was okay dealing with getting along on a daily basis and that means being able to function during the day time in a somewhat normal fashion and learning there’s a time to grieve and I did so with the use of a tool, like a candle that I used to set up and light in the evening time and that would be the time that I would grieve and so trying to place the grieving time so I’d know I’d have the time to do it so I could function during the day time.
H: You set limits on your grief, which is great.
E: Yeah, otherwise, every little trigger that hits you, you find yourself crying in the middle of the day. Whatever you’re doing, all of a sudden tears start flowing. It’s just every little thing that hits you and your life has kind of come to an end and you have to refocus and get that energy back and know when you can grieve. It was a process that I kind of let get away from me and then so I went back to that.
H: Did any of your training as a professional athlete help you with your grief process?
E: You know what, the only thing I think that really helped me out more than anything from my athletic career was the fact of getting knocked down and getting back up again. You know the next play is going to come at you no matter what, so get back up. G: What about expecting the team to help you?ÂThe support team. Could you pull that in at all?
E: Yeah, the fact that, metaphorically speaking, yes, you’re not going to be successful unless you bring people together, okay, and understand that you need a team to work with because you can’t do this alone. You can’t do it alone on the field and you can’t do it alone by yourself in the arena that you’re certainly in in life. You need people around and so, yes, that was a part of it, and sometimes you forget that you have a team and you are often trying to do things by yourself.
G: Do you think there’s any feeling that maybe you want to punish yourself a bit too? Like your behaviors but also rejecting other people or not letting them help or not letting them in. Was there any of that for you?
E: I don’t know if that other than the fact that I was just very angry at the fact that this knowledge is out there that I didn’t know about. That nobody had talked about it. The fact that we might have been able to save Jeff, you know, if I would have known this stuff before.
H: And the fact that maybe if you’d brought him to doctors and somebody had said when they were examining him, you know what, this is a serious depression. We need to get some serious help here.
E: True. But I realized this. If you don’t know what to say to a doctor, it’s very difficult for them to be able to – in their short period of time – be able to diagnose you. So I use that to a degree of trying to explain symptoms. The reason why you need to learn as much as you can so when you go in front of a professional, you need to say, “These are the things that are happening to me” just like you would if you had strep throat, for example. Okay, my throat hurts really badly so they know where to look. So if I go and I say “I’m not eating well” “I’m not sleeping well.” “I’m anxious all the time.I can’t concentrate”. And you start listing these things, they’ll say, “Ah hah.” They’ll know where to direct you. But if you just go in and say, “I don’t feel good.” What are they supposed to do? And so I don’t blame the doctors for Jeff’s case. I blame it more on the lack of education from not knowing. Like I said, go back to the Civil War doctors. They do’t blame themselves, obviously. I’m sure if they were living now, they’d say oh, my gosh, so many I killed.
H: Well, and it’s people like you and you going out and doing outreach and educating the world that’ll hopefully prevent some other child from taking their life.
E: Yeah, and that’s the hope and that’s the goal and that’s why I’m doing what I’m doing.
G: And that also gives you purpose, doesn’t it, for Jeff’s life? E: Yes, it does, and I think sometimes in the bigger scheme of things, maybe that ‘s what had to be done not only to save other lives, but maybe to save mine as well. So I kind of look at it that way, but it doesn’t get past the point of the fact that you lost somebody. In fact, as we’re talking about this grieving process, it really hit home about a week ago when I heard on the radio that our Oakland County Commissioner’s son was killed in a tragic snowmobile accident. That came back and hit home because he’s a friend of mine and he’s going through something that I went through, and just monitoring wha’s going on in his situation, it’s the same thing. It’s day time and tears will be coming and trying to fight them off, yet you’ve got this huge job, responsibility for all these people, and yet how do you take care of yourself and do it? And I liked what I heard you guys talking about, Gloria, when you were talking about yourself and taking care of yourself. I love that because I think of the symbolism on the airplane, when they pull down the mask and say make sure you take care of yourself before you can take care of anybody else. And I love that symbolism because I think tha’s it. You can’t take care of your family. You can’t take care of anything unless you take care of yourself first. Once you’re healthy and healing, then you can take care of everybody else. Then you can take that burden on and make sure you’re taking care of yourself because you’re doing it. Otherwise, you don’t do anybody any good. In fact, you can actually do more harm.
G: Right. Now, Eric, when you went to jail, how long had it been since Jeff had died?
E: It was, I’m trying to think of the actual time frame. I think it was within a year. It was within that year.
G: Okay, because that’s one of the points I want to make to guys. We don’t expect you to have this amazing turnaround after you listen to the show, right? Eric is talking about how he had this information but it really sunk in later on in the year, didn’t it?
E:Yeah, I think I went through the initial grieving part just to get to function. I could function in the day time and move around but then that soon turned to, you know, I can function, but still have all the stuff still inside and so the self-medicating and not paying attention, not really caring was still with me and then I let that get away from me.
G:We’re coming up on break now and I’m your host, Dr. Gloria Horsley, and we’re talking to Eric Hipple about Real Men Do Cry and about the death of his son, Jeff, and please stay tuned to hear more on this show and go to our website, www.thegriefblog.com, to put in your story and to leave a short comment. Please stay tuned.
Well, Eric, I love the title we picked for this. I said to you, let’s see, what shall we call it? Real Men Don’t Cry? And you said, no, Real Men Do Cry.
H: I love that, too.
G: And I thought that was excellent. I know we’ve got football fans out there that have watched you play from what was it, ’80?
E:’80 to ’89, actually, right.
G: Can you talk about being a real man and what it means? Give us a picture of that and then we’ll talk about what happens when something happens to a real man. How is it out on the field and being a quarterback? You’re telling everybody what to do.
H: And that’s a lot of pressure, isn’t it?
E: Yeah, and, well, it’s pressure where you get immediate feedback, and it’s sometimes a good thing and sometimes a bad thing. If you’re having a good day, it’s a great day, and I was talking to age 15 to 16 year old group of boys the other day and one of them asked what’s it like to get booed? I said, well, it depends if that’s during the game or if they’re booing you as you’re being introduced onto the field. There’s two different things. One is, eh, you know, it’s part of the game, okay. But if you’re getting booed while you’re walking on the field, you feel a lot of pressure just to complete the first pass. But I think a lot of the stuff in athletics is the macho behind it and the fact that you’re bulletproof.You have to have no fear. You can’t be intimidated so you’re going to have to take care of the business at hand and if you get knocked down, you’ve got to get up again and keep fighting and it’s done in a time frame so you know you’ve got that 60 minutes worth of fighting time that you’re fighting for and so you can give it everything you’ve got in that 60 minutes. I think where that loses translation is when you approach that into real life. It’s hard to have that intensity and maintain that through your whole life span. And so what happens is you find yourself. It’s not as intense.
H: There’s a lot of highs and rushes, I would think, that you get during those 60 minutes that you probably want to recreate off the playing field.
E: That’s the other side of it that I was talking about when somebody asked me what its like to be booed? I said, well, what’s it like to get cheered? And I said to have 80,000 people screaming your name is a really really cool neat thing to have happen. It’s kind of like an experience where you’re just kind of along for the ride and every thing’s going along really really well. They call that “in the zone” feeling, but those are very impactful things to have happen to you and it’s almost impossible to recreate. I’d say the most powerful feeling I’ve ever felt to compare to any emotion like that was when Jeff died. That was an emotion that I couldn’t control. I still can’t even put it into words.
H: Now obviously you had no problem showing your tears and being emotional and I was wondering if there were ever any teammates.I know it was a few years later, but, that visited you and when you broke down, they couldn’t deal with it because they felt that real men don’t cry.
E: I think within the confines of, dad, there are certainly some people that said you know what, they don’t understand the whole thing and they don’t. They may understand it at their own level but didn’t want to deal with it because they don’t want to face it and there’s also the mentality that, toughen up.
G: Suck it up, isn’t that what they say?
E: Yeah, suck it up.
G: Scott was a quarterback on the football team in high school and he always talked about sucking it up.
E: Yeah, suck it up. Get over it, you know. But I think the ones that are really, actually the real true men, I should say, that I believe in, are the ones that did come to the aid and were able to sit there with you and put his arm around you, be able to cry with you, be able to understand it, be able to visit you and see how you’re doing, and just let whatever emotion you have, let it out. And they helped you. I think that’s the true man that does that and there were many of them that came to my aid.
G: We had Bill Hancock on our show. I don’t know if you know him. He wrote Riding with the Blue Moth and he was in charge of the basketball March Madness, and I was surprised when he talked. Wow, the sports world. There are a lot of good guys there that were there for him.
E: Yeah, and I don’t know if its the camaraderie thing that goes along with that or if its you’re in it together so you can understand it, but I think certainly there are those guys, some of them that don’t get it, but I think the majority of them that are actually compassionate and involved do understand. They understand the pain, they understand the sacrifice, and they also understand you can’t do it by yourself.
G: Now if we’ve got some men out there that feel fairly isolated, have you got any suggestions for them?
E: Look introspectively and actually look at and examine themselves and realize that they can’t do things by themselves and it’s okay not to do things by themselves. It’s okay to ask for help. It’s okay to reach out and say, I need some help. I need a friend. I need someone to walk along aside of me as I go through this, somebody I can lean on when I need to. I think that’s very important and I think it’s important for guys to understand that and not worry about how the world’s going to perceive them, because all across history, those people that seem like they didn’t have support or help, they all did. And they all had support. All the great men have always had support. Some were able to open up and reach out and absorb and pull in when they needed to and give out when they had to.
G: So, I want to say, Eric Hipple, quarterback for the Detroit Lions, 1980 to 1989 is saying to you guys, reach out, right?
E: Yeah. Reach out. Don’t be afraid. G: Don’t be afraid. So we’re coming up on break now, and I’m your host, Dr. Gloria Horsley, and this is our last break with Eric Hipple and we’e talking about Real Men Do Cry, and when we come back from break, Eric, I want to ask you if ther’s something that you would like to leave with our audience before we close our show. These shows are archived on our website www.thegriefblog.com as well as www.thecompassionatefriends.org website. They can also be downloaded through Itunes. Please stay tuned for more.
Well, Eric, one thing we haven’t had too much of a chance to talk about is your family. I wanted to say, Jan, Jeff’s mom, you’re divorced from her, and you’re married to
E: I’m married to Shelly, and then I have Taylor, who’s now 15, and Tara who’s now 13.
G: Okay, and then you have an older daughter.
E: Yes, Erica.
G: Erica. And is it Erica that wrote the poem?
E: No, actually it’s my youngest.
G: Oh, your youngest daughter wrote you a poem. When did she write this?
E: She actually wrote it at age 12, but she was age 7 when Jeff died at age 15 so this has stuck with her and she wrote this poem, like I said, about a year ago, and it was published in a small area here and went out on a program. This is how it carries along. Loss and how it reverberates. But I’ll read this real quick to you. It says:

You were here,
You were fine,
From my mother’s heart
From the look in my father’s eyes
From Erica’s warm visit
To Taylor’s sparkle in her eyes
Went blind
From Erica’s warm visit
To a disastrous moment
You were here
You were fine
How can you do this?
What should I do?
With me in the other room
To a sore sharp pain in my jump
I can never describe that painful thump
You were here
You were fine
You were part of us
I can’t describe walking into the dining room
Seeing past or sitting at one end of the table
Mom sitting at the other
I still can’t describe
How numb I was
When I lowered my head
Into my mother’s arms
As the words
“He took his own life”
Went into the deepest of harms.
I just want to say
That you saved a lot of people’s lives
I thank God every day
For you being in our lives
Even though you are not with us in person
You are still with us in spirit
Just answer one question for me
What should I do?

And I think that question, “what should I do?” really just rings out and, like I said, this has stuck with her, but I think it sticks with everybody’s lives when you’ve had a tremendous loss. And what should you do? You should take care of yourself. You should reflect back on the positive moments, on how the person lived, not how they died, and, like I said, take care of yourself. Make sure that you get healthy and help others that you can help them to a position that you’re in.
G: Yeah, that’s great advice. Heidi, I was wondering, that poem was so moving. As a sibling, what came up for you with that?
H Just how profound the loss is. These girls have lost their only brother. I lost my only brother and our brothers will live on forever in our memories. We are who we are today because we knew them and they were part of our lives and they had a huge impact on us and they always will.
G: Yeah, and it says to me something, Eric, the fact that Tara could talk about her brother taking his life by suicide five years later, that to me is really key because that says that you have not kept this a secret in your family. This has been an open thing that people have been able to talk about which is so freeing for everyone.
E: Yeah, it is, and then, you know, I think people’s minds are starting to change a little bit and accept that type of death as a tragic loss as any other loss is, and so my hope and prayers go out to anybody that’s ever lost a son or daughter.
G: And I wanted to say that it’s wonderful that University of Michigan has a fabulous site for depression.
H: Very comprehensive.
G: And I would really recommend that people go on to that site. What other things are you doing now, Eric?
E: I’m Outreach Coordinator for University of Michigan Depression Center now so I moved from the National Advisory Board capacity to actually being on staff. And we have particular programs. We’re involved in a program right now with the National Football League Players Association and identifying depression in men and helping with that. But also I go to a lot of schools, I think 48 schools last year, and 30 some odd different community
G: Wow, you spoke at 48 schools?
E: Yeah. And so that continues on.
G: What if people wanted you to speak at their school? How would they get in touch with you?
E: www.depressioncenter.org. That will put them into the University of Michigan Depression Center site and I’m on their speaker’s bureau.
G Oh, great. So you go around the country and speak on that. That’s fabulous.
E: Yeah. It spread out from just Michigan to wider ranges which is neat to see so the word’s getting out.
G: Yeah, now you were our grand marshal for The Compassionate Friends program, their conference in Michigan a year ago, and I wondered, did you do any Compassionate Friends or do you know anybody who’s gone to those groups?
E:You know what, no. I know people who have gone to the groups and relate back and forth but as far as my time has been solely really kind of tied up as it is.
G: Well I was thinking early on. You didn’t ever attend anything right after Jeff died.
E: I’ll be honest with you. I did not know about Compassionate Friends until – and this is I think something that we need to get the word out more about Compassionate Friends – I did not know about Compassionate Friends until a later date.
H: So it’s time for our show to close. I want to thank our guest, Eric Hipple. Please tune in again next week when our topic will be When Compassion Can’t Wait and our guest will be Valerie Sobel, founder of the Andre Sobel River of Life Foundation in memory of her son, Andre. Join us to hear about the Foundation and the work of this remarkable woman, Valerie. This show is archived on our blog, www.thegriefblog.com, as well as the www.thecompassionatefriends.org website. This is Heidi Horsley. Please tune in again next Thursday at 9:00 Pacific Standard Time, 12:00 Eastern for more of Healing the Grieving Heart, a show of hope and renewal and support. Remember, others have been there and made it, and you can, too. You need not walk alone. Thanks again for listening. I’m Dr. Heidi Horsley, and Eric, I just wanted to say that Jeff is gone but not forgotten. He lives on in your memories and in all the work you do. Thank you for bringing awareness about depression and suicide to the world. Thank you, Eric.
E: Thank you, Heidi. Thank you for having me on. I appreciate it.