Walking Through the Grief of Suicide

You know, suicide pain is something that if you’ve never, ever been in that deep, dark place where you can’t even function and the pain of it is so intense and that’s what hurts my mother’s heart so much is that he had such pain and I wasn’t there to help him through it.  

Greetings and welcome everyone to Breaking Bread, the podcast brought to you by Apostolic Christian Counseling and Family Services. It’s always an honor to have you along. This podcast, as you know, if you’ve been a long-time listener, you know that we try to address pertinent topics, practical topics that intersect our emotional lives, our relational lives, our spiritual lives, our physical lives. 

There’s been a topic that has been requested and been on our hearts for a long time. And there are some topics that as an interviewer and a producer, I’m not sure I can do well enough. And today’s topic is one of those topics. And the topic is suicide. An issue that is very relevant. 

It’s something that more and more we find touching us, but at varying degrees. I am very much honored to have a couple in this studio here today that has experienced the difficulty, the struggle, the questions, the hurt, the pain of suicide. And so, I want to kindly introduce Dell and June Knobloch, welcome, both of you. Thank you. Thanks. Thanks for coming and thanks for sharing. I really think this episode is one of listening. I would like my voice to be minimum and your voice to be maximum. And I think our listeners want it that way as well. You have walked through grief in a very deep way in the last number of years. 

And we would be honored for you to surface that grief in a way that we could possibly maybe partly understand. Del, would you make a beginning here, share with the audience the nature of the testimony that you and June will bring here. 

I’m Del Knobloch. I’m here with my wife, June. We lost our son, Jeff, at the age of 38 years, four days shy of his 39th birthday, actually. He died of suicide. We just want to share our journey through that moment in hopes that it can help someone else. 

Well, I’m speaking from the perspective of being a mother. Jeff was a very outgoing person. He was a family doctor. Very successful practices. And he had a beautiful family. We all had a beautiful family. And I would have never dreamt in my wildest imaginations that this would have happened to our family. 

But it can happen to anyone. Suicide is not a respecter of persons. You don’t have to be down and out and on the street. I mean, Jeff was a very high functioning, happy go lucky guy. He was always smiling. He was always telling a joke here or there. And he had this ability to connect with people’s hearts. 

He was a man of God. He loved his Lord. And he shared so freely the gift of salvation with anyone and everyone who would listen or wanted to know more. He would take the time to explain what God had done for him in his life and I think that’s probably why his practice grew so quickly because he connected with his patients and they maybe came in for a sore throat but they left with possibly medication to help them through a crisis. 

He had just a way of finding people’s hearts. No one saw this coming, not his medical partners, surely as a family, we did not see it coming. And the hard part for me was that Jeff hid this all his life and the pain that he must have been in and carrying inside all the time without being able to tell anyone. 

I realize now that in a medical profession, mental illness was a taboo thing for doctors to talk about to each other. In some states, if you had a mental crisis, you were no longer. able to practice medicine. And I think Jeff felt that he couldn’t go on anymore. He was overwhelmed. You know, he was so busy helping everyone else, and working so hard, and buying out a partner that had retired from the clinic. 

I knew that he was under financial obligations, and I knew he was working extra weekends to help with that. We did not know that they had marital difficulty and for some reason he would come home and he just couldn’t express it to us. I don’t know if it was an escape for him just to come home and be Jeff or if he just couldn’t face the fact that things weren’t going well. 

Like I said, I was shocked. I had no idea. From a mother’s perspective, I think if they had lived nearby, I maybe would have picked up on things. They lived in Grinnell, Iowa at this point, and it was five hours away. We didn’t see them that often during those years, but there were good times when he came home. 

Like I said, he would go golfing with his dad, and they’d have breakfast together like when he used to be going to college. Sometimes they would get up really early and go have breakfast before the store opened and before Jeff went to school. And he loved those one-on-one breakfasts. In fact, that was one of the things he wanted to do every time he came home. 

And he was a man who loved people, he loved his mission trips, he went on his first trip between his sophomore and junior year in high school, and he went along with his father to Juarez and that made a profound impact on his life. But he had been all over the world. He’d been up the Amazon River during rainy seasons, and they would go and take care of the villagers, who were pretty much isolated unless it was rainy season. 

That was when they could get up into those areas. He went to Honduras, he went to Africa, he went all over. And he was always refreshed after those trips because it grounded him. We live in a very affluent society and there is so much excess and when he came home it was like he was focused again. 

He was on the school board, he was a big promoter of education and music and the fine arts and he became involved in the community wherever he lived. It was very difficult for his sister. They were very, very close as children together. They weren’t very far apart in age and they were very close. 

I don’t know if he felt this was the only way that he could provide for his family. He knew he couldn’t practice medicine at this point anymore. He was just burned out. Just extremely tired. Was not sleeping and so I knew that he was under a lot of stress. He came home for a family reunion, and I was quite frankly shocked that he was so run down, but again, there’s a lot of stress in life and he had been working a lot and he needed just some rest. 

I don’t know when he decided that suicide was the solution to what he was feeling inside. I do know he was probably in tremendous pain and he had to hide it. I also know that his wife did not know what was happening. She was not versed in depression, she did not know the warning signs, and to her credit, she just didn’t know what was happening to them, but she knew something was wrong. 

She didn’t know what to do, so she took the children and left for her parents. And they lived in that community, it wasn’t like they were gone, gone, but. Are you speaking now before the suicide? Before the suicide, yes. And we didn’t know that either. And her parents never ever told us anything either. 

I felt very helpless because we were probably the last ones to know. But to give Heidi some credit here, like I said, she did not know, she did not know the signs. But she knew that this wasn’t the Jeff that she had married. As I look back, Jeff had a crisis one night over the weekend and his friends took him to the emergency room and I don’t know how hard that would be for someone who was a doctor and worked with all of these nurses and medical personnel and your partner coming in to care for you and to find a mental health bed, just like a 48 hour crisis hold. 

I knew he needed sleep, and I know that he couldn’t sleep for more than two hours a night, and it had been that way for a month. And that’s a big problem. Red flag right there. So, Jeff slept. He slept soundly. They had to take him to Iowa City. That was the only place they could find a bed for him. 

There’s a very big shortage of mental health beds in the state of Iowa and unfortunately, the Blue Cross Blue Shield policy the clinic had did not cover mental health care and the bills would be piling up. And that would add more stress. And he talked his psychiatrist or psychologist out of keeping him another 24 hours. 

He ended up going home after 24 hours. He called me to come down. Heidi had gone back to her parents. And I really needed to be there. I held him. And just ministered to him. There was nobody to take care of him. He was like, alone. And he really appreciated me being there. I was there a few days, and he says, Mom, you have to go home. 

Heidi will come home if you go home. And reluctantly, I did go home. And he texted me that everyone is home tonight. We’re having supper together. And I thought, oh, thank goodness. Maybe the crisis is past. I mean, they had a lot of things to work through. And he had a lot of things that had to be faced. But they were a family again. 

And that was Wednesday. He died the following week on a Saturday. 

I think he was saying goodbye to a lot of people that week. I think he had formulated in his mind how he could care for his family. He did not leave a suicide note. But he had two life insurance policies laying on the counter. He had the bills that needed to be paid yet, and the checkbook. And I think he felt that at least he could provide for his family. 

But everything else, he lost everything else. He had some very, very good friends. Very, very good friends. And they were by his side at times when he was having a really bad day, but they didn’t even realize the extent of his despair. You know, suicide pain is something that, if you’ve never, ever been in that deep, dark place where you can’t even function. 

And the pain of it is so intense people do not understand that and that’s what hurts my mother’s heart so much is that he had such pain and I wasn’t there to help him through it, but he was married. They’ve been married for 15 years. Avery was 12, Elsa was 10, and Auggie was 6 when Jeff died. They’ve gone through so much as children, and the pain of suicide, where they’re at, it doesn’t go away with the death. 

It gets transferred to somebody else. It shattered our world. It crushed our hearts. Jeff would have never done this to us. He wouldn’t have. It wasn’t something that, okay, this is what I’m going to do logically. It was that he just couldn’t go on. I realized that God could have sent one of Jeff’s wonderful friends to the door just at the right time. 

He could have had somebody call or he could have changed the circumstances of the day. But he didn’t, and I think with his loving, caring, he looked down and knew that it was time for Jeff to come home. He had done a lot for the Lord in his 38 years, and I realized I had to give him back to God. It took me until April 17 to walk through that door. 

But once I did, that is when the healing started. Sharing this story with you is very hard, but it is one that I am walking through this grief to mourn my son, but also to honor his memory. And every time I talk and share, I heal a little more. This will be with us for the rest of our lives. There is no end to your grief. 

But I will be very frank with you and let you know that God was always there, even when we couldn’t see him through our tears. I am also very, very thankful that God gave me the grace to never have to ask why. I believe that God is sovereign and his will will be done. I don’t understand his will at times. 

But I did not struggle with being angry, and that was a gift from him. The amount of grace that he has given us over the years is immeasurable. I also know now his love for us is so deep that whatever we face in our lives, He can heal us, he can care for us. There were difficulties. The first year was very, very rough. 

Heidi was our daughter, our daughter in law, but I considered her our daughter. And she was the mother of our grandchildren and she was hurting also. And she had a lot of other emotions that I didn’t have to deal with. And we had to find a way to bring us back together in the fold. She did remarry two years after Jeff died and it was good for her to have someone again. Our grandchildren’s stepfather is very good to them and they really like him. He’s a good man.  

Where do I go from here? The journey isn’t easy. But I did learn through a lot of counseling and time. that it was Jeff who made this decision. I wanted to blame somebody for this, but it was his decision. And once I got that into my head, I could move forward with other relationships. 

I also realized that you can’t go around grief. You have to go through it, and it will wait for you until you acknowledge it, and you do the grief work, the hard work of grief. The mourning leads to healing, and it was a hard concept to learn, but when I started implementing that, by facing that grief, and dealing with it, and getting the help I needed, it really changed my world. And I will tell you also that as far as marriages go it’s very, very hard to lose a child and my husband is wired differently than I am and we were both so crushed and empty that we really couldn’t comfort one another. This will probably surprise you but going to church was probably one of the hardest days of the week. 

Everybody looks at you and thinks, oh, how is she doing today? And they want us so badly to be better, and they want to try and help fix us, and you can’t fix us. You can’t do it. We live and attend a large congregation. And there’s hundreds of people on Sunday in the fellowship hall. And I remember those days that you would go to church and everybody else’s life was going on, and you felt like you were being observed the whole time to see how you were going to do today. 

And it was very lonely. A lot of people don’t know how to respond to a death of this nature. And it is a different nature. It is completely different than another loss of life. Because we think if only we would have known we could have changed this and that’s a fallacy too because God is in control. 

When you’re in a large group, there were some wonderful, wonderful Christian friends who stood by us through this journey, and some of them had experienced traumatic grief in their life already. And they knew they didn’t have to say anything. They just had to be there by our side. They just gave us a hug when they felt like they needed to give us a hug. 

And I had one dear sister who I’m so close to. She knew that thank yous were going to be a big, big hill, hurdle for us. And she offered to come and help me. And I couldn’t do it for more than maybe three hours at a time or maybe a couple hours in an afternoon. But she organized me and looked up addresses for me and sorted ones that I wanted to write a personal message to. 

I mean, she just knew what to do. I didn’t have to make decisions. She just ministered to me. And I had other friends that came alongside me, and I changed my house seasonally. We owned a flower shop in addition to a pharmacy. And they just came and they decorated my house for fall. And I thought, oh, how perceptive they are. 

I didn’t have to ask them. They just came. You don’t always have to have something to do in order to be very powerful. Some just came just to be with us. You don’t have to say a lot, but just knowing they’re there and sharing their love with us was so very important. My family was wonderful. Our community was wonderful. 

Our church family was wonderful. We had all kinds of support. And yet, you still walk through this journey alone. Over time, both Dell and I realized that we needed to counsel separately because we’re wired differently. He stayed busy as long as he was doing something or he was at work, his days were filled. 

He felt normal a little bit, where I was more emotionally just empty, drained. I mean, I was just a shell of a person. I needed a different type of care than what he needed. And when we figured that out, that’s when our marriage came back together. I’m going to let Dell continue on here.  

Like June said, we were in business, and we started at a wrong time, economically probably, and it was tough going, and I did not get a lot of family time, and I, when the kids were in grade school, we just had the two, the son and the daughter, and I made a point of taking them each out for breakfast at different times by themselves. And they had no problem getting up early and doing this before work and school. And that was just such a blessing, such a special time. And I continued that through high school and then when they left to college. We still tried to do that when they came home, when it was available. 

And I was so honored on the morning that Jeff got married. The night before, he says, Dad, can we go out for breakfast in the morning, just the two of us? That was just such a blessing. And, like June said, we still tried to do that. Life gets busy. He was a busy health care provider, had family duties, and he was involved in so many of these other things. 

And it got less and less. And I think, if only we could have done that once a month. Maybe it would have been more in tune, but that wasn’t to be, and I can’t go back there and I can’t change that, but those were very special times. And as June said, as parents, as hard as it is, you have to kick them out of the nest and let them try to fly on their own. 

Just like the birds do and it’s so hard, but we have to let them go and we have to be available for them but we can’t be in their lives all the time. One thing I think would be helpful to share is what his partner Dr. Paulson shared at his funeral in Grinnell. But Dr. Paulson said you know in the universe a star doesn’t just go off , when it dies, it gradually loses power until it reaches a point of no return and then it just implodes into a black hole. 

And that just really resonated with me and I think that’s it in a way. It really scared me because I could look back in my life and see at times that I was too busy, I was too wrapped up, I had too many things going on, and then we had financial pressures during the early 80s and stuff when we were trying to get our business started and interest was 20 percent, and I thought, what would have happened if I would have had one more crisis added to my plate? 

Would I have been any different? I don’t know. And I heard that same sentiment to some of his doctor friends, and they said, I was there, I was close. I think every engineer would say that every structure has its breaking point. And you raise, I think, an important point that brings us to a place of empathy to recognize that we are fragile. 

And in the medical world, every other organ in our body is the same. You put too much pressure on a bone, it’s going to break. Your heart, every organ there’s a limit. For some reason, we don’t recognize the mental health part of it as being the same or we don’t want to talk about that. It’s not a weakness. 

It’s just an overload on that system and we’re all susceptible. Suicide does not discriminate. It’s all ages, all socioeconomic levels. Being a pharmacist all these years, I worked with so many people. Antidepressants are one of the top drugs we dispense. And I could honestly say at times I would look at that patient and I’d say, in my mind I’d say, why do you even need this? 

They were like Jeff, happy go lucky, you’d never, never in a million years know what was going on inside them. So, I do have a lot more empathy, and I’ve had some very, very strong bonds with these people because a lot of them are the ones that came forward in our time of need and were the ones that gave me a hug, or squeezed my hand, or just looked at me, and there was that knowing, I know what you’re going through, and it’s just made me a better person. 

You know, for as hard as this journey has been, there has been some great blessings that have come out of that. And that is one of them, and it’s also given me the courage to reach out to people that I know are struggling. June, you mentioned how the pain was hidden. You had no idea Jeff was dealing with this. 

Dell, you talked about dispensing medication in a way that says certainly this person doesn’t need that. If I were to have a guess, even among our listeners at this moment, there’s probably astonishment. 

Absolutely. In the same time, that’s opened a door for me. People know that they can talk to me now. Yeah. And they could have before. I probably wouldn’t have heard with the same ears that I hear now. But I am much more empathetic. There is so much pain out there, and everyone has a story. We can look at things and hear about someone’s problems, and we say, well, that’s not so serious. 

But to them it is. What looks like a molehill to us, looks insurmountable to someone else, depending on where they’re looking from. And that’s really opened my eyes, too. We don’t know what that other person is carrying inside them. I think that’s what made Jeff such a good doctor. He saw the patient. 

He didn’t see a diagnosis. And he treated the patient, and we heard that comment over and over and over again. And the reason he could do that, because he was feeling it himself. There was one lady that called into their clinic the week after he died. And she was a patient of the clinic, but not one of his particular patients. 

And she says, Dr. Knobloch talked me out of suicide three times. And now he’s gone. There was no one there for him. And there would have been. It’s not that there wasn’t, but nobody knew. He had friends that were therapists, counselors. They didn’t know. His partner, they met together the night before. 

It wasn’t foreign material for him, but he absolutely did not recognize it in Jeff. And he worked with him every day. I think it was probably as hard for him to accept as it was for us. So, he was surrounded by people that would have done anything for him because he has done so much for them. But nobody knew. 

Dell, would you speak to the listener who identifies very much with Jeff? Feels overwhelmed? Feels to the point of breaking? What would you say to them? Speak to someone. Anyone. If you have chest pains and you don’t tell your doctor, you’re not going to get treated. And you could end up having a heart attack and die. 

If your mental status is such that you’re at the breaking point, you need to speak out. And I would say both for those that are suffering, and for everyone in particular, if someone is speaking to you and crying, pursue it. Or if you aren’t comfortable doing it, refer them to someone else. And if you’re not hurting, be a listener. 

Listen for that underlying conversation that isn’t being said, but is being said from their heart, and I also try to keep that in mind when I’m listening to people, and if they’re crying out about it, like I said, it may not seem like that big a deal to us, but if they’re sharing it with you, it apparently is that big a deal to them. 

Dell, June made, I thought, a tremendously profound point in saying that you’ll need to go through the grief. There’s no avoiding it. There’s no going around it. She also spoke of uniqueness between the two of you. What did that grief work look like for you? Well, like she said, we went to joint counseling at first, and that was very helpful. 

It really was. But then it came to a point we were just kind of at a stalemate, and we just couldn’t relate to each other. And so, we decided to go to individual counseling, each with their own counselor. And you know, she mentioned about the gender differences, the mother relation, the father relation with children. 

But there’s other factors as well, and God provided me with a terrific counselor. He was an older gentleman, probably about my age, maybe a little younger, I don’t know. But through our conversations, we learned that we both had something in common. We had both lost our fathers at the age of 12. We reviewed that whole situation, and this was like 50 some years ago at the time that this had happened for both of us and the old endure and be still mentality was in vogue at that time and we laughed at the time about how we had all these people come over. It was a sad time. They shook our hands, said they were sorry but there were no hugs just at that time and had lots of food. Had the funeral, and then the next day you were supposed to get up and do your chores and go to school like nothing ever happened and you didn’t talk about it again. 

And that is so wrong. But at the same time, it does affect how I would look at grief differently than what June would because that’s probably the biggest trauma I had had in my life at the end. That was at 12. And as a family, we never ever talked, our siblings, we never talked about that for 50 years. 

It wasn’t until my mother passed away and we had our first sibling reunion, we started sharing our perspectives on that. And at that time, there were six of us, ranging in age from 6 to 18, and I was right in the middle at 12. And 50 years later, all of a sudden we are talking about this and sharing it, and it was amazing. 

The different stories, the different perceptions of grief. So, there’s a lot more factors, and it’s an individual journey. Yes, as a married couple we walk through it together, but you’re also an individual, and it does, it creates problems at times. Because we’re not on the same, we’re on the same path, but we’re not walking together. 

And people should be aware of that. And you know, you think, well, what are we doing wrong? You know, we went to counseling, we went to grief share, and yet, it’s just not working. And like she said, I’m more the busy type. I found out I’m not alone in that. Ironically, and it’s a story I’d like to share. 

It was like two years after our son died. There was another couple in our community who lost around a 30 year old son. I’m not sure what the situation was, but I just had it on my heart. I had to go visit them. And lo and behold, when I got there, the wife or the mother was sitting in the house, reading a book, probably on grief. 

How to work through that with a box of tissues beside her. And she comes in the room and says, I’ll go get my husband, he’s out mowing the lawn. And I thought, oh, he was probably out watering the lawn with his tears. We each have our own way of handling that. Beyond the counselor, Dell, what role did people play in your grief? 

The first thing, I have to acknowledge that we were just overwhelmed with the support we got from our family, our church family, the community. It’s just unbelievable. We had people from the community pull in our driveway and ask if they could come in and have a prayer for us. Some we knew well, others we didn’t. 

You know that they also had something in their background that encouraged them to do that. And I try to take note from that from here on out that when it’s on your heart to do something, do it. I so much appreciated that we had two funerals and two visitations for our son. Our elder, Brother Rod, allowed us to have a church visitation and a funeral service in Lester. 

And then we had one two days later in Grinnell. But it was so good for us just to feel that prayers and support of everyone. And that is immeasurable. It really is. Aside from that, as far as on a day-to-day basis, this is, again, a little bit more where we differ in our grief process. If someone came and wanted to mow my lawn, that would’ve been an insult to me. 

I have to do that. I have to get out, I have to be doing something. And that’s just the difference. And, like I gave that other example, I found out I’m not alone in that. Going back to work was very difficult, but it was good for me. Like I said, the support I got from the customers and, to this day, I have special relationships. To a lot of those people. And I’m just so, so thankful. God is good. I feel instructed in this moment to be present with people. I find very often when you’re in somebody else’s pain we tend to either go to the past, ask why, or how did it happen, or let’s unpack that, or we go to the future, how it can be fixed, or what’s the prognosis, but staying in the painful moment is perhaps uncomfortable for us, and that’s why we maybe avoid it. 

I’m speaking now from my own perspective. I avoid it, but it sounds to me, whether it’s thank you notes, decorations, or pulling in your drive to have a prayer, that is present. And I have to believe that is part of the recipe on caring for people in pain. Absolutely, and just because we’ve gone through this ourselves doesn’t mean that we can fix it for anyone else. 

If I’d had a heart attack, that doesn’t mean I can fix someone else’s heart. But I can walk alongside that person, and I can share my experience. I guess that’s what support groups are all about. They can’t fix each other, but they can share tips on how did you handle this, how did you handle that. It encourages you. 

Like, you’re not alone, you’re not different and crazy, I mean, the feelings, the emotions, everything that goes with all these things, it’s okay. You can do this. It brings a community into a very isolated, I think June, you mentioned the isolation that grief and pain. And I don’t know if it’s self-inflicted or if it isn’t. 

At that point, you really don’t know anything. You just go through each day. The thing that is discouraging for me that we found out is the lack of resources. And it’s changing, and I’m so thankful for that. Dr. Paulson just partnered with a local foundation and started the JPK Fund, and they have raised, in the last five years or so, I’m not sure when it started, hundreds of thousands of dollars. 

It’s a program that is administered through the local clinics. There’s no red tape, there’s no applications. And it helps people with their mental health issues. Anything from child care, so they can make it to an appointment, transportation. help with co pays, whatever. He usually sends us a report. I think last year they helped 141 different people in whatever they needed. 

I know in one instance he told us they fixed someone’s car that needed to have regular appointments and he would have just not come in and they reached out and they’re just amazing. And if we can just keep that momentum. Keep that out there. People aren’t afraid to talk about it. And it pays the bills. 

It does. I mean they don’t have to worry about paying for their medication or the appointments and it’s been a wonderful thing for their county and community, and it’s very well supported by so many people who Jeff knew in the community too. Mental illness is real. You don’t have to hide it. Get rid of the shame and stigma. 

It’s no different than diabetes, cancer. Let’s treat it. I do know that through this whole experience, my faith has been strengthened and it’s been deepened to the very inner part of my core that God loves us so much and I did not know how deep his love was until I experienced the loss of my son. I also have hope that God is going to continue with me through our grief journey. 

And hope and trust in God is, I don’t know how you would do this without God. I really don’t know how you would survive. He has the last word and I know that there will be a new life. And I will see my son again. Thanks for sharing that hope. And that’s really what it’s all about. And that’s what people that die by suicide, apparently that is what’s lost in their life. 

And so, like I mentioned, when we walk alongside someone, we can’t fix it. But if we can just give them a little glimmer of hope, that yes, the sun will shine again. It may seem impossible today, but it will. And, that hope is everything. Dell and June, this time together has been invaluable, and I can speak for our listeners. 

We’re honored and feel like you have given us a precious gift in sharing this story. I want to honor Jeff’s memory in this moment, Heidi and the children and Jeff’s sister recognizing that this is a reality ongoing. Dell, you mentioned, and I just want to encourage our listeners, don’t hide pain. I think that would be one of the lessons. 

And receive the pain of others, perhaps, would need to be coupled with that. And then, June, you mentioned how deep the love of God has been made known to you. I want to capture that for myself and for our listeners, that there are few valleys as dark as this one from a parental perspective. 

And yet the testimony of you as a daughter and son of God is that God’s love has been made rich. And I hope that we can capture that as well because that’s so, so encouraging. Thank you both for sharing here today. Thank you.