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Scarlett's Media Memphis Black News & Community Voice |
The Life That Comes After
Families who lose someone to suicide are left holding a question no one can answer. Some of them build something in its place.
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By Shawnee Calhoun |
September 10, 2026 | Memphis |
What gets set out on the table: photographs, a church fan, a pair of work gloves, a marigold. The objects that carry a person forward are rarely the expensive ones. Illustration generated with Gemini AI; concept and direction by Shawnee Calhoun.
The Memphis Crisis Center started with one young man.
He was under the care of a local doctor. He lived with recurring hallucinations. He looked for a support system that could hold him. He did not find one. He died by suicide.
That was 1970. A group of doctors and community stakeholders decided that his death should not have happened. Among them were Dr. Richard Farmer, a psychiatrist and chief of psychiatry at the old John Gaston Hospital, and Dr. Allen Battle, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center. They opened the first 24-hour volunteer-powered hotline in Memphis and named it the Suicide Prevention Service.
The name changed before long. Volunteers noticed the calls covered a far wider range of crises than suicide alone, so the agency became the Suicide and Crisis Intervention Service. The hotline had no building at first. Volunteers answered it out of their own homes. It later moved through several locations, including the psychiatric ward at the old City of Memphis Hospital and the music department at Rhodes College. Today it is the Memphis Crisis Center, and it has been answering this city for 56 years.
Most Memphians who call do not know that history. But the phone rings on a desk that exists because one young man could not find help in time. His name is not in the public record. His absence built something anyway.
That is one way to understand a memorial.
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The question that does not close
People who lose someone to suicide carry a particular weight. Researchers have documented it. A 2022 study in the International Journal of Qualitative Studies on Health and Well-being found that suicide grief differs from other bereavement in measurable ways. Survivors report higher levels of rejection, shame, stigma and blame. Survivors are also more likely to conceal how their person died.
Then there is the question itself. The same researchers describe the unending “why?” as the thing that sets this loss apart from every other kind.
The second question is quieter. What if I had noticed sooner? What if I had called? Researchers file those questions under guilt, blame and responsibility. They are among the domains specific to suicide loss, and they are the domains that broader grief studies tend to miss.
Neither question has an answer. But the research points somewhere useful. A study of 420 adults bereaved by suicide, published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, found that the need for emotional support runs through the entire social network of a person who dies. Most of that need stays hidden. The authors concluded that support has to be offered directly by family, friends and professionals, and offered again later, because a grieving person may not feel ready the first time.
That finding is an instruction for the rest of us. Ask once. Then ask again in March.
What families build
A memory wall, a garden, a scholarship handed across a folding table. Three of the ways families answer a loss by building something that outlasts it. Illustration generated with Gemini AI; concept and direction by Shawnee Calhoun.
Clark and Connie Flatt lost their 16-year-old son, Jason, on July 16, 1997. They founded the Jason Foundation that October, less than three months later.
Clark Flatt has explained what drove him. The family had attended every PTA meeting, PTO meeting and church seminar available to parents. They had sat through sessions on drugs, on alcohol, on bullying. In Jason's 16 years, Flatt said, no one ever offered a seminar on youth suicide.
So he built one. Then he went further. Tennessee became the first state in the country to pass the Jason Flatt Act in 2001, requiring suicide prevention training for teachers. Roughly 20 states have since followed. A father identified the exact gap that failed his son, and a father closed it.
Alison Malmon was a college student when her older brother died by suicide in 2000. She founded Active Minds in 2003 to put mental health conversations in the hands of students themselves. The organization now has more than 600 chapters.
Jordan and Lisa Tabor started a nonprofit called Rain Will Bring Flowers 15 days after their son Owen died. Fifteen days. The organization brings mental health education to Louisiana students, and it funds a four-year endowed scholarship in Owen's name for graduating seniors entering behavioral health. Two students received it this year.
“We just could not let our son's tragedy go to waste.”
Jordan Tabor, to WAFB
Lisa Tabor asked for something simpler, too. She asked people to tell Owen's story to their own children, so those children would know that other kids struggle and that they are not struggling alone.
Brad and April Hunstable lost their son Hayden days before his 13th birthday. They started Hayden's Corner to help parents navigate mental health with their kids. Jonny Boucher founded Hope For The Day in Chicago in 2011 after losing 16 people, including his boss and mentor. The Alliance of Hope maintains an online memorial wall for one reason: so survivors can say their person's name in public.
None of these families set out to run an organization. Each of them looked at the specific thing that failed their person, and each of them went at that thing directly.
Memphis, and the room on Colonial
Not every family builds a foundation. Most do not. Most are looking for a room.
There is one on the third Saturday of every month at White Station Church of Christ on Colonial Road. It runs from 10:30 a.m. to noon. There is no cost and no registration. Everyone in that room has lost someone to suicide.
Compassionate Friends meets monthly for families grieving the death of a child, grandchild or sibling of any age and any cause. The Kemmons Wilson Family Center for Good Grief runs groups led by trained professionals, including groups for children and teens.
The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention holds its Memphis Mid-South Out of the Darkness Walk each fall. Families walk under their person's name. Coworkers and neighbors walk beside them. AFSP describes the walks as a place where people find the courage to speak about their own connection to suicide, often for the first time.
This matters locally in a way the numbers make plain. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported in September 2025 that age-adjusted suicide rates among Black Americans rose 25.2% between 2018 and 2023. Rates among white Americans fell 3.1% over the same period. Among Black people ages 10 to 24, the rate rose 29.4%. Among Black people ages 25 to 44, it rose 29.2%. Memphis is not a bystander to that trend.
What is left
A person who dies by suicide does not become the manner of their death. Jason Flatt was an A-B student, an athlete and, by his father's description, a social butterfly. Owen Tabor was the kind of kid his parents believed was fine. Somebody in this city was a barber, a deacon, a night-shift nurse, a daughter with a specific laugh.
Their families are still here. So are their coworkers, their exes, their friends who were not family and did not get a call. All of them are carrying a question that will not close.
But the Memphis Crisis Center has been answering phones since 1970 because of one of them. That is the part worth holding onto. The people we lose keep doing work in this world. They do it through us.
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Community Resources
- 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline — call or text 988, 24 hours a day.
- Memphis Crisis Center — 901-274-7477 (901-CRISIS7), free and confidential, 24 hours a day.
- Suicide loss support group — third Saturday monthly, 10:30 a.m. to noon, White Station Church of Christ, 1106 Colonial Road. No cost, no registration.
- Compassionate Friends — monthly support for families grieving a child, grandchild or sibling.
- Kemmons Wilson Family Center for Good Grief — professionally led grief groups, including groups for children and teens.
- AFSP Memphis Mid-South Out of the Darkness Walk — annual community walk.
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Editor's Note
This article was reported from published sources, each linked in the text. No family in this story was interviewed directly for this piece. If you have lost someone in Memphis and want their name and their life in the record, Scarlett's Media wants to hear from you. — Shawnee Calhoun, Editor-in-Chief, Scarlett's Media.
© Scarlett's Media | scarletts-media.com
Serving Memphis' Black community through independent journalism, education, and outreach.
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