Three-time survivor of suicide talks awareness, advocacy

Mary Turner Roberts still remembers the day she received the first phone call. She was a young girl, 16 years old, when an officer on the other end of the line told her she had to head to the local hospital. 

Something was wrong with Dad, they said. 

It was the type of call Roberts would receive not once or twice in her life, but three times.

Call One

It had begun as a regular Saturday night—Roberts had made plans to go out with her friends. As she walked out the door, Roberts said her father called her over.

“He kissed me on the cheek and said goodbye,” she said, in front of packed bleachers at Mountain Brook’s Crestline Field Tuesday, Oct. 13. Roberts was the featured speaker at the most recent AWARE event—a grassroots network where members of the community are encouraged to speak freely about depression, substance abuse, suicide and other issues. 

At the time, Roberts said she remembers feeling embarrassed about her father asking for a kiss in front of her friends. He wasn’t usually the sentimental kind, she said.

Before the night was over, Roberts would understand why he acted differently. She got to the hospital and saw her father was being wheeled down the hallway on a stretcher, her mother and siblings not far behind. She asked her mother if dad had had a heart attack. No, she said. Dad tried to kill himself.

“I got to see him,” said Roberts. “I told him I loved him and told him to keep fighting.”

Somewhere deep inside, however, Roberts said she knew that was the end. 

“I became a survivor of suicide at the age of 16,” she said. 

Roberts spoke freely Tuesday night, stepping away from the podium and closer to the gathered crowd. 

“I wish I could tell you things were all right after my Dad committed suicide,” she said.

Roberts said she dealt with the pain, with the anger—not at her father, but at God—with drinking. 

“Where was God?” Roberts remembers asking herself. 

Her mother offered to get her counseling, suggested she talk with someone. It was the stigma that kept her from receiving that help, she said, the fear of being labeled “crazy” for asking for help. 

“The thoughts that consumed me,” said Roberts, “destroyed me.”

Call Two

After several years, Roberts said she learned how to find peace. She married and had two children of her own. 

But one day, another call came in. She was told to call her mother’s house. Once again, the police answered. 

Roberts’ mother took her own life at the age of 70 in the same manner, in the same bedroom her father had taken his life years before. 

“I can’t go through this again,” Roberts told her husband. 

This time, she had the support of her own family to lean on. 

“My husband told me, ‘you can and you will,”’ she said. 

She struggled, at times, with the questions. 

“Why would my parents do this?”

Roberts joined a support group in Tuscaloosa to help her deal with the questions, with the pain. After her mother’s suicide, Roberts said she learned to focus on one breath at a time. When the dark thoughts would flood her mind, she learned to shift her focus. She’d force herself to think instead, she said, of her mother’s smile or of her laugh. 

“The last few seconds of my parents’ life should not define them,” said Roberts. 

Call Three and Beyond 

In 2011, a final call came in: Roberts’ older brother had lost his own battle and committed suicide. He left behind a wife and five children, said Roberts. 

As a three-time survivor of suicide, Roberts said she knows she has been called to provide a voice.

“Suicide thrives on silence,” she said. 

It is important to educate people on what the look for, she said, on the warning signs of suicide, and teach them that it’s okay to ask—“are you okay?”

“The fact that you asked them won’t make them kill themselves,” she said.

Because suicide is often linked with impulsivity, Roberts said she is a proponent of measures that may help interrupt an individual from following through. Pills packed in individual bubble packs, for example, or gun safes with a suicide prevention hotline number on them, she said, might just cause a person contemplating suicide to pause and seek help instead. 

Suicide prevention is a topic Roberts says should not be ignored or shuffled under the rug. In her own home, Roberts said she has spoken to her children about it. When her son found suicidal threats on one of his classmate’s social media platforms, Roberts’ son asked for her help.

“Call his mama,” he said. “I think he needs help.”

That’s how it should always go, said Roberts.