THUNDER BAY – Margaret Hajdinjak knows firsthand the grief from the death of a loved one by suicide is different than any other loss.
Whether it’s guilt from continually wondering if there was anything that could have been done to prevent it or a sense of isolation from people being seemingly afraid to ask about coping with the loss, it can be overwhelming.
Hajdinjak knows all of that too well after her 26-year-old son Steven took his own life nearly 12 years ago.
“I think there’s a fear because there’s such a stigma around suicide. Even when my son took his life, my husband said ‘we can’t tell anybody.’” He didn’t want people to know because maybe that was a reflection on him as a parent,” Hajdinjak said.
“There’s a lot of guilt that’s associated with suicide. What if I was there 10 minutes earlier? What if I said this, what if I had done that? But when you lose someone to an accident you have no control over that. With suicide, we feel like we have control but we don’t have control over that.”
To try to help reduce the stigma of suicide, Hajdinjak founded the Out of the Darkness Memorial Walk to give families an opportunity to come together and find strength through their shared experiences.
The seventh annual walk will take place this Sunday at Confederation College with registration starting at 3:30 p.m. in the Ryan Hall Cafeteria, followed by the three-kilometre march around the campus.
The idea for the event began after she took a solo trip to New York City and stumbled upon a suicide memorial walk. Even there by herself, not knowing anybody else, she felt a sense of community. It’s the same thing with the walk in Thunder Bay, she said.
“You don’t have to say anything. You can just be a part of it and feel the understanding that surrounds you,” Hajdinjak said.
Organizers of the walk held a Tuesday morning news conference at the Thunder Bay office of the Canadian Mental Health Association. The walk is timed as part of Mental Health Awareness Week, which was recognized locally on Monday by emergency responders.
That goes a long way, Hajdinjak said.
“We’ll see a lot more organizations like EMS and the police and everyone is talking about it. That’s what we want, people to talk about mental health and create that awareness and take away the stigma,” Hajdinjak said.
As years have passed, it has became all too clear that Steven's death was not an isolated case.
Just a few days ago Hajdinjak saw a photograph on Facebook of her son on his graduation day with some of his classmates. She recognized other faces in the photo of his peers lost to suicide.
“It’s just staggering to see him having five friends that have lost their lives too,” Hajdinjak said. “It’s very powerful. I don’t know why it happens.”
