Survivors’ support could use lifeline

More than two years after her daughter's suicide, Laurie Berlin describes her grief as a box that she keeps on a shelf. Sometimes she leaves the box alone for weeks at a time. Other times she rips open the lid, searching for answers.

"Probably for the first three or four months I didn't know how I was going to live," said Berlin of North St. Paul. "She was my only daughter. She was like my best friend."

Early on the morning of Feb. 3, 2007, Laurie returned from work to find 17-year-old Sarah hanging in the garage. She remembers that the city police chaplain put her in touch with Margaret McAbee, executive director of Survivor Resources. McAbee came to Sarah's funeral and then led Berlin and her husband, Jason, into support groups to help ease their grief.

"We're more sensitive, more caring," Jason Berlin said Friday of what they learned through Survivor Resources, where thousands of families have found help after homicides, suicides and other violent deaths. But now the nonprofit organization is struggling to survive. It's lost all of its state funding -- the $100,000 a year constituted about 40 percent of its $260,000 budget -- and as a result one or both of its paid counselors face layoffs.

"Serious jeopardy" is how McAbee, a violent crime survivor who works from an office in the St. Paul Police Department, describes the situation. "The state is in serious financial trouble and they just didn't have it to give. It's going to cut into the number of clients that we serve."

Even as money diminishes, the number of police referrals to Survivor Resources hasn't. McAbee and her staff serve about 800 clients a year, spending about $300 apiece. They help with everything from viewing their loved ones' bodies in morgues to understanding police investigations, and managing waves of grief.

"People who lose young family members suddenly and violently often don't know what to do," said McAbee, whose husband was murdered in rural Wisconsin in 1985. "Some of them have never had any contact with the criminal justice system or the medical examiner and they don't know how they get their questions answered."

McAbee's husband, Bill, was killed in a 1985 stabbing in rural Wisconsin. She worked with Lt. Joe Corcoran, a St. Paul police officer, to found support groups for survivors after she discovered first-hand the frustration of trying to understand what had happened to her husband. The organization operated under various names until 2007 when it became Survivor Resources after the Minneapolis bridge collapse.

McAbee and others in Survivor Resources do the grittiest work imaginable, said Senior Commander Tim Lynch, who leads the homicide unit at the St. Paul Police Department. They're front-line workers, visiting grieving people in the hours and days that follow tragic death to help them find answers, said Lynch, who also chairs the governing board of Survivor Resources.

"In the long term they've had just astounding results in helping people become functional citizens again," he said.

Most of the organization's money helps survivors, McAbee said. She and the two paid counselors spend much of their time coordinating volunteers who lead support groups, but they also do some of that themselves, she said.

Battling 'shame'

For a family who has lost a loved one tragically, the nightmare lingers, sometimes for years. Reeling from the shock of sudden and terrible death, they're overwhelmed with notifications, funeral home preparations, police investigations and media inquiries. Survivor Resources, McAbee said, is a one-of-a-kind "nuts and bolts" organization that helps navigate families through these painful but necessary details.

"For many people, they're just devastated and they don't know which way to go and what to do," McAbee said. "Their emotions are all over the place. There's hurt and sadness and loneliness and anger, every emotion there is other than joy."

Referrals usually come through law enforcement. McAbee said that work isn't restricted to the metro area. Survivor Resources recently helped a mother in Georgia whose son was killed in Crow Wing County, Minn., and a Minnesota woman whose sibling was killed in Chicago.

When the Berlins lost their daughter, their immediate reaction was to hide the nature of her death from their sons, then ages 2 and 5. McAbee persuaded them that avoiding the truth feeds the "secrecy and shame that surrounds suicide," said Laurie Berlin, who began studying for a master's degree in marriage and family counseling after Sarah's death.

The Berlins still hang Sarah's stocking at Christmas. They keep Sarah's jewelry and other possessions in a dresser where their boys can see and touch it. "Sarah still is part of our family and she always will be," Laurie Berlin said.

When Sarah died she was a senior at North St. Paul High School, "a super intelligent girl," her mother said. But she also was inclined to defend classmates who were emotionally hurting. "I think she took on other kids' pain," Laurie Berlin said. "That was her downfall. She never took care of herself."

McAbee, who also lost her son William when he died in a snowmobiling accident in 2006, hopes that Survivor Resources can weather its current funding challenges. A reduced budget would mean fewer support groups in St. Paul and the program in Minneapolis would end, she said.

People who lead these groups are survivors themselves, McAbee said: "They are able to reach out with the power of someone who's been there."

Kevin Giles • 612-673-4432