Too Many Moms Visit Graves After Suicide For Mother's Day

How Many More Grieving Moms Will Be Too Many?
Wounded Times
Kathie Costos
May 8, 2016

All over the country, women are waking up to "Happy Mother's Day" and remembering their children they lost to suicide. So many haunting questions remain even though they may never know the answers, they need to know why their sons and daughters made the choice to end their lives. It is usually harder on Moms because they were the ones who could make it all better, take care of illnesses and injuries, comfort an aching heart, encourage after disappointment, give support to seek dreams coming true as well as punishment when the "kid" did something wrong so they would grow up to be a better person.

So many of the children raised to care about others so much they were willing to die for them could not find a single reason to live one more day upon this earth and left their Moms. We read about some almost everyday but all over the country too many Moms, Dads, Sisters, Brothers, Wives and Husbands along with children, suffer in silence as if they were responsible for the suicide. Sometimes that grief causes action so that someone else may be spared from the same loss. Sometimes that grief causes anger to be turned inward so deeply anything positive seems like an insult to the veteran they buried. Other times the loss is just too much to carry. It happened in Texas last year.

Alexandre Quiros, an academically decorated Air Force Academy cadet, stabbed himself to death, the El Paso County Coroner's Office announced Wednesday. His mother, Ksenia Quiros, ingested deadly levels of antihistamine and hiked into remote open space to kill herself 13 days later.

Some of you may be thinking that Alexandre was one of the "22 a day" lost to suicide but you're wrong. He would have been one of the 475 suicides within the military last year.


USA Today reported the number of suicides for 2015 showed that while the number of enlisted decreased, almost a decade of "prevention efforts" had little effect on the sons and daughters willing to die for someone else.

The Pentagon reported Friday that 265 active-duty servicemembers killed themselves last year, continuing a trend of unusually high suicide rates that have plagued the U.S. military for at least seven years.

Data released Friday also show that suicides among reserve troops — reservists in the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps and the National Guard — were 210 last year.

As with all military members, he would not have been counted among the often misquoted number of veterans committing suicide. The DOD does not have to track those they failed while in the military. That is up to the Department of Veterans Affairs. The DOD gets to wash their hands as if they had absolutely nothing to do with the loss. No one has asked them to explain anything that happens to veterans and as far as the currently serving losses, leaders are not held accountable by Congress. Hearings have proven to be useless displays of Senators and Representatives attempting to portray themselves as being on top of all of this. CSPAN has covered these hearings but apparently what members of Congress have been hearing has been good enough for them because they keep funding failures.

This is from the report that every seems all too willing to talk about but few bothered to read the report.

Of the 147,763 suicides reported in 21 states, 27,062 (18.3%) were identified as having history of U.S. military service on death certificates. However, Veteran status was unknown or not reported for more than 23% (n=34,027) of all suicides during the project period. Without linking to VA or DoD resources to validate history of U.S. military service, it is necessary to remove those without information on history of military service from estimates of Veteran status among suicide decedents. Among cases where history of U.S. military service was reported, Veterans comprised approximately 22.2% of all suicides reported during the project period. If this prevalence estimate is assumed to be constant across all U.S. states, an estimated 22 Veterans will have died from suicide each day in the calendar year 2010. Last month the Department of Veterans Affairs released another suicide report but the press didn't seem to be too interested in it. After all, it was a lot more appealing to them to use "22 a day" from a simple line in the 2012 report taken from limited data of just 21 states up to 2010.

This is from the new study.

Nearly 14 percent of Veterans reported suicidal thinking at one or both phases of a two-year VA study.

The study, now online, is slated for publication in the June 2016 issue of the Journal of Affective Disorders.

That would fit with some other research showing that a greater proportion of Veterans experience suicidal thinking—as well as attempts, and deaths by suicide—relative to the general population. One oft-cited VA study found that Veterans, while making up only about 13 percent of U.S. adults, account for about 22 percent of suicides. Another study, from 2007, found that compared to civilians, Veterans were twice as likely to die by suicide.

But for Moms, these same veterans survived risking their lives for others and as Moms visit their graves they wonder why no one did anything after all these years that actually saved the lives of their children. How many more deadly decades do we need before someone changes the ending of far too many stories?