Dougy Center at the Hollywood Theatre

At last month's meeting of The Dougy Center's board of directors, I got a chance to preview a short DVD that speaks to the mission of the agency: to support grieving children.

Tonight that same video, "Understanding Suicide, Supporting Children," will be shown at a premiere screening at 7 p.m. at the Hollywood Theatre. A Q&A with parents and youths who appear in the video will follow. The event is free and open to the public.

Suicide is a grim topic, I know, but after seeing this video, I wasn't depressed -- I was inspired. I was impressed by the intelligence and the resiliency of these teenagers and young kids, some as young as 6, who speak movingly and honestly about dealing with a suicide death. Too, I was proud to be associated with The Dougy Center, which was the first program of its kind when it was established in 1982 and has since has become an international model.

I'm also proud of Lori, who recently began training to become a group facilitator for youths who meet at the center to speak of their loss and support each other. All services are free and children can attend as often as needed, whether it takes weeks, months or years.

Our executive director, Donna Schuurmann, is fond of saying that no one ever gets over grief. Rather, they get through it. Seeing this video helped me understand that yet again.

If any Rough and Rede readers would like to attend, I'd love to see you there tonight.

A grief that never ends

Two weeks ago today, friends and co-workers joined me at a fundraising lunch for The Dougy Center, the Portland-based nonprofit that has been a pioneer in providing services to grieving children and families after a death.

It was an event typical of The Dougy Center's organization and efficiency: A spacious hotel ballroom with a healthy lunch; lots of volunteer greeters to steer you to the right table; a concise program with engaging speakers that started right on time and ended precisely one hour later so people could get back to work. The lunch raised $75,000 and introduced hundreds more people to the important work that the center does and which has been replicated at 500 sites around the world.

It all began in 1982 after the death of Dougy Turno, who died of an inoperable brain tumor at age 13, but not before he inspired the idea of a center where kids could talk about openly about death and dying. Today The Dougy Center provides peer-support groups that serve nearly 400 children a month, all free of charge. I've been on the board of directors of The Dougy Center for about three years now, and while I obviously support its programs I've always felt slightly apart from most staff and board members in that I haven't experienced the trauma of losing a parent or sibling as an adolescent or adult.

How narrow my thinking has been. Just a few days earlier, I was in California. There I spent a day with my mom and drove her to the cemetery in Salinas where we put fresh flowers on the graves of four relatives I never had the opportunity to know: my brother, my twin sisters and my maternal grandmother.

My grandma Mercedes was killed in a car-train accident in 1953 at age 47 when I was barely 6 months old. My oldest sister was born in 1947 and I came along in 1952, followed by my younger sister in 1955. In between, my mom gave birth to a boy in 1949 and twin girls in 1950. Beverly Jean and Barbara Ann died one day after their birth. Robert Joseph was born Oct. 19 (the same birth date as my younger sister) and died Oct. 21 (the same birth date as my mom).

It must have been a good 10, if not 20 years, since I'd been to the cemetery. Standing there on a Sunday afternoon with my mom, who's now 82, I witnessed how deep the pain still cuts some 60 years later. No wonder her birthday brings a mixture of joy and sadness, knowing it's the day she lost her first-born son. To carry those babies as best she could, only to have them die as virtual newborns, before the medical advances that might have kept preemies alive, had to have been crushing. And yet she had the courage to get pregnant again -- and again.

If her babies had lived, would my younger sister and I have been conceived? That's probably an unanswerable question. Had they lived, how different would our family dynamics have been? I would have had a big brother to look up to and been No. 5 in a family of six.

All this was coursing through my mind as I sat at the table during that lunch two weeks ago. I guess I do have more in common than I realized with my Dougy Center colleagues.

Photo by Dharma Daylilies

The randomness of death

How strange. Yesterday I wrote about death -- but in the most positive terms. I took note of The Dougy Center's robust fundraising efforts to sustain peer support groups for kids who've lost a parent or sibling. And now, as I sit down to write on a Friday evening, I'm struck by the astounding randomness with which Death (yes, with a capital D) announces his arrival.

This morning I did a double-take when I read the headline stripped across the top of the Metro section: "Heart attack kills Lake Oswego chief." The poor guy, Dan Duncan, was 55 years old and had just announced last week that he was stepping down as police chief. He was found dead in his home Thursday. He was supposed to have had a retirement party at City Hall today.

"Cruel" is the first word that comes to mind. A guy works all his life in law enforcement, including 25 years in Lake Oswego, and leaves with a clean reputation, then keels over before he even has a chance to begin retirement.

"Ironic" is the second word that comes to mind. Lake Oswego has got to be one of the least stressful places to be a cop, given its affluence, low crime rate and embarrassing lack of diversity (they don't call it Lake No Negro for nothing).

I didn't know Duncan. But a day earlier, as I stumbled across the obituaries on the back of the Business section, I spotted a familiar face, that of John Jacob Sigurdson, the youngest of four children born to Icelandic immigrants who moved to the Northwest in 1935. He would have been 5 years old then. He died on Monday at age 79.

I knew him as Jack. When I joined The Oregonian in 1985, one of my first jobs was working on the regional desk, editing stories with rural datelines all across Oregon, Washington and Idaho. Jack was the layout editor for the Northwest pages (we'd call him a page designer today) and he was as old school as they come.

Jack wore a short-sleeved white shirt every day, with a plain vanilla tie. He brought a sack lunch every day and usually ate at his desk. He whistled while he worked (who does that anymore?) and he wore a No. 2 pencil behind one ear. In those days, as a young, ambitious editor, I was focused more on figuring out the strengths and weaknesses of the reporters I worked with and adapting to the substantially larger newsroom that I had joined. I honestly couldn't tell you a thing about Jack as a person and I doubt he knew a thing about me -- it's just the way it was in a big newsroom, with our given specialties and generational differences.

So now I come to learn that he graduated from high school in Seattle; that his college major was speech; that he was a religious man; that he had three children, 10 grandchildren, four great-grandchildren; and that he would have been married 50 years to the love of his life, Phyllis, had he made it to June 10th.

At age 57, I'm now three years older than Jack was when I began working with him and two years older than poor Dan Duncan, the police chief. Mentally and physically, I feel nowhere near that age. And yet, I'd be foolish to think my good health and a long life are guaranteed. Sure, I'd like to retire on my own schedule and still be in great condition so I can enjoy a life of relaxation and adventure with Lori. So, Death, if you're reading this, cut me some slack, ok? I've got a lot of living left to do.

Photograph: http://jameswoodward.wordpress.com/2009/03/