On this week’s episode of the Seekers of Meaning TV Show and Podcast, Henry and Marcia Blumberg discuss Henry’s memoir of their son’s suicide, Sean Left Quietly: A Father’s Memoir.
Henry describes the book this way:
This memoir describes our family’s journey through grief towards healing after our youngest son, Sean, took his life in 2012. He was 35 years old and had struggled for many years with depression and paranoia.
Many reminiscences, including joyous and unforgettable moments, later enabled us to cope with the anguish of his death. Memories were a central underpinning of support at the most difficult times. Guided by my son’s questions and curiosity the memoir spans three continents. It reflects his keen interest in our memorable family visit to South Africa, his birthplace, the brutality of apartheid that resulted in our immigration to Canada and the family’s challenges that ensued. The memoir also explores the intergenerational trauma of my father whose close family perished in Latvia during the Holocaust.
Through my passage of introspection, during bereavement, I confronted my own vulnerability and reached into my formerly unacknowledged emotional depths. I realized that death and loss can wound each of us in many ways, unrelated to mental health, especially as millions now grieve the passing of family and friends during the Covid-19 pandemic.
I hope that our family’s decade of lessons learnt and striving for solace might provide a beacon of hope to others to steer through their own darkness to inner peace, lead to acceptance, and help to alleviate the suffering of others.
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Henry Blumberg
Henry Blumberg is a barrister, writer and genealogist who grew up in apartheid South Africa and immigrated with his family to Toronto, Canada, in 1980. His lifelong concern with mental health, led him to serve on the executive of The Clarke Institute of Psychiatry Foundation for almost 9 years.
While he and his wife celebrated the birth of four sons and nine grandchildren, they mourned the tragic death of their two-year-old granddaughter, Sasha Bella, and later the loss of their youngest son, Sean, at thirty five by suicide, after he had struggled for many years with depression and paranoia.
In Sean Left Quietly: A Father’s Memoir, he describes the route he, his wife, and family, travelled through grief towards healing after their son’s suicide.
Through his passage of introspection, during bereavement, he confronted his own vulnerability and reached into formerly unacknowledged emotional depths. He realized that death and loss can wound each of us in many ways, some unrelated to mental health, especially as millions grieved the passing of family and friends during the Covid-19 pandemic. He hoped that in writing this memoir his family’s decade of striving for solace might provide a beacon of hope to others to steer through their own darkness
Dr Marcia Blumberg is an Associate Professor in the English Department at York University, Toronto and teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on a range of theatre and performance topics. She specializes in Modern and Contemporary Drama particularly international re-visionings of Ancient Greek Classics and Post-Apartheid theatre. Yet another course features provocative contemporary international drama that focuses on issues pertinent to present contexts including spatio-temporal, sociopolitical, and gender, class, race, and power dynamics.
She has published widely and presented at many conferences internationally.
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