I Know How You Feel: They Lied About My Father's Suicide

When Lisa was told her father had a heart attack, her world stopped. But the truth was even more devastating than she could have imagined: they lied. He ended his own life. 

In this episode, Lisa takes listeners on an unflinching journey through the aftermath of grief, and the staggering weight of unanswered questions. With raw vulnerability and unshakable strength, she shares how discovering the truth behind her father’s death shattered everything she believed—but also became the catalyst for her healing.

This is a space for anyone who’s ever felt broken by loss or had their life flipped upside down by truth. Through intimate storytelling, grounded coping tools, and deeply honest reflections, Lisa explores the art of compartmentalizing pain when life demands your functionality, and the long road of turning unimaginable hurt into meaningful purpose.

More than just a story of survival, Lisa reminds us:
 Your pain is not your weakness. It can become your power and your purpose. 

The Help Hub

Transcript

Kim, Host (00:01.302)
Hi Lisa, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Lisa Sugarman, Founder The HelpHUB™ (00:04.397)
Hey Kim, thanks for having me.

Kim, Host (00:06.849)
So I know for years you lived with this one version of the story of how your dad died. So I'm wondering if you can take us back to that time in your life, what you remember from that day and how you first came to understand what happened to him.

Lisa Sugarman, Founder The HelpHUB™ (00:21.304)
Yeah, of course. So I lost my father the first time, and you'll understand what I mean by the first time when I share my story. I lost him the first time when I was 10 years old in the summer of 1978 to what I was told was a heart attack. So we had lost a family member. I lost a cousin a year before my father had died to suicide. So my father's loss was the second loss in my life that I had ever experienced.

And I lived for 35 years of my life thinking that my father had died of a heart attack in spite of the fact that he was a super healthy and active guy. And when I was 45 years old married, I think we had been married 20 years at that point, I had already had two teenage children. I accidentally discovered that my father had taken his own life. So I've grieved my dad twice in my life and it really just blew me to pieces in so many different ways and it...

really changed my attitude about the work that I was doing in the world. I was a parenting writer. I had written a bunch of parenting books and I was out there creating content in that parenting space about raising kids and work-life balance. And I just didn't feel like any of that was authentic anymore. I felt like I really had a, just a lived experience now that was too valuable, I think, to just keep to myself.

So I found a way to start talking about it and to start little by little sharing and ultimately writing and then speaking about it. And now all the work that I do focuses on suicide awareness and prevention and mental health and wellness. And I found my way to this place of advocacy and this, what I believe to be the work I was supposed to do ultimately.

Kim, Host (02:13.318)
I found that in doing the podcast that people have these incredible shifts in their life. It only takes one experience to change the trajectory of their entire life. And I know that you said that you found out on accident that he had committed suicide. How did you find out that truth and how did it feel to suddenly have to grieve him again?

Lisa Sugarman, Founder The HelpHUB™ (02:34.893)
Well, I found out just it was a random conversation that I had had with a family member. I bumped into a cousin. We were catching up. We were just chatting and she asked about my girls who, as I said, they were teens at the time. And it was just very general conversation until she just dropped a bomb out of nowhere and asked me if our daughters were experiencing any of the same mental.

health challenges and mental illness that my father had experienced, I had no idea what she was talking about. And it really just created this domino effect of me then reaching out to my mother and asking my mother if my father had been depressed and the answer became yes, because that was the truth. And then without even realizing what I was asking her, when I asked it, I never intended to really ask her the question, it just came.

straight out of me. asked if he had taken his life and after 35 years she said yes. So it just changed everything and then all of a sudden it's like you're in the middle of this Bermuda Triangle without any land anywhere, nothing to grab onto, nothing underneath you and it was just this feeling of complete and total chaos, just not...

believing anything anymore, not knowing what was true from my past or what wasn't or were the memories I had authentic and it just kind of spiraled into this endless cycle of kind of rethinking all my experiences and my interactions with my dad and what I believe to be true and it just turned me inside out.

Kim, Host(04:18.65)
What did you end up finding out about what your dad had been going through? What kind of struggles was he's... I know you were fairly young, but what did you come to find out he was really struggling with?

Lisa Sugarman, Founder The HelpHUB™ (04:31.82)
That's the thing, not much. We really don't have a lot of answers to those questions that we need answers to and we'll never have them, which is the hard thing, the sad thing, the frustrating thing. So my father was one of those people, know, there are two different kinds of people, people who keep their mental illness very concealed. My father was one of those people. And then there's another cohort of people who you know that they're struggling.

They oftentimes will tell you, you'll see it, you'll hear it. Well, we didn't know. So my mother had no idea. Family had no idea. I was 10 years old, so I certainly didn't have any idea. I thought my father was the most joyful man in the world. He loved the outdoors. He raced cars as a hobby. He loved being around people. He loved his family. So there was no reason for any of us to believe anything was wrong. The only thing that we ultimately knew

was that my father came from a very difficult family. He was the youngest of three children. His family was very challenging. And I mean a lot of things when I say that. His parents, it was not a loving home. No matter what my father ever did, it was never enough. It was never good enough. It was always what you didn't do or could have done or should have done.

And it was a very toxic environment to live in. was a frustrating environment, I think, for him to live in. So even as a kid, even as a young kid of 10 years old, I knew what the dynamic was with my father's family, because my mother's family was very much the opposite, an abundance of love and support and kindness. And my father didn't have that. So I know there was a lot of stress. He ran my family's business, my father's side of the family business.

as well as his own job. So he really had two full-time jobs and he was incredibly stressed because of that, I think, ultimately, and there was a lot below the surface that nobody knew.

Kim, Host (06:38.436)
How did that change your understanding of your or your perception of your father and yourself ultimately?

Lisa Sugarman, Founder The HelpHUB™ (06:47.721)
I'm glad you asked that question because it had a profound impact on me in a lot of different ways. First of all, it changed my belief system completely around suicide as a selfish act. I had always grown up believing that suicide, feeling in my heart that suicide was a selfish act. No one gave me that thinking.

No one inserted that in thinking into my brain. It was just something that I developed on my own as a result of being subjected to that kind of loss very young. That changed completely when I really started to understand what mental illness was. When I found out my father had mental illness after I learned about his suicide, I really took a good, hard, long look at what is that mentality? What are people who are struggling with depression and mental illness actually going through? What's their state of mind? So for me, that...

was a complete and total shift. you know, it's a hard place to be because I then, like I said, felt like all the work I needed to do was different. I needed to use this new understanding of what I really believed mental illness was all about to change narratives.

So, you know, it was very difficult for me. I kind of lost contact with my dad emotionally after I found out that he had taken his life in the very beginning. And what I mean by that is that I always worked really hard to keep my dad as a part of my family. My children never met him. My husband never met him. I always wanted them to feel like my dad was a presence. So I always talked about him. The few pictures that I had of him were always around. And I talked about him like he was

member of our current family. And I stopped that for years after I found out the truth. And I found my way back to that, but it took a lot of work on my part really understanding that mental illness is an illness that you can't always see and is so subjective and only the person who is experiencing it can truly understand what it's doing to them. So it's been a journey.

Kim, Host(09:07.679)
That is definitely a journey and a huge shift. Can you walk us through just practically what that looked like in your life? You said it was a huge shift, but day to day, it sounds like you had to pretty much burn down your entire thought, like belief system, thought, even the work that you were doing. How did you rebuild that step by step into what you're doing right now?

Lisa Sugarman, Founder The HelpHUB™ (09:30.58)
Well, it was very organic. didn't intend to pursue any of this, any of the, I never saw myself doing any of the work that I'm doing right now. It was just nothing that was on my radar whatsoever. And I mentioned that for those first few years after learning this truth, it really just shut me down because part of me was just in such complete denial and disbelief that this man who I thought I knew so well was so ill under the surface. And I

just I couldn't get my bearings. So what it did to me for those first few years, I stopped writing. I stopped creating the content I was creating and I became two distinctly different people. So I, at the time, as I mentioned, I had young kids. They were still, you know, teenagers. I was very involved. I was working in the school system. So I had a job. I had my home life. I was raising my children and I was two very separate people because

Outwardly, was someone that no one would ever have known that anything was wrong or that I had discovered anything or that I was struggling with anything because I kept it very, very quiet. My husband, after I found out the truth, the only other person who I told for those first several years of my husband. And that was the only outlet that I had for the beginning. And so I would do my thing during the day. I would be mom, I would go to work, I would have my friends, I would live my life. And then I would come home and be an

absolute disaster when I put my kids to bed and I closed the door in the bedroom and I would cry to my husband every night for what felt like years until I guess I just got my bearings a little bit and really just started to process that this okay, this was the truth and this did happen in spite of how impossible it seemed. And that's when I just started to emerge. I just started talking. I started talking about it. I stopped using the old narrative.

It's surprising how many people ask you when you say that you've lost a parent, surprising how many people ask you how they died. And I've always had people ask me how my father passed away and I've always said it was a heart attack. And I did still say that for the first few years. And then ultimately that was where the shift happened. I no longer believed it was selfish. I understood it more clearly. I felt just such heartache for him that he suffered alone. And he and my mother had such a beautiful marriage and relationship. He just was.

Lisa Sugarman, Founder The HelpHUB™ (11:55.954)
too deep in his own head. And so I started talking and then talking led to writing and writing led to getting involved on crisis lifelines and getting involved on boards of mental health organizations like Samaritans and becoming a grief group counselor and launching my own mental health resources platform and starting my own podcast. So it's just been organic. Didn't have a plan. I just kept doing.

more and different things in the same space as a way of making an impact.

Kim, Host (12:32.657)
I really appreciate you sharing the coping skill that you use. feel like this is really common and people don't talk about it enough that you compartmentalized to get through it. Like you were one person, you were out there, you were being a mom doing what you needed to do, and then you would come home and fall apart. And I think that that is such a common experience. And I hope people feel like if they're doing that, that that's, that's an okay way to get through things. And I'm curious about a couple things. When people

asked you how your dad died and you were ready to share and you told them, you know, my father died by suicide. Was there anything that people said where you felt like they minimized your experience or you felt the need to educate them because they, I don't want to say said the wrong thing because everybody's just working through their own stuff. But was there anything that people said that you felt minimize the experience or they could have

done a little differently just in case maybe we come up against this experience so we can do better for somebody.

Lisa Sugarman, Founder The HelpHUB™ (13:35.045)
No, I really appreciate that question. I don't think anyone's ever asked me that question. And it's a very powerful one. The answer ultimately is no. I never encountered any of that. I only ever experienced incredible kindness and support and non-judgmental reactions to me sharing everything. And I did it very systematically. That's just how I am as a person. I made sure that I talked about it first.

My husband and I talked about it with our daughters and then my extended family and then my closest friends and so on. And it kind of rippled out from there. But as far as encountering anything that was negative, no, I didn't. The only thing that I think speaks to what you're saying that I have discovered and that has become something I've worked very hard to change that might be helpful for people is I've learned that language

matters so much in general in the way that we talk about things, but it matters especially in the context of suicide loss. We say, and we're all guilty of it to some degree because it's what we were taught, it's how we were raised, it's what the world says. We say something like, our person committed suicide. And to me now at this point, all these years later, that has become, I have such a visceral reaction to that.

I have such an intense internal reaction to that. It's so triggering for me because I understand now so clearly why it's so important that we not use that kind of language, why that language is so stigmatizing and why it's contributing to the overall stigma and narrative of suicide being a negative thing. Suicide is not a negative thing. It's a terrible outcome. It's an unfortunate.

horrible traumatic outcome. And it's definitely a difficult, incredibly difficult type of grief to navigate. But there's nothing sinful about it. There's nothing immoral about it. It's someone's only choice in their brain for how to make the pain stop. So if we're talking about what to share with people who might be listening to our conversation that

Lisa Sugarman, Founder The HelpHUB™ (15:59.266)
might be helpful in changing kind of their perception and other people's perception, I would say be careful when you say committed suicide because what that does is perpetuate the stigma. Instead, say died by suicide, say ended their life, say took their life, say suicided, which a lot of people are saying more often now, and give the person who died

that way the dignity that they deserve. that's hopefully that you can see the tie in to your question.

Kim, Host(16:31.806)
And I really appreciate that education because I think to just going off on a little side note Language is so important for mental illness and I I find that people tend to throw things around very Lackadaisy and pop culture with certain things like I'm so OCD. I like to organize. I'm so ADHD. I can't focus. my gosh, like I just had such a hard day I just want to kill myself those kinds of pop culture II

lax-y-daisy references around mental health are just so detrimental, I feel like, and just bringing the seriousness back to it and making sure that we're using the right language and we're making people feel just like you said, that that person had dignity at the end of their life and that it wasn't their fault, it was the mental health issues they were going through and that was the only choice they felt like they had. So I really appreciate you explaining that for us.

about surviving suicide loss three times. And I'm curious what those losses have taught you about grief, but also about survival.

Lisa Sugarman, Founder The HelpHUB™ (17:41.221)
Well, I think what it's taught me ultimately about grief is that we're always grieving. We've got a connection to our person who's no longer here. And I mentioned this in a conversation recently with someone else I was talking to about grief. And I said, I would never want to stop grieving for my father or my friend who I lost or my cousin or anyone else who I've lost in any other way, because that grief is a bridge to that person.

We ebb and we flow through it. It's really just a matter of finding a way to integrate it into our life so that the grief and the joy that we will ultimately have in our hearts can coexist together. So that's my feeling about the grief part. And as far as survival, I think for me, one of the biggest things that's helped me survive is being vulnerable about it, is talking about it, is...

putting my experience out there for whomever might get a nugget from it or maybe just some kind of reassurance or maybe feel a little less alone or feel a little bit more validated. That's how I survive. I survive by taking my experience and recycling it, I guess, in a way that I hope benefits other people who are at a different point on that.

loss spectrum. know, somebody listening to our interview right now might be like really in the thick of it. Like maybe they just lost their person. Maybe they're a matter of days or months or weeks out and they haven't experienced this kind of loss for years and they're just trying to navigate their way to the next day and they hear this and they know, okay, okay, this is awful. I'm not alone. I'm not the only one.

who feels this way because this is such, look, grief in general can be such an isolating experience, but this kind of grief is such a specific kind of grief that you really feel like you're alone from the stigma perspective more than anything. Cause you never know how someone's going to react when you're talking about suicide. And once you realize that over 700,000 people a year die by suicide.

Lisa Sugarman, Founder The HelpHUB™ (20:10.369)
and there are 135 people who are impacted by that suicide. On average, they say that 135 people are impacted by every one suicide. That means the population of people who are dealing with this kind of loss is over 94 million people a year are touched by this and nobody's talking about it. So the way I deal with it and all the other people who I've met through this community are dealing with it is by doing what you and I are doing and talking about it.

Kim, Host (20:38.565)
Absolutely. I think that's such a lovely way to put it is that storytelling is so powerful and that why we do what we do sharing these stories because that really helps other people. It's such a, passed over a way to process and to kind of do your own therapy. In my opinion is just connect with people and their stories because even if you haven't, experienced, suicide or loss or anything like that, you're still going to be able to connect with grief.

Like you're saying, we're always grieving life is cyclical in that way. and I've, you've said that you've really been able to integrate this loss into your life. I'm wondering if you can tell us about the help hub that you created and the Trevor project and all of the things that you've created to help others from this experience.

Lisa Sugarman, Founder The HelpHUB™ (21:29.472)
I would love to talk about any of those things because that's, you know, that's what I've been kind of putting my heart and soul and energy into for the last several years. So I'll talk about the Trevor Project first because that came before the help hub in my world. was largely because of the work that I've been doing for the last several years on the Trevor Lifelines that I recognized that we needed something different in the way of mental health resource platforms. So

After I learned that my father had taken his life and had kind of emerged from that place of just not knowing what to do with that and wanting to do something to give back, I thought of ways to do that. And what made sense to me was to potentially get on a lifeline to be the person that my father could have benefited from. So I trained with the Trevor Project. And for those who don't know what the Trevor Project is, they've been around for about 27 years. They are a crisis.

support Lifeline and there's also a texting platform as well for at-risk LGBTQ youth ages 13 to 24. And so any at-risk LGBTQ youth can call the Trevor Project and either call or text, but I happen to be on their Lifeline. So when you call up, I am one of the counselors who will take that call. And we just do a lot of holding space. We deescalate a lot of people. We give out a lot of resources and

We create a lot of safety plans for people who may be having suicidal ideation or maybe in the midst of an actual attempt. I've had met too many of those calls or maybe they're just struggling with coming out or maybe they've been abused or maybe they've lost a job. So it's not just suicide. None of these crisis lifelines like 9-8-8 or Trevor project or crisis lifeline are exclusive to suicide. These are, these are numbers.

anyone can call with any kind of mental health crisis. So it was because of all my work, giving out resources and just being exposed to such a wide, I guess, array of people and communities that I started realizing that even though we all go through so many of the same things, like we all grieve, we can all certainly have issues with depression or anxiety or loss in general.

Lisa Sugarman, Founder The HelpHUB™ (23:52.802)
We don't experience those things in the same way. Like someone from the AAPI community might need something different than someone from the BIPOC community would need, or someone from the queer community would need, or someone in the elderly community could need. Like the way that we seek out and find help looks a little different depending on where we're coming from. But I didn't see any place like that. I didn't find or wasn't aware of any place out there where...

Anyone can go from any community, but you could find the help or the resources or the support that you need to support your unique needs. So I just kind of started accumulating resources as I found them. And then I guess I just got a little bit of a mission because I then spent.

dedicated time every single day vetting resources and slowly categorizing them and ultimately ended up with this massive list directory of organizations and then I broke them all apart into different categories under those different community headings and ended up with 16 of them and I Ended up just really restructuring my entire website. I rebranded it. I re-architected it I made it into a place called the help hub because ultimately it's a hub of

help and resources and content and have just been building on it ever since. And I really kind of relaunched it, truly relaunched it in November. So it hasn't quite been a year that it's been out in the forum that it's in now. And it's a place that anyone can go for mental health resources, crisis support services, tools, content. I built a pretty extensive virtual toolkit that people can reference if they're having hard conversations about grief or they're afraid someone they know is not okay or they need

grounding exercise. created a whole toolkit full of tools that people can share and download and access. And there's a YouTube channel now, the podcast that I'm on called The Survivors that's all about suicide. Survival is piped through the help hub. just this week actually announced a huge collaboration with recovery.com. They are now the treatment option that's been integrated into the help hub. So you're not just finding the help.

Lisa Sugarman, Founder The HelpHUB™ (26:10.859)
that you need in the resources, actually also now through the help hub, you can go directly to recovery.com to get treatment if treatment is the option you're looking for. So it's grown into this beautiful organic destination for all different types of mental health resources. And I'm just incredibly proud of what we're building and who it's helping and what it's putting out into the world.

Kim, Host (26:37.585)
I love that. That's so inspiring. And I love that you emphasized that even though we can all connect through storytelling and these different experiences, everybody is experiencing their own thing very differently, processing it differently. Not everybody's going through depression the same way, anxiety the same way. It's all very different. I think that's a very important point. So I really appreciate that. I just have one last question for you.

Lisa Sugarman, Founder The HelpHUB™ (27:03.456)
Sure.

Kim, Host(27:04.947)
What do you want people who are grieving a suicide to know about what's possible in their own healing journey?

Lisa Sugarman, Founder The HelpHUB™ (27:13.888)
I've had a lot of people ask versions of that question before, but I think the way you just phrased it was my favorite. So I want anyone to know that everything is still possible. It just might not be possible right here and now where your heart is and where your head is when you're in this much pain. But here's the thing about what someone who might be in the thick of it now is feeling.

The way that you feel now, and I say this a lot because it's so important, the way that you feel right now, whatever that is, however desperate or however broken you feel, you won't always feel this way. There is no end, we talked about this already, there's no end to grief. But grief is love, so it's a signal that we cared about our person and we now...

have to find a way forward, but you get to do that at your own pace. Like there's no timeline. There's no expectation. Grief looks different and feels different for everybody. So I would just say that be gentle to yourself right now where you are right now and that things won't always feel like this. There will be a time when you will see things clearer and you will feel things more deeply again. And that...

Joy will come back into your life. I didn't believe it would. And I'm not going to sit here and say to you, don't worry, don't worry. You know, you'll be OK. You'll never be OK because your person is gone. You'll be different. But you can also still live a joyful life. And that person's with you. And the sky really is still the limit. You just have to give yourself grace to reach that point.

Kim, Host (29:09.663)
I need to put a sticky note on my mirror that says everything is possible, just not now. I think that is so beautiful. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing your story with us. And I look forward to sharing all of your platforms with our listeners.

Lisa Sugarman, Founder The HelpHUB™ (29:25.066)
Thank you so much for having me. I would love to have this conversation a thousand different times every chance I get and I absolutely loved this one.