Be Strong and Courageous: Teen Suicide and a Father’s Heart. An Interview with Wade Brown.

Joshua Brown

Joshua Brown was fourteen years old when he took his life.  His father, Wade Brown, shares about his athletic, gifted son, the shock of suicide, and the ripple effects of loss.  Counseling, meaningful physical reminders, and the support of a caring community are essential as he carries Joshua with him in 2020.  Wade also leads and manages a large team at GE and speaks about how mental health and emotional support are essential during COVID-19.

You can find the Handle with Care podcast on Google Play, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify. And you can listen to this episode here:

A reminder of Joshua

Here are three take-aways from my conversation with Wade

1. Showing up matters.  Go to the funeral, send the text, make the call.  Even if you don’t fully know what to do or say, your support matters.  And this is a sort of point 1b guidance.  When you show up, especially in the aftermath of someone committing suicide, try to be aware of appropriate boundaries on how and what you ask about.  Wade spoke to the pain of having someone pry into whether or not Joshua is bipolar.  And here is a bit of guidance.  Before asking a question, take a moment to interrogate yourself.  Are you asking about of your own curiosity or because you are actually trying to support the other person?  You might have noticed in this episode that I did not ask about the details of how Joshua committed suicide.  This was purposeful.  If someone is not offering those details, I choose not to root around for specifics.  Knowing the details of death does not have a material impact on how I can come alongside someone.  More than anything, it serves my own curiosity and could feel prying and invasive to the person I am in conversation with.  Take a moment to pause and reflect on why you are asking the question you are asking as you relate to a parent who has lost a child.  And if you blunder your way into a mistake, go back and apologize. 

2. When it comes to comfort, Wade offered a metaphor that was powerful and nuanced.  He talked about how there are marathoners and sprinters in the world of the grieving:  there are people that will be able to come alongside you with great intensity and then seem to fade away and there are those that are there for the long-haul.  It is with great maturity that Wade talks about how one is not better than the other and that recognizing people’s different capacities allowed him to not just feel confused by those that seemed to be present than then fade away. 

3. Cultures of support are essential to helping your team thrive.  Wade noted several times that everyone has their Joshua:  everyone has a pain that they carry into their workplace.  Through his loss, Wade began to cultivate a purposeful openness and culture of support in his team at GE…and he attributes this openness to significantly contributing to his team’s ability to weather the challenges of COVID-19. 

An anchoring thought on the fridge

Wade and his older son, Jonathan