Hope After Suicide – Book Review

Author: Wendy Parmley
Release Date: August 2014
Publisher: Cedar Fort, Inc.
Genre: Biography

I have always been a people watcher and very intrigued with human behavior. This coupled with family deaths, divorce, and being diagnosed with depression as a teenager was what led me into the field of mental health, earning a bachelor’s degree in psychology.

Today, I am healthy and working at an inpatient psychiatric hospital to help others in their journey back from mental illnesses. I have seen the havoc suicide can wreck on an individual and families. Anger, guilt, depression, fear are only labels for feelings that go much deeper than those labels can adequately convey. Wendy’s story gives a voice for all those who have lost someone to suicide.

Wendy was only 12 years old when she lost her mother to suicide and was thrust into a world very different without her mother in it. Wendy is able to describe how you can love that person so much and still have so much anger and fear. Though she covered up her sadness and fear by burying her feelings deep inside her, as an adult, she realized her need to uncover those feelings and work through them with the help of a counselor.

I think writing this book was cathartic for Wendy and was a large part of her healing process. Wendy shows how you can overcome grief, depression, anger and fear.

About Hope After Suicide:

After her mother took her own life, Wendy Parmley learned firsthand the heartache, despair, and loneliness that accompanies suicide loss. Reinvent your definition of saved,perfect, and forgiveness as you read this true narrative of a woman opening her heart years after her mother’s suicide and learn how to overcome any loss in your own life.

About the author:

Prior to a disabling bicycle accident in 2011, Wendy spent nearly two years searching for answers related to her mother’s suicide death when Wendy was just twelve years old and the oldest of five children. She poured through her old journals, read her dad’s and grandmother’s memoirs, listened to funeral and family home evening tapes, and interviewed countless friends and family members including her former bishop, his wife, and the former police chief in order to discover truth.

Following her bicycle accident, Wendy’s injuries prohibited her return to work as a nurse manager at a local hospital. She left behind her 20 year nursing career and began organizing and writing from the information she had previously gathered.

Wendy has long advocated for suicide prevention and has participated on various professional and community based groups dedicated to that end. She also recognizes the need to unashamedly support those who must continue to live in the painful aftermath of a loved one’s suicide and passionately lends her voice to that cause.

Wendy earned her nursing degree from UVU in 1991 and her MBA from Brigham Young University in 2007. She has three sons and daughters-in-law, one daughter, and two beautiful grandchildren. She and her husband Mark live in Orem, Utah.