How Tanaura found help and hope through 211 Alberta

Tanaura Seon volunteers with United Way’s Impact Speaker program to share her story of reaching out to 211 Alberta to find mental health support after losing loved ones to suicide.

This story includes mentions of suicide, grief, and other mental health struggles. Please take care when reading and watching the video.

If you need support, you can contact 211 Alberta for mental health resources in your area, or 988 if you or someone you know are dealing with thoughts of suicide.

I didn’t want to think about what was happening, I didn’t want to think about the people that I’d lost, and I didn’t know how to acknowledge that loss.

It’s such a profound loss because there’s so many questions and there’s no answers. I was mad. It was so unfair. It was awful. But at the same time, you can’t be mad at somebody because they were obviously in a terrible amount of pain to be in that situation.

There were a lot of complicated emotions that I really struggled with and my way of dealing with it was to not deal with it at all. I put it out of my mind as much as I could.

I was driving to work one day early in March and hit a patch of black ice. I rolled my vehicle either two-and-a-half or three-and-a-half times, landing upside down.

The first real clear thought I had when everything stopped was ‘I don’t want things to go like this’. I knew I had to change something because I was getting a second chance. I could have died. It was a very serious accident, but I walked away without a scratch. I was very, very fortunate and I just knew that I needed to do something different because I wasn’t happy with the way things were going.

I went to the hospital because I needed to get checked out and made sure that everything was OK. I called my husband and told him I loved him and that I needed a new car. He picked me up, and on the drive home we pulled over so I could make a call to 211.

I remember being scared, being relieved, and being unsure about what was going to happen. I didn’t know what I needed but I had heard of 211 somewhere and that they had access to resources. I figured they could point me in the right direction.

I remember the Community Resource Specialist being compassionate and being kind, giving me a name and a number that I wrote down on a scrap of paper in my car. I went home and called that number, and it led me to program for suicide bereavement that was life changing for me.

The bereavement group was really difficult to go through, because it was a group of people coming together that were broken. Over those 10 weeks you could see people start to heal. It was gradual but we all learned coping skills. We all learned how to say goodbye.

That was really life changing because I learned how to access the feelings that I had and how to process them. It was also an opportunity to talk about my loved ones in a way that I couldn’t before. Lots of people are uncomfortable talking about people after they’ve died, but that was a safe place, and it was a welcoming space.

Losing somebody to suicide is a different kind of grief that nobody wants to talk about. I share my experiences because it’s very difficult, it’s very isolating and you feel like nobody wants to talk about it.

It’s not easy to go and talk about my experience, but I think it’s important and that’s why I share. I’m fortunate enough that I know that I’ve been able to help more than one person.

Almost every time that I go and talk to a group of people there’s somebody who comes up to me afterwards to say: ‘I lost somebody to suicide too’. Those connections are really important. Acknowledging it and saying that it’s OK to talk about it makes a huge difference for people.

To the people who work for 211 Alberta, I want to say thank you. They made a difference for me and I appreciate it, so thank you very very much for the work that you do. 211 Alberta is so incredibly important. It’s a great resource in this province and hopefully it’s around for years to come. I can’t imagine life without it.

211 Alberta is provided in partnership by United Way of the Alberta Capital Region, Distress Centre Calgary, and Canadian Mental Health Association Edmonton. If you or someone you know needs help, you can contact 211 Alberta 24/7 by phone, text, and chat. The service is free, confidential, and available in over 170 languages over the phone.