“Each of us owes the people we love and the people they love, or the people they could hurt, the responsibility to look without favor or prejudice. Maybe there was a sign in my son’s propensity to fall in love so madly he couldn’t see anything but the girl he loved. Maybe there was a sign in the way he seemed to cut off almost all communication with us when he went to college. We just thought he was trying to experience himself as a young man who didn’t need to report his every move to his mother and father, and we didn’t want to interfere with that. We weren’t with him every day, as we had been when he was younger, and we definitely would have seen changes in him if we had gone up there, or cajoled him into a visual phone call.

“We second-guessed our impulse to reach out. We should have reached out. I’m not suggesting that you have to question every move someone makes, but then again, it doesn’t hurt to question. The worst that could happen is that we irritate or offend someone, and that seems a very small price to pay. We loved him, and we knew that he knew it. You know, if love alone was enough to prevent a suicide, almost no one would ever die by suicide. If love alone was enough to deter someone from violence, there would be a whole lot less violence in our violent world.”

Stefan spoke then, briefly. “I never imagined myself to be the kind of person who could violently hurt someone I loved, and it doesn’t matter that it was an accident. But I had to go on and I still want my life to matter for something, which is why I started The Healing Project.” He talked about its aims and goals. “Everybody has the obligation to do good, like John Wesley said, as much as we can for as many people as we can. But if you’ve done wrong, you have even more of an obligation. It’s the most important thing.”

Then we took questions. One woman, not unkindly, asked me how I coped with the inevitable shame:

I told her, “I wanted to hide away. I wanted to die at first. But like Stefan said, the most important impulse you have, along with the guilt, is you want to do something good. It wouldn’t do anybody any good if I just hid away. I really didn’t want to even do this speech, not even for money, since it was too painful to even think about. But I became convinced that there was a good reason to do it, that maybe at least it would give somebody the insight to help another family along.”