Jessica Merritt

When people hear suicide prevention, they picture a hotline number or a clinical setting. Both matter enormously. But there is another piece that gets talked about far less, and it is the piece we work on every week. It starts with a homecoming. They get out. The uniform gets hung up, and they walk into a civilian life that looks, from the outside, like everything they were fighting to get back to. And then the quiet sets in. The mission is gone. The structure that ordered every hour of the...

They Lost Him Twice Most people picture one loss. For a widow of a veteran who died by suicide, there were two. The first happened at the homecoming, which is the part nobody expects. There were photographs. There was relief. Everyone exhaled and said the hard part was over. And then, slowly, she began to understand that the man who walked back through the door was not the man who left. He was there and he was not there. Certain sounds changed the whole evening. She learned to read a room...

We planted five new witch hazel trees on the farm this summer and it felt like exactly the right thing to be doing. The land here has always been part of our program, not a backdrop for it. This season we leaned into that more deeply than ever, foraging, planting, making, and learning from what grows right outside our back door. Nature is not just where we hold our retreats. It is one of our most powerful teachers. And caring for it is some of the most meaningful work we do. There is a reason...