Maria Canton
Northern News Services

Rankin Inlet (Mar 06/00) - By the time he was into his early teens, Ben Williams knew 14 people who committed suicide.

It is a statistic he doesn't forget.

Williams was living in Arctic Bay then. He was attending school, and the period between Grade 7 and Grade 10 is marked by the memory of those 14 people.

When he was asked if things improved after Grade 10, the young RCMP officer says now he doesn't even know how many family and friends he has lost to suicide during his 21 years.

It was in junior high, he says, that he began to come to grips with suicide, but he was yet to discover how many people in his world would make that devastating choice.

"When I first started understanding about suicide and knowing someone who had committed suicide, in Arctic Bay, I was probably in Grade 7," he says.

"And it happened before then too, a cousin of mine committed suicide and she lived in Iqaluit, I knew about it, but I didn't really understand it in the way that..."

His voices trails off in the empty office at the Rankin Inlet RCMP detachment where he is working at his first placement after graduating and becoming a police officer.

"It's painful for a family -- there are a lot of cousins who have committed suicide and it's like a helpless feeling, you don't know what to do.

"I knew it was wrong and I was told it was wrong, but it was so common that it was almost expected -- it was something that was done, you knew there was going to be another one."

Williams and his family moved to Iqaluit at the end of his Grade 10 year and it was then, he says, that he started trying to answer the question asked by so many Nunavummiut -- why?

"I couldn't understand how serious a problem had to be before someone committed suicide and when my friends did it, I tried to understand what was going on around them that made them commit suicide -- and there were problems in their lives.

"It was just so common that to choose another route was something you really had to think about."

Long before he stopped counting the deaths, Williams says he stopped going to funerals, the void they left in him was too painful.

He also noted that people never talked about suicide.

He said they would talk about the person who committed suicide, but never about the issue itself.

"We would express feelings and memories of people, but the issue of suicide was a little hard to touch on.

"It's a very serious and scary issue to talk about and it's very hard, but it's something that we're going to have to get over."

And it wasn't until he was 16 years old, after Grade 10, that Williams sat down with his parents and had a serious and open conversation about the issue.

"(My parents) would ask me what I thought about suicide, if I understood that when you die, that's it, but not until I was 16 did I seriously talk about it with my mom and dad.

"I didn't talk about it until I was a little older."

Is that the problem, waiting to talk? Not wanting to talk? Fear of talking?

"I honestly don't know. All I know is I've had people commit suicide around me and we've tried different solutions to stop it -- even having the students put the body in the casket -- anything to try and stop suicide.

"But if you can't talk about something, it will just continue to happen. How do you pick someone to start expressing their feelings about something they can't even talk about?"

That is the question.

Williams plans to try to make a difference for his people, for his new territory, and no doubt his choice of career will provide the perfect venue for him to help make that difference.

"When I was going to school in Arctic Bay I wasn't aware of any solutions and it was something no one wanted to deal with.

"Now I see people trying to solve it a lot of different ways: by talking, opening programs, by doing things in the community to address the situation.

"I think now people have the courage and are trying to change."