Lindsey Doolittle’s ‘Faces After Suicide’ transforms silence into dialogue with upcoming exhibition

Photo Courtesy of Lindsey Doolittle

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Every year in the United States, over 49,000 people die by suicide, according to the CDC. That’s one death every 11 minutes. In the time it takes you to drive to work, clean out your inbox, or wash your dishes, someone’s story finishes its final chapter, crushed by the weight of the world.

But those stories don’t always end in isolation. Each loss leaves behind a ripple—partners, parents, children, friends—grappling with not only heartbreak, but the silence and stigma that often follow. People who die by suicide may be gone, but their absence reshapes the lives of everyone who loved them as they wrestle with grief, unanswered questions, and far too often, blame.

Lindsey Doolittle is one of those people. After losing her husband, Brett Doolittle, a sergeant with the Kansas City, Kansas Police Department, to suicide in 2015, she found herself not only grieving but also isolated and left to navigate blame, shame, and a culture that didn’t know how to speak about her loss.

“People look for the closest to the deceased of someone who’s died by suicide, and that’s where they point the finger,” Doolittle, a local art teacher, says. “They don’t look further into that person’s life.”

After Brett passed, Doolittle’s network of support seemingly vanished. The police department where Brett had worked for 16 years, his family, some of her friends, and workplace all fell silent. Much like Doolittle, they didn’t know what else to do. That silence inside her home, her community, and even her school cut as deep as the loss itself.

In Brett’s suicide note, he cited the police department as the source of his anguish while describing Doolittle as what kept him going. KCKPD ignored this, blaming their marriage in both the official police report and the autopsy. When Doolittle reached out to the department’s former chief, she was met with what she was becoming all too familiar with: silence.

“People who die in the line of duty, people who are officers who have a physical illness, and they die of a physical illness, there’s so much support,” Doolittle says. “Would they have treated me like this, or treated his death like this, if it had been any other type of death?”

Just weeks after Brett’s passing, Doolittle sought out a support group as the silence had become too loud. There, she found the community she desperately needed. They taught her that you don’t get over it, you get through it.

Photo Courtesy of Lindsey Doolittle

As the members of the group—all of whom had been bereaved by suicide—shared their stories, Doolittle began to draw.

“Everybody’s got a unique story, but we all have common threads,” Doolittle says. “I started to draw the survivors while they were talking, not looking at my paper, just looking right at them because people shy away from us or disappear in our lives because they don’t know what to say, or they’re blaming us, or they’ve judged us.

“It is a death that people just tend to turn away from, and it’s so stigmatized,” Doolittle says. “I feel stigma is shame, a silence, so I don’t turn away. I look directly at them.”

The art style of blind contour results in finished products that don’t often look like their subjects, as gaps and spaces represent the holes in the lives of loss survivors and the brokenness they might feel. Doolittle titles each drawing by the survivor’s relationship to the person they lost to preserve their anonymity.

Her collection, having grown over years of attending support groups, have pooled together into an art exhibition, Faces After Suicide, opening on Aug. 15 and running until Nov. 8 at the Englewood Arts Center Gallery.

In the soft quiet of the art gallery, visitors may walk among drawings that seem to breathe pain and resilience. Line portraits will peer back with sunken eyes, clenched jaws, or expressions softened by memory. Arranged in a circle just like a support group, the titles of each drawing are stark: Son. Husband. Mother.

“I want people to see that there is hope,” Doolittle says. “My group showed me that you can have joy in your life again, and I want loss survivors to be able to see that; hear that.”

The exhibit will also feature a wall of handwritten letters from loss survivors to those they’ve lost to suicide. Visitors are invited to contribute their own letters to the exhibit, which they can submit via Doolittle’s website.

On top of the letters and art, the exhibit will include a table of resources from around the world regarding prevention and awareness. It’s Doolittle’s way of showing help can be found wherever they need it, not just for people who are struggling with suicidal ideation, but also for people who have lost somebody to suicide.

“I hope other people who might not be a loss survivor can gain a different perspective, and maybe not shy away if they know somebody who’s struggling and show them that it’s not too late; that they can always reach out,” Doolittle says. “You don’t have to fix anyone. If you don’t know what to say, you can say that. I feel like making this show visible, it kind of confronts that stigma. It challenges people.”

Doolittle’s work aims to spark conversations, challenge assumptions, and fill the silence that surrounds suicide loss. She also believes the stigma needs to be confronted early on.

As an educator, Doolittle watched as the stigma took root in her own classrooms, where many of her own students knew her husband as Officer Doolittle, as he would often join them for lunch at the school. When her students became curious, she was asked to hide the truth.

Photo Courtesy of Lindsey Doolittle

“[The students] were saying he got shot or died in a fire—none of it was true,” she recalls. “When I asked my former principal if I could at least say he was sick, she said, ‘Don’t even go that far.’”

Being an art teacher, Doolittle felt conflicted with her own curriculum, as she was taking part in the stigma that now plagued her.

“We talk about Vincent van Gogh with our kids,” Doolittle says. “We show Starry Night. We show his self-portrait after he cut off his ear, but we don’t say why. We don’t say where he was when he painted those things,” she says. “We sanitize it, and in doing that, we teach kids that suicide is something we can’t talk about.”

In response, she wrote and illustrated Goodnight, Mr. Vincent van Gogh—a children’s book that introduces young readers to the concept of suicide in a way that’s honest, age-appropriate, and gentle. The book is now on permanent display at the Van Gogh Library in the Netherlands. Tri-County Mental Health even purchased copies for every school in the region—including Doolittle’s own.

By turning her pain into purpose, she crafted an animated version of her book, and she created a documentary about the Faces After Suicide exhibit.

Doolittle also launched an organization with a name resembling her own philosophy: “Above the Rug”.

“Sweeping suicide and those left behind under the rug only deepens shame and silence,” Doolittle says. “This exhibition lives above the rug, inviting others to step into the conversation. By making this experience visible, it creates space for connection, empathy, and public acknowledgment.”

Most importantly, it tells loss survivors that they’re not alone—a feeling Doolittle knows the reality of facing. About a year and a half after Brett’s death, she hit her lowest point.

“I’ve never thought about ever ending my life,” she says. “But the absence of the police department, the absence of his family, people leaving out of my life, I came to a point where I just thought it was never gonna get any better. I started to hate myself.”

She attempted suicide herself, but thankfully, she survived and immediately sought professional help, having attended therapy since.

“Art saved me,” Doolittle says. “It was my avenue, my outlet to get what was inside of me out there. It was also a way to distract my mind from the intrusive, unwanted thoughts.”

Photo Courtesy of Lindsey Doolittle

Art doesn’t have to solve anything; it just has to witness. Doolittle doesn’t pretend to have all the answers, just that the most important thing is to stay—to show up, to hold space, and not to vanish in fear or discomfort.

“Not everyone disappeared out of my life,” Doolittle says. “Some of the people you thought were going to be there for you will disappear, and sometimes the people you never thought would be there for you are.”

After a decade since Brett’s passing, Doolittle doesn’t place blame—not on her husband, not on herself, not on the police department.

“I feel that his life exceeded his coping skills,” Doolittle says. “When we start playing the blame game, nothing is solved.”

Some wounds will never fully heal, but through grief, Doolittle found purpose, and through that purpose, a way to fill the silence.

In the absence of her late husband, she built something enduring: not answers, but acknowledgment. Through her art and advocacy, she reminds us that, even in silence, there is space for connection, healing, and hope, and most importantly, she reminds loss survivors everywhere that they are never as alone as they feel.