Heartbeat Memory Tree Lighting: Loved ones honor those lost to suicide in El Paso County
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (KRDO) - The sights and sounds of the holiday season are now well underway; typically a festive time best spent with friends and family.
However, it can be a particularly rough time of year when loved ones are no longer with us to celebrate.
A tree at Rock Ledge Ranch in Colorado Springs may appear as your ordinary Christmas tree, but to hundreds of others it's so much more.
That’s because there's over 400 ornaments hanging that each represent a life lost to suicide, each engraved with someone's name, and each bearing a special memory.
The Heartbeat Memory Tree Lighting is an event which began in 1980 to bring empathy, encouragement, and direction following the suicide of a loved one.
"That's the main thing, to help them get through this holiday season with just a little piece of healing," Heartbeat facilitator Betty Van Thournout said.
Better and her husband are the driving forces behind the lighting. A legacy they’re carrying on that started with Loretta Archibald - a woman who lost her son to suicide in 1978.
"Nobody could comfort her. Nobody understood. And so she decided to set out on a path that she was going to change that," Van Thournout said.
Archibald certainly did... by bringing grieving parents, children, friends and others together every holiday season.
A remembrance that is especially meaningful here in El Paso County; which leads the state in suicide deaths.
Of the more than 1,200 that occurred in Colorado in 2023, 196 suicide deaths took place right here in our region.
It's a tragic statistic that Van Thournout and her husband hope to see changed one day, "Above all of this, I am a grieving mama, too. I didn't think I could survive that. But this, this fills my heart to see people come and be able to walk away and go, okay, I can take one more step today. I can take one more step in my grief journey."
Everyone is invited to stop by and pay respects at Rock Ledge Ranch.
The tree will light up nightly at dusk through the second week in January.
