More out of service to my wife and family than for personal connection, I attended a fundraising event for the Samaritans this afternoon. What I learned:

* Calls to the suicide-prevention service have increased 20 percent since the Marathon attack. I assume that that's local to Greater Boston.

* A major component of the organization's work is postvention, a word neither I nor my spellcheck had heard of, but there's a Wikipedia page for it (so it must be real!). It connotes support for the people that suicide leaves behind. 

I value this part of the mission greatly, in the sense that funerals are brought about by death but are for the living. I have had slightly less regard and attachment for the caller counseling, because I'm not convinced that suicide is always, incontrovertibly, the wrong decision for an individual.

My opinion arises from my fascination of humankind's unanimity that death is bad, even though not a single soul who's left the living has reported back. I think there is far greater justification for death agnosticism than there is the more common kind, regarding a Supreme Being.

Anyway, I'm feeling good about our donation to help this group, and wanted to share.