Susan Woitas wrote the first poem in her collection “Lost Lives” after losing her 17-year-old son to suicide in November 1997 & the last poem in December 2005, three years after the death of her second son, who also died by suicide at the age of 17. In addition to presenting Woitas’s poetry, this paper offers some reflections on how Woitas survived the death of her sons in a societal context that simultaneously places impossibly high standards of caring on mothers & stigmatizes death by suicide. (22 refs.)