Bereavement due to suicide

…And in terms of, going back to the day I mean I, it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done, me telling the children that, you know, and I’m sort of proud of myself in the sense of, of that, and really of they way I’ve dealt with you know what’s happened since, it’s been all very much sort of seat of the pants, it’s always been gut feeling because there is no rule book you know,  there isn’t a, “Well, you know do this next, and then that, and then do this and…” You know the process of grieving is not a linear process, and you hear people coming out with these, you know, “There’s bereavement, there’s various stages of grief and you go through this, and then you go through that”, and it’s a load of rubbish, I mean it’s like you know, it’s much more like a spiral and you’re constantly going through it, you go through some, you think you’ve been there before actually you are in somewhere different  but you, you, you’re re-visiting these phases the whole time.

Extremely hard I mean yes, it is a personal holocaust I mean I think that’s the best way of summing it up it’s, you, your whole world just disintegrates around you, the impact of it is, it’s inconceivable to express, I can’t put it into, into words what it does to you, it really wrings you in, inside out, just a sort of whole, a kaleidoscope of emotions and feelings all swirling around together, which, are just really hard to deal with, you know, confusing.

How long do those feelings go on for, are they still going on?

A long, long time. I mean I, I don’t think you ever adjust, you know some people talk about adjustment to bereavement and, I don’t know whether we ever really adjust fully to, to losing someone who’s close to us that we love, a friend or a relative. But certainly with bereavement through suicide I don’t think you ever do really, you don’t adjust, at best you reach an accommodation with yourself and that’s different to an, that’s different to an adjustment. To use a comparison, my mother died of cancer when I was fifteen and that was like horrendous, we nursed her at home, it was horrendous, and in many ways you could say it was worse, the experience of that, but I’ve come to terms with my mother’s death, you know, in that that was a natural death, natural, natural causes, it was terribly sad it was awful experience to, to see her suffer, but my father’s death through suicide I’ve never, that, that hasn’t healed. Somebody wrote a book called ‘A Special Scar’, it’s a really good way of putting it because it doesn’t heal in the same way, it’s still there, it’s still, it’s still like it was, I’m not saying like yesterday ‘cause it’s been a long time now it’s been over thirty years but it still feels very recent in my mind and it still impacts on me very centrally in a way that my mother’s death doesn’t.

The guilt probably is the biggest emotion out of, out of the three for me anyway because there are unanswered questions that I think that maybe I should have done more to prevent this. And I suppose it’s beating myself up. I should have done this. I should have done that.  But the guilt is much more intense at happy occasions really and it’s hard to deal with. But fortunately my family have gone through the same bereavement and I can discuss it with them and they know what I mean. And with the SOBS [Survivors of Bereavement by Suicide] group as well, they understand completely when I say, actually I laughed the other day and I felt guilty for laughing. And they know how I’m feeling and they know why. It’s difficult for, for people who aren’t members of the family or people who haven’t gone through this bereavement with us. At work when people are larking about and having a laugh and a joke and I can’t imagine them understanding me saying, ‘Actually I can’t laugh with you because I feel guilty about it because my sister’s dead’. It, it’s difficult.

Other people have said that.

Really?

Mmm.

I’m not surprised. I went on holiday. Well we’ve been on several holidays this year and I’m excited because we’re going on an aeroplane and then we get on the aeroplane and my mood just sinks. And it’s because I’m quietly thinking about my sister who had never been on an aeroplane. She never went on holiday with me and I’m going on holiday again and having a good time and I’m looking forward to it and I feel guilty because of that. And it, it’s hard, it’s hard to explain to people who haven’t gone through the experience of suicide really.

And I was numb and I, for a year I suppose. I think it, in my mind it’s a year that the intense grief lasted and I’ve had many other things happen to me in my life, I’ve had divorce, I’ve had other losses, you know, I’ve had various other traumatic experiences, but I’ve never experienced anything like that. It’s as though all the other deeply emotional experiences I have are nothing when set, set beside that period of that day it happened and that year afterwards. I would doubt I’d even truly grieved since then because I tend to dismiss grief, that period was so painful to me it, it, it, it, it was so painful that it was a place that I, that I, that I never want to go again.

After a year, of feeling terrible as I remember it, outwardly I know, that I was behaving like I always did and I think this is the thing about children, I think you can underestimate just how emotional, because I think in terms of emotion as I say that children, certainly of 12, are just as sophisticated in their emotions as adults, so when you feel emotional pain it’s the same as an adult feeling emotional pain, but as far as the adults around me were concerned, you know I didn’t show them that emotional pain, I never cried, only on the time I heard it, I, that was the only time I cried. In fact I got really fed up with my mother sitting on the stairs weeping. And then after a year it seems to me like a year, I suddenly realised one day that I didn’t feel anything anymore, except anger with my father for what he’d done.

Yes, I’m, what I was trying to explain was there’s, there’s a lot of sadness and anger that that she has not been part of all the big things that have happened to me since , but that at the time, that it’s almost as if it’s an anger about her making a decision not to be there, that she chose not to be part of our lives anymore, but it’s also I guess an understanding that at the time she made that choice she was a very poorly lady.

Mm.

And that throughout those last few months of her life she wasn’t, a lot of her thinking was revolving around her, she was at a place where she was very unhappy, she was very ill, and she wasn’t thinking in a logical way.