Bereavement due to suicide

Libby: We lost our son when he was 23. It wasn’t foreseen although he was increasingly fragile, and he was seeing mental health professionals. Since that time we’ve been through experiences which many of you looking at this site will recognise, and because we are media figures a lot of people have written to us with their own parallel experiences and we’ve learnt a lot.

All bereavements are hard and suicide has a particular ability to throw the survivors off balance. All sorts of extra feelings, emotional burdens and wonderings can get in the way of simple grief and if you let them  those feelings can poison the comfort of remembering the good times.

Paul: Every suicide is different because every individual is different and the same goes for those of us who remain. You can’t generalise about feelings, people may tell you that you’re bound to be angry or guilty or whatever but they are wrong. It doesn’t work the same for everyone. Some of us are lucky to get a fairly good understanding of why it probably happened. Others have to live with a complete mystery. Some families have been through years of fearing it, for others it’s a profound shock. And then there are other people and that’s a whole subject in itself, always there’s the problem of how you tell other people and how far you should try to explain it or even defend it because nobody who hasn’t experienced a suicide close to them really knows how it feels.  And then of course we all have different ways of remembering the one we lost – memorials, writings, music - whatever seems to work there is no one formula.

Libby: That’s why we hope that the wide variety of people on this site will have a chance of being useful. Someone among these brave volunteers might just strike a useful note for you. In the same way among your own acquaintances there will be individuals who unexpectedly are immensely helpful and others who somehow can’t be. You have to take whatever help works for you and gently reject the things that don’t, and that goes for the professionals too, and the books. But perhaps the central thing to hold on to is that suicide is always a mystery. Hardly ever can you point to one single cause because things which drive one person to take their life may be quite survivable by another. For that reason it seems to us, as parents who have to live on, that feeling guilty is just as irrelevant and unnecessary as feeling angry with the person. The suicidal person didn’t mean to hurt you, he or she wouldn’t want to shipwreck your life just because, for some reason, they couldn’t carry on theirs.  The relationship you had is not dead or devalued and after the shock, or in between recurring bouts of shock – when they come back for a long time, you can still think of the one you lost with the same love and the same respect as we think of our son Nicholas.