8 8“Different people suffer pain differently. It is not the
degree of the pain but the difference of pain.”
—Suicide support group leader
I was not prepared for the violent extremes of emotion that engulfed me after Harry’s suicide. In what seemed like seconds, I would careen from feelings of inconsolable sorrow to murderous rage to horrified bewilderment. The reality of what had happened stole my days; relentless nightmares robbed my sleep. I was psychically battered and physically spent.
The rapid changes in mood left me unable to catch my breath. Each time I thought I had discovered the missing piece of the puzzle that would explain Harry’s death, my reaction would alter accordingly. Yet, because there was no logical answer to what had been an irrational act, I could find no peace or rest.
“Suicide is the ultimate ‘fuck you,’ ” I would repeat to myself when fury at my husband’s abandonment would flood over me. Then, the image of a despondent Harry, facing his death isolated and alone, would fill my thoughts. Physical pains of remorse would overpower me, their intensity causing me to fear that I was dying of heart attack. My anger would be replaced by uncontrollable tears. It was I who had abandoned Harry, I would reproach myself. My body would shake from waves of shame. How could I have been so stupid, I would berate myself. He was planning his suicide and I had not been able to see what was going on. Panic would push away the anguish. This was not real, I would conclude. I must be dreaming or in the middle of a nervous breakdown. I would feel myself physically shrinking, disassociating from the world around me. Then, the reality of Harry’s death would jolt me back—and the cacophony of emotions would begin again.
According to Marian Osterweis and Jessica Townsend of the National Institute of Mental Health, sudden death is especially shocking for those who are left behind because it precludes the possibility of preparation. They point out that 80 percent of all deaths in the United States occur with several weeks’ warning, adding: “More psychological distress is experienced by family members following death by suicide than death by natural causes. Heightened anger directed at the deceased and guilt for not having been able to prevent the death, as well as true clinical depression, are more likely to occur and persist.”
The authors conclude that whether or not a death is anticipated, the bereavement process following the loss of a loved one takes several years. They observe that for many people, the second year is more difficult than the first. In addition, the mourning process does not necessarily progress in an orderly fashion. People move back and forth between what the authors describe as overlapping and fluid stages, and act in ways that might be considered abnormal under other circumstances. People differ in how rapidly they recover and how they express their grief after a death. The most immediate response, however, is shock, numbness, and a sense of disbelief. There are dramatic and rapid swings from one state to another, including depressed moods, difficulty in concentrating, anger at the deceased for dying, guilt about what might have been done to avoid the death, irritability, anxiety, restlessness, and extreme sadness. People also experience numerous physical symptoms, such as pain, gastrointestinal upset, lack of energy and sleep, and appetite disturbances.
The distinctive bereavement process following a suicide is described in an American Journal of Psychiatry article, written by Drs. David Ness and Cynthia Pfeffer, which concludes that family members who have lost a loved one to suicide are blamed and avoided more often than relatives of people who have died under other circumstances. The article points out that this attitude may reinforce the guilt and self-blame that already preoccupy suicide survivors, exacerbating their isolation and difficulty in talking about their feelings.
As survivors move from absorbing the impact of the suicide to dealing with the consequences of the loss, we begin to embark on our own individual journey of healing. Yet, in the process of moving on, we also experience tremendous guilt that our lives have not stopped with the death of our loved one.
I remember the feeling of alarm that came over me the first time I was able to become absorbed with something unrelated to Harry’s suicide. It was several months after he had killed himself. My days were totally consumed with the practical logistics of putting my life back into order; my nights were filled with the unrelenting emotional fallout that prevented me from sleeping. I envied people who had the luxury to concern themselves with such minor annoyances as the dry cleaners ruining their clothes or their bus being delayed in traffic; I longed for the boring and routine.
I was at the dentist’s office to replace a filling that had fallen out the day before. Even the act of making the appointment seemed like a betrayal of Harry’s memory: How could I engage in such a mundane activity at the same time I was struggling to resolve the ultimate philosophical question of what makes some people want to live and others choose to die? The care of my tooth seemed absolutely inconsequential—almost laughable—compared with the anguish that Harry must have been suffering. Yet, here I was, selfishly taking care of my insignificant needs.
I had come to believe that my ability to concentrate had been permanently impaired by Harry’s suicide. I was not able to read, watch television, engage in a conversation for more than a few minutes before the recollection of the events surrounding his death would ambush my thoughts. I considered myself disabled, a casualty of a vicious war.
There was a copy of People magazine in the dentist’s waiting room. I started thumbing through it, when an article recounting the latest scandals of a notorious actor caught my attention. I read for what seemed like several minutes before I heard my name being called by the receptionist. I was startled to discover that I had become so engaged in this man’s marital and drug problems that I had forgotten about myself. I was suddenly infused with hope for my future: For the first time since the suicide, I had been able to concentrate completely without images of Harry interrupting my attention. Even though my optimism was almost simultaneously replaced by profound guilt—I was forsaking my husband’s memory—I knew on some gut level that I had not been left irreparably damaged, that I was on my way to becoming whole again.
Many survivors discover strengths and inner resources they never knew existed following the suicide of a loved one. “In one second, I went from being a child to being a man,” recalls Lewis, a forty-one-year-old hospital administrator from Tulsa whose father killed himself one week before Lewis graduated from high school. “He always overprotected me, and his death was my first lesson in the ‘real’ problems of the ‘real’ world. As the oldest son, I was left to take care of my mother and younger brothers. Because of my father’s suicide, I lost out on an important part of my growing up. Instead of going to college, I stayed home and took a job. I felt forced to assume my father’s role as provider for the family. It took me a while to be able to express my anger at what he had done. Although I felt guilty that I was being disloyal to his memory, it was the only way I could begin to start my own life.
“I don’t remember my father ever being depressed until the last couple of months of my senior year in high school. I had received a baseball scholarship at a small college around two hours from my home, and my father kept on saying that this would be the last summer the whole family would be together. He was really upset about this. I would assure him that I would come home for vacations, but he would always answer me with the same comment: ‘It’s the end of an era.’ I was so involved with my own problems—teenage stuff, like who to invite to the prom—that I didn’t see what was going on with him.
“The Saturday before my graduation was my team’s big game. My father always came to see me play; he would even come to practice. We were alone in the house and I was waiting for him to drive me over to school. All of a sudden, I heard a loud bang in the backyard. My next-door neighbor was screaming and I ran outside. My father had shot himself in the head. For some reason, I was very calm. I walked back into the house in what seemed slow motion and called the police. I was in the kitchen and I remember seeing my father’s half-eaten toast and the paper opened to the sports pages. His coffee was still warm. I went back out to my father and cradled him in my arms. I knew he was dead but I kept on talking to him. I remember all this yelling and commotion around me. I was covered with his blood but it didn’t seem to matter. I knew beyond a doubt that he had killed himself because I was going to leave him. In my mind, I just accepted total responsibility for his death.
“Although I had really loved my father, for some reason I was unable to cry when he died. I became the man of the house and took over the responsibilities of looking after my family. Around six months after my father died, my best friend came home from college for Christmas vacation. He was going on and on about school and sports and girls. It all seemed so far away from me. For the first time, I became mad at my father for leaving me with all his shit. But then I quickly erased that thought from my mind, as if I were being a bad son.
“As the months went on, I started feeling as if I were drowning. One day, my mother said to me that she was worried I was becoming like my father. I had no idea what she meant. She reluctantly told me that my father had suffered from depression when he was younger and had been hospitalized for a suicide attempt when I was two years old. I was crushed—how could she have kept that information from me?
“It was only after his death that I began learning about my father’s life. It was like working backward. The more I knew, the angrier I became. Why should I have to give up my life because he was sick? I started having terrible nightmares. I was always screaming at a man who was trying to run away from me. I was terrified that I would end up crazy like my father. I was convinced that I was losing it and knew I needed help.
“My priest suggested that I attend a support group for suicide survivors that met in a nearby town. Walking into that meeting was very difficult for me. But it was the beginning of my healing. I was able to rant and rave against my father with people who did not judge me for being selfish or cruel. I even felt safe enough to cry. The more I allowed myself to see my father’s suicide as his choice, the more I knew I had to get on with what I wanted to do. My mother was financially stable, my brothers were doing well in school, and I was ready to take my life back.
“Now, I am regarded as very successful in my community. I am engaged to a wonderful woman, have a responsible job, and coach the local Little League team. I guess you can say that I have moved on from the devastation of my father’s suicide. Yet, especially when I’m feeling good, I start thinking that I really could have done more for my father. I kick myself for being a self-centered teenager who should have spent more time with him. I also feel deceived that I didn’t know about his previous attempt to kill himself when I was growing up. I’m convinced that it would have made a difference in how I acted toward him. Twenty-three years after his death, it seems as if I still have the same set of emotions. The difference is that they are not as intense and don’t swing back and forth with the same frequency. I have these relatively long periods of calm, which allow me to function and even thrive.”
The irrationality of suicide leaves the survivor no room for definitive resolution. “In order for me to move beyond my partner’s suicide, I need to accept it as a purely existential act,” explains Lena, a thirty-four-year-old actress from New York City. “Charles and I had been in a loving, committed relationship for three years. He was a sculptor whose work was just beginning to become recognized. I search myself and search myself but I cannot recall any signs that Charles was even vaguely unhappy. We talked about just everything, so I thought I really knew him. God knows, I was wrong.
“It was one of those lazy Sunday mornings, last August. I went down to the basement to do the laundry. When I came back up to the apartment, I heard all this commotion on the street. The window was wide open and there was this beautiful photograph that Charles had taken of me taped to the sill. He had written “I love you” across the bottom. I knew then that he had jumped. I started screaming and could hear my voice echoing, as if it didn’t belong to me. I remember ripping the picture to shreds and throwing it out the window after him.
“Charles’s suicide left me furious. We didn’t get a chance to say goodbye. For weeks, I was in total raw shock, as if I had been in a fire and all my skin was burned off. Luckily, I was already in therapy and had a very supportive network of close friends. Gradually, my anger abated and I was able to begin mourning him. Yet, every time I seemed to start feeling better, this automatic reflex would kick in and I would begin to assault myself for being so blind and self-involved that I neglected to see what must have been going on with him. I would blame myself for having left him alone so I could go do the laundry, of all things.
“Lately, I’ve been trying to go out more and not be so solitary. Yet, when I find myself starting to have a good time or wanting to begin dating again, I feel unfaithful to Charles. I’m trying to incorporate his suicide into my life, to find a balance between remembering him and establishing a new life for myself. It is probably the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do.”
The roller coaster of emotions following a suicide causes intense feelings of isolation and a breaking apart from all that once seemed familiar. “Six months ago, we had a round of layoffs at work and two of my colleagues committed suicide shortly afterward,” says Brenda, a fifty-eight-year-old secretary at a large law firm in Chicago. “My husband and children tell me that something is wrong with me because I’m taking their deaths so hard. It’s true that they were not my closest friends, but I feel so guilty because I still have my job while they lost theirs. Why is that so? I keep wondering what would have happened if they hadn’t been laid off. Would they still have killed themselves?
“There was a group of us who worked on the same shift for four years. Our desks were right near each other. We would go out to lunch together and occasionally see each other socially. Mostly, though, we shared our problems with each other—both personal and work-related. One Friday afternoon, two-thirds of the office staff were fired, with no warning from management. It wasn’t based on seniority and we were all shocked. I felt very disoriented, even though for some reason I had kept my job.
“Three months after she was fired from her secretarial job, Maria, a thirty-one-year-old single mother of a four-year-old boy, slit her wrists. She was on life support at the hospital for two days before she finally died. When her mother called to tell me what had happened, I was shocked. I had always thought of Maria as unbelievably strong. It was also my first experience with suicide. My first reaction was terrible sadness for the loss of such a young person. Then I became angry. How could she have left her son, who needed her? Why had she been so weak to have given up when she had so much to live for? To leave everything behind because you lose a job? I couldn’t believe it.
“Her wake was awful. They had an open casket, but it didn’t look like her. The expression on her face was troubled, almost angry. There was an extremely emotional reaction from her coworkers. We were like a family with a very close bond. Then, one month after her funeral, Faye, a paralegal who also had been fired, killed herself by taking an overdose of sleeping pills. She was twenty-six years old and had been in and out of hospitals since she was a teenager because of anorexia. She was always talking about death, how dead people are luckier than us. We would tell her she was beautiful, that she had so much to live for. But it didn’t seem to make an impact.
“Faye’s condition became much worse after she was laid off. She was down to fifty-four pounds, and in the hospital when Maria killed herself. We debated whether or not to tell her because she had looked up to Maria as very strong and a real fighter. We decided she had the right to know, but now I think we made a mistake. At the wake, Faye just stared at Maria’s body and looked desperate. Afterward, she went to visit her mother in Pennsylvania for a couple of weeks.
“She had been back in Chicago for one week when her psychiatrist called her mother to say that she hadn’t shown up for her appointment. One of the conditions of Faye’s release from the hospital was that she had to see him or she would have to be readmitted. Her mother called the police. They went to Faye’s apartment and found her body. She had left notes for different people and had prepared bags filled with carefully selected items for each one of her friends.
“My first reaction was, thank God, Faye’s torment is finally over. She suffered so long and has now found peace. I told myself she had finally done what she had wanted to do for so long. I feel bad that this was my reaction, but it’s the truth. We had tried to get her help all the time but nothing had worked.
“I feel so different about the deaths of these two young women. I think that Faye is at peace but I’m angry at Maria. Yet, everyone who is left behind is devastated, no matter what. We all have big-time guilt that we could have done more. There was no sense of closure at either funeral, just a feeling that neither one of them really cared about the rest of us. Even though they were in different states of mind, I really believe that suicide is an extremely selfish act. I try to think of Maria and Faye as mentally ill but it doesn’t help.
“Now, the mood at the office is much more somber. Those of us who are left don’t hang out together anymore and we’ve stopped talking about Maria and Faye. The human resources department at work didn’t offer us any kind of counseling; no representative from management came to either funeral. Just yesterday, I told the office manager that I had to take one day off next week. She said sarcastically, ‘Not another funeral, I hope.’
“I’m thinking about looking for another job. This is a cold place and feels cursed. I’ve also begun to realize how short life is. I don’t want to die, and I pray that I never get into that state where I might even consider killing myself. I accept that suicide is a way out but I don’t want to do it. Recently, though, I find myself reading into what people are saying, thinking they might be giving off signals that they are considering killing themselves. I lost my father, but my reaction to his death was very different—I viewed it as following the natural course of God’s plans. I’m now filled with feelings of mortality; like it or not, suicide has become a part of my life.”
Some survivors are able to accept the idea of suicide more easily than others, resigning themselves to its power and permanency. “I feel completely comfortable with my brother’s decision to kill himself,” says Martin, a forty-nine-year-old architect from Miami. “I’m not sure that his reasons for ending his life shouldn’t remain mysterious. I didn’t kill myself. I was minding my own business—it was his choice.”
Martin’s brother committed suicide twenty years ago, when he was a first-year medical student. “I was on my honeymoon when my parents called me to say that Jimmy had shot himself. My life changed from that minute on. I believe that there are external lives and internal lives, and the two of mine became completely separate at Jimmy’s suicide. My parents were devastated. Jimmy was always the golden boy in my family, the brilliant son who was going to win a Nobel prize. I was the screwed-up one, the artist. If one of us was more likely to kill himself, it seemed that it should have been me.
“I’ve become very fatalistic since my brother died. My philosophy is something along the line of, ‘If you’re not hung, you’re shot.’ I find myself taking chances all the time. I love flying my plane, especially into a storm. I make a lot of money, then lose it, then make some more. Everything is pretty transitory. In a way, I consider Jimmy to be very courageous. He faced death eye to eye—he controlled his destiny, not the other way around. I admire him for that.”
Even though survivors experience a wide range of often contradictory emotions following the suicide of a loved one, its impact alters our lives forever. Shortly after Harry’s death, I began to despair of ever being able to come to terms with his choice to die, to leave me so alone. Although I was talking about his suicide with my therapist, selected friends, and the members of my support group, I was growing more and more discouraged. All this rehashing and reconstructing was getting me nowhere, I would tell myself.
One evening, I dragged myself to a support meeting, vowing it would be the last one I attended. That night, a woman told the story of her son’s suicide, which had occurred more than thirty-five years earlier. Sophie was in her late seventies, a retired opera singer who had performed with leading houses all over the world. When her son was fourteen, she returned home to find him hanging from a light fixture in his bedroom. As treatment for her ensuing depression, her doctor ordered shock therapy to try to erase the incident from her consciousness. It seemed to work, and Sophie was left with only blurry impressions of the events surrounding her son’s death.
About two years ago, Sophie told the mesmerized group, she had become filled with detailed memories of her son’s suicide, specific recollections she thought had been obliterated in the past thirty years. Since then, she went on, she had started reliving the suicide almost obsessively and had begun suffering recurrent nightmares filled with terrifying images of her dead son.
“You can never escape,” she said. “I don’t know what triggered me, but I am now consumed by my son’s suicide. Over these past many years, his death had seemed to be theater, something I had seen on stage. I was completely detached from what had happened. I was not prepared for my past to just descend on me. Now, I’m beginning to accept that you can’t hide from what happens to you. You have to go through it to get through it.”
That night, I cried for Sophie and her poor, young son. I cried for all the people at the meetings who had lost someone so dear to them in a manner so inexplicable and wrenching. I cried for Harry, dead in his prime, preempting the ending to his life without waiting to see what might have laid ahead. But I knew that I had to listen to Sophie’s advice in order to heal. I had to endure the hollowness, the guilt, the anguish, the anger, in order to emerge on the other side. There is no easy way to eradicate the pain of grieving. I would have to try to keep my balance until the roller coaster of emotions finished its course. Then, I could get off, walk on my own, and truly move on with my life.