3 3“Many deaths leave survivors with unfinished business,
but few may be said to create more of it than suicide.”
—Bruce Conley,
Suicide and Its Aftermath: Understanding and Counseling the Survivors
Suicides are messy deaths; there is nothing neat about them. The lives of those of us who are left behind have been shattered into thousands of tiny fragments, and we do not know how to begin cleaning up the devastating damage. Our loved ones have departed by their own will; even though they knew that they were planning to leave us forever, they did not give us the opportunity to bid them Godspeed.
As we go about trying to pick up the pieces of our former existence, we are fearful that we will be haunted by the ultimate absence of knowledge for the rest of our lives. We will never know the reason why our mother hanged herself or our brother walked into the sea or our child threw herself in front of a train. Yet, even though we must live without closure concerning their deaths, always wondering about the whys and imagining the what-ifs, we eventually begin to regain a sense of control in our lives as we continue to search for some kind of logic to our losses.
“I rearranged the paintings in my living room every night for four months after my son shot himself,” says Charlotte, a teacher from Des Moines. “I would drag the ladder from the garage into the house, take all the pictures off the wall, and move them around for hours. In the early morning, I would carry the ladder back to its place. But, no matter how I changed the paintings, I could never get the room to look right.”
Coping with any death is traumatic; suicide compounds the anguish because we are forced to deal with two traumatic events at the same time. According to the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the level of stress resulting from the suicide of a loved one is ranked as catastrophic—equivalent to that of a concentration camp experience.
“It is the difference between going to war and seeing your first casualty,” explains Steve, a New York television producer whose brother drowned himself two weeks after graduating from law school. “The worst part of suicide is the shock of it. When my mother died from breast cancer, I had already gone through much of the grieving process. I suffered terrible sadness and pain with her death, but it is not the same as the turbulence and destruction I associate with my brother’s suicide. His decision to die eclipses the very fact that he is no longer alive.”
The initial impact of discovery scars us forever. The image of my husband’s beloved green scarf, bloodied by his self-inflicted brutality, has branded itself permanently on my memory. Yet, even though we are left reeling in disbelief, those of us who have experienced the unspeakable trauma of a loved one’s suicide eventually find the resources to carry on. “You suddenly find yourself struggling to survive and discover you have strengths you never knew existed,” says Sandy, a Detroit housewife whose daughter jumped in front of a train six months after the birth of her first child.
“I was thirteen when my mother hung herself,” relates Laurie, a forty-six-year-old singer who now lives in Los Angeles. “Although her death is with me every second of my existence, I try not to talk about it too much. People have a weird reaction when I tell them. But I’m not a freak and neither was she.
“The memories of that day are very vivid. I was out of school on summer vacation. It was a Sunday morning. I was asleep but woke up when I heard my mother come into my bedroom. She took off her glasses, then got into bed with me. She began to hug me and kiss me. But somehow her demeanor was different. Normally, she was a real talker, always telling me how much she loved me, how I was the greatest daughter in the world. But that morning she was totally quiet. She just kept touching me without saying a word.
“The truth was that she was staring straight through me. Her eyes, which were usually hazel-green, were bright green. It was the strangest sensation. We snuggled for what seemed like an hour to me and I loved every minute of it. I must have fallen back to sleep. When I woke up, I saw that she was gone but had left her glasses on the bureau. I thought that was very odd because she was blind as a bat and never went anywhere without them.
“I started walking around the house yelling, ‘Mommy, here are your glasses.’ My father was in the living room reading the newspaper. I asked him if he had seen her and he said no. I opened the doors to all the rooms in the house but I couldn’t find her. This terrible sense of urgency swept over me and I knew something was wrong. I went outside to a neighbor’s house but she said she hadn’t seen my mother. All this time, I remember my father reading the paper, not saying a word.
“I came back into the house and went methodically, room by room, screaming, ‘Mommy, Mommy.’ I opened the door to the bathroom again but this time I went inside. She was hanging in the stall shower, my jump rope tied around her neck. Her head was cocked to the side, her tongue was hanging out of her mouth, and her eyes were wide open. I didn’t know if she were dead or not.
“I started screaming, like some kind of animal sound. My father came running into the bathroom and I remember that I was scared he would have a heart attack when he saw her. My baby brother was toddling around, crying and scared.
“My father told me to get my older brother, who was still sleeping in his bedroom. He was sixteen. I ran into his room, punching him hard to wake him up. He raced to the bathroom, took one look at my mother, and ran to the kitchen to get a knife to cut her down. We carried her to her bed. My brother started blowing into her mouth to give her air because we thought she might still be alive. I guess my father called the police and they came right away.
“My father sent me upstairs to my room with my little brother. I forced myself to calm down and then went outside. There were all these ambulances and police cars and people who were just standing around looking, like a carnival. I pretended to be a casual observer and went up to one of the policemen on the street. I asked him: ‘Officer, what happened to the lady in there?’ He answered, ‘She passed away.’ I began screaming at the top of my lungs, ‘She was my mother. She was my mother.’ All the neighbors just looked at me. Finally, some woman came out of the crowd and put her arm around me. She led me back inside the house. No one else moved; they just watched me.
“The police took my mother away. My father, brother, and I just sat together in the dining room and cried and cried. My little brother was also there crying, only he didn’t know why. I felt like I wasn’t really there with them. That I had died with my mother and I was just watching someone cry who used to be me. I left the house to take a walk. It was a beautiful day. I stopped by all the neighbors to tell them what happened, even though I’m sure everyone knew by then. I would repeat the details of the story, then keep on walking. We moved out of our house that night and I never slept there again.
“My family doesn’t discuss my mother’s suicide. Once it was over, it was never talked about again. But for awhile, I was obsessed about describing what happened to everyone I met. Then, as I got older, I stopped telling people. I believe that I have shelves in my life where my memories are stored. When I decide, I can take them down, dust them off, and then put them back. My mother’s death is on one of those shelves. I now focus on the fact that she chose me to spend her last hour with, to tell me how much she loved me before she died. This gives me great comfort.
“My mother had a beautiful voice and I wanted to succeed as a singer as a tribute to her. As a child, I held on to the idea that when I sang she would be listening to me in heaven, feeling very proud. I know that when I sing, part of her is within me. I am singing for both of us.”
Laurie sobbed in anguish as she recalled the painful memories of her mother’s death. Yet, like Nancy, who had reached out to me in the middle of the first terror-filled night following my husband’s suicide, Laurie shared her story so that others who are suffering from similar experiences will realize they are not alone.
“I recently became friendly with an eighty-two-year-old woman whose father killed himself when she was seven,” she says. “She tells me that his suicide seems as if it happened yesterday, that time has passed in the blink of an eye. I completely identify with her and feel very close to her. We are like members of a secret society. Maybe if survivors are more open about what happened to us, we can chip away at the wall of silence that surrounds suicide. Then, we can begin talking about our loved ones with pride, not shame.”
The immediate response to suicide is total disbelief: The act itself is so incomprehensible that we enter into a state where we feel unreal and disconnected. “When I heard that my roommate from college had jumped out of his office window, it was as if I had been instantly thrust under water,” describes Jay, a real estate broker from Tucson. “At the time I got the call, I was meeting with a client. After I got off the phone, I could see his mouth opening and closing but I couldn’t understand what he was saying. I had separated from my surroundings and was suspended in air.”
Even if there is a history of mental illness and past suicide attempts, we can never be prepared for the devastating shock of sudden self-death. Sarah is a graphic artist currently living in Philadelphia. Her younger sister, Melissa, suffered from anorexia and had been in and out of hospitals since her early teens. Although her sister had tried unsuccessfully to kill herself several times before, Sarah did not believe her mother when she called to say that Melissa had been found dead in her apartment with her wrists slit. She was twenty-six years old.
“My mother told me that Melissa was dead and I responded, ‘Our Melissa?’ ” Sarah recounts. “I had been waiting for this call all my life but when it finally came, it didn’t seem real. I went to work, spoke to my boyfriend, met a friend for lunch, but I never said a word all day about Melissa’s suicide. Then, I went to my regularly scheduled therapist’s appointment. I waited fifteen minutes into the session to tell her about my sister. I knew that the minute I gave it words, I could no longer deny what had happened. Melissa’s suicide would now always be a part of my life.”
Some of us walk in to discover our loved ones dead by their own hands; others are jolted with the news by a ringing telephone that instantaneously severs our lives into a “before” and an “after.” For a number of survivors, the suicide takes place in front of their eyes. As if in slow motion, they watch the act unfold, powerless to reverse the death and destruction it leaves behind.
“My husband shot himself in our bed right after we made love,” Gina, a twenty-nine-year-old nurse from Atlanta says unemotionally, the image too overwhelming to absorb even after ten years. “Scotty was a police officer and had just come home from the night shift. His uniform was draped on the chair next to the bed, so he was able to reach for his service revolver without getting up. It was like a dream. I watched him take his gun and point it to his head. He mouthed the words ‘I’m sorry,’ and then pulled the trigger. There was this explosion and I was instantly drenched with his blood and brains. It was warm all over me. The blood had a coppery odor, like a new penny, and it blended in with the sulfury scent of gunpowder. I can still smell it.
“I started screaming hysterically. I then ran out of the house, totally naked. One of the neighbors must have phoned 911 and the police came right away. They were very nice to me. One of them helped me into the shower so I could wash Scotty off me. He then helped me get dressed. The police were devastated that one of their own had taken his life. They called his parents, who lived nearby. When they arrived, they started screaming at me: ‘Why didn’t you tell us Scotty was depressed? Why didn’t you call us?’ Scotty and I had been married for less than a year. I was nineteen years old and didn’t know any better. I had been very happy so I just assumed he was too.
“We were living in San Antonio and Scotty’s suicide was in all the papers. One of the reporters found out from someone—I’ll never know who—that I’d recently had an abortion. She wrote in her article that Scotty might have been depressed about that. That was almost as devastating as his death. I was having a difficult pregnancy and the doctors had advised me that my health was in danger. Scotty and I had agonized over the decision to end the pregnancy. It was he who urged me to do it, saying we could always try again soon. All of a sudden, it seemed as if everybody was blaming me for his death and I felt totally exposed.
“His funeral was very low-key. No one wanted to talk about how he died. To this day, his mother does not acknowledge that his death was suicide; she believes that somehow the gun went off accidentally. Even though his fellow officers came to Scotty’s wake and funeral, none of them wanted to mention the word suicide. I thought I was crazy, like I was the only one who would say what was going on. Then I would think, maybe it is me who is nuts and Scotty really didn’t mean to kill himself. But of course he did.
“I moved to Atlanta six months later and put myself through nursing school. Five years ago, I married a medical technician whom I had met at the hospital where we both work. We have a three-year-old daughter and our son is eight months old. I have never told anyone about Scotty’s suicide—not even my husband. I’m afraid that if I say anything, his death will be thrown back in my face, as if it were my fault. One night, my husband and I were fighting about something. I get very quiet and distant when I get mad. My husband yelled at me, ‘Your problem is that you don’t know anything about suffering.’ I thought, If you only knew, but I kept my mouth shut.
“I keep thinking about Scotty’s death. I’m like a kid in front of the television set, replaying the Barney video over and over again. Only, with me, it’s Scotty shooting himself all over me in our bed. Have you ever lost a filling in your tooth? You keep putting your tongue there to touch the empty space. That’s what I feel like. I obsess about the what-ifs. What if I had stopped him from reaching for his gun? What if I had sensed that something was bothering him? What if I had decided to go through with the pregnancy? What if I had been more loving?
“I’ll never know why Scotty did it. We didn’t argue that night. Yet, he must have been angry about something, and I was the one who got the brunt of his anger. I feel that Scotty robbed me of the chance to be like everyone else, with a white picket fence and a ‘normal’ existence. I know that on the surface my life looks like that to others, but it feels like a big lie.
“Right after I moved to Atlanta, I started suffering severe panic attacks. I went to a therapist for two years but never told him about Scotty’s suicide. You are the first person I have discussed this with. You interviewed a friend of mine whose brother killed himself. She’s very open about his suicide but I have never told her about Scotty. She mentioned your name and I contacted you because I wanted my story to help others, if possible. I want people to know that you can go on, even though you’re no longer whole.”
Like Gina, suicide survivors are left to put their lives back together, even as we are haunted by our feelings of blame and self-doubt. Yet, before we can start to grieve for our loved ones, we must first get through the initial impact of their suicide. For months, the details of how Harry had died obscured the fact that I had lost my husband of twenty-one years. Gradually, I began to understand that his choice to end his life was separate from my feelings of loss at his absence. The unfinished business created by suicide overshadows the mourning process; we can begin to heal only if we are able to mourn.
“It feels as if it’s been five hours, not five years since my son killed himself,” explains Ted, a forty-nine-year-old architectural draftsman from a suburb of Seattle. “Jason drove his motorcycle off the road after having an argument with his girlfriend. He had just turned seventeen. He left us a note on the dining room table saying: ‘I wish I had something to live for.’ I used to talk about his suicide all the time, but I don’t think people want to keep hearing about it. It’s like they are saying, Why are you still reliving what happened after all this time? Get a life, already. But it feels as if I’m speaking about something different now. For the first two years, I was explaining what it was like to lose a son to suicide. Now, I’m describing what it’s like to no longer have a son.
“Thoughts of Jason flood me. I can get transported back to places I’ve been with him just by hearing a certain sound. I try not to fight those feelings. Before Jason’s death, I always accepted that life has its ups and downs and you just have to deal with them as best you can. But Jason’s loss had an effect on me that I can’t truly understand.
“My father died last year after being very sick from stomach cancer. His slow demise, no matter how painful, was part of nature. Jason’s death was out of sequence. I remember his youth and vitality and spirit. A young person should not be thinking about death.
“Jason was doing very well in school. He was in his senior year and was planning to join the army after graduation. I always trusted that he knew the right thing to do. The other day I was in the gym and I saw a young man playing pool. When he finished, he put the cue back on the rack. He then turned off the light in the room. I noticed how he did all the right things, like Jason would have done. Yet, Jason did something so wrong when he killed himself.
“In a way, I feel deceived. Jason should have been able to share what he was feeling with me. I thought we were fairly close for a father and son. We both loved sports and would go to a couple of games together each year. I feel that he should have wanted to let me in on something that would have such a huge impact on my life. He knew how much I cared for him and yet he treated me like a stranger. He could have told me that he was hurting or in pain but he never let me know what he was planning.
“When I left for work the day Jason killed himself, my last words to him were, ‘Is anything bothering you?’ I knew he was having problems with his girlfriend; he had been moping around the house for a couple of days. He answered no, like kids do. I didn’t want to push him because I wanted to give him some space. I thought he would just get over it like he usually did. By the end of the day, he was dead.
“My wife called me at work to tell me about the motorcycle accident. When I got home, there were all these police in my house. My wife was crying and showed me the note. I felt as if I had lost my mind, like I was on drugs and hallucinating. I went outside and began walking back and forth across the driveway. It seemed like an eternity. I was losing touch with reality. I was trapped. I thought, How can I live without him? It can’t be. Where was Jason? Then it hit me that this was how it was going to be for the rest of my life.
“I got very angry at the police. I heard one of them talking about shift changes and I started screaming at him. I couldn’t believe that in the middle of this horrible tragedy they could be talking about such mundane things as what time they should be getting off duty.
“The pain is something you have to experience. There is such a lack of control and there’s nothing you can do about it. There is no answer. Crazy things happen in our world, but you can’t dwell on why they’re happening to you. It’s just romanticizing your situation. With hope, you come to terms with it.
“I joined a local suicide survivor support group, which turned out to be my savior. Even though my wife has been in bad shape since Jason died, she didn’t want to come to the meetings. If I didn’t have the groups, my sense of isolation would have destroyed me. I saw that I was not alone in what I was experiencing. You have to try to reach out to people who have had a common experience and draw from it. It will help.
“Lately, the horror of the suicide has been replaced by good memories of Jason. I had been walling them off because I was scared that I wouldn’t be able to handle them. I know I will never be the same person again but I also know I have to move on. Although I feel guilty that I’m alive while my son is dead, he will be in my heart forever. I have to let go of his suicide in order to reclaim his life.”
Guilt suffuses every aspect of a survivor’s healing process. Yet, in order to move on, we must begin to separate our loved ones from their suicides. Seven years later, I am finally beginning to define my husband’s life by how he lived it—not by how he left it. It is not an easy journey.
I was recently invited to a neighbor’s wedding. I attended reluctantly, afraid that I would be overwhelmed with reflections on my own marriage and regrets for what might have been. Yet, despite my fears, I found myself enjoying the evening. A wonderful swing band filled the hall with joyous music. I danced unencumbered, my body moving freely to the exuberant sounds. Suddenly, I realized that I still possessed a capacity for experiencing happiness; it had not died with Harry. It was like discovering an old friend I thought had been lost to me forever.
At the end of the set, the band leader made an announcement. The piece we had been dancing to had been written by him in honor of his father. As I applauded him along with the other guests, I saw it was Jack who was addressing the admiring crowd. Years before, we had occasionally attended the same survivor support meetings. A talented composer whose father had shot himself after losing money in the stock market, Jack had been terrified that he would never be able to create again after his father’s suicide.
I caught his eye. His face lit up with a warm smile of recognition, a tribute to our individual endurance over these past years. Although we shared a secret pain that set us apart from the others, we both were aware that here he was, playing his life-affirming music, and here I was; dancing to it with pleasure.