“WE FIND A PLACE for what we lose,” wrote Sigmund Freud to Ludwig Binswanger after the death of his friend’s son. “Although we know that after such a loss the acute stage of mourning will subside, we also know that we shall remain inconsolable and will never find a substitute. No matter what may fill the gap, even if it be filled completely, it nevertheless remains something else.”
Some say survivors never recover from a suicide. “Life is back to normal, but normal is different now,” says a man whose son hanged himself. “Normal will never be the normal it was before a year ago.” A man whose teenage daughter killed herself two years ago says it helps him to think of his grief as a physical handicap: “Some people can’t see, some people can’t walk, and I can’t seem to enjoy life,” he says matter-of-factly. As Tom Welch told me, “We never really essentially get over anything. We resolve it in such a way that we can go on.”
Certainly, the sheer weight of the pain eases with time. In Madame Bovary, Flaubert describes a young widower’s passage from suicidal depression to something approaching normalcy:
Ah well, slowly but surely, one day chasing another, spring on top of winter, autumn on top of summer, it leaked away, drop by drop, little by little; it left, it went away—it sank down, I should say, because there’s always something stays, at the bottom, so to speak . . . a weight there, on the chest! But it’s the same for all of us, we mustn’t let ourselves go, and want to die just because others are dead.
During this slow healing, signs of recovery may seem minute. One mother visits her son’s grave three times a week instead of daily; another dreams of her son once a week instead of every night. “For a year and a half my daughter was the first thing I thought of when I opened my eyes in the morning,” says one woman. She smiles faintly. “Now I can make coffee before it hits me.” Yet this gradual increase of pain-free moments may be fraught with its own dangers—the pangs of “recovery guilt” many survivors feel for not thinking about the suicide twenty-four hours a day. “It’s like if I go on with my life, I must be an awful person,” says Tom Rossi. “There’s that tug that if things start to go well, then maybe I should punish myself, because what kind of person am I if I can be happy and he’s dead?”
Even when the tide of everyday experience takes the edge off the pain, wounds are often reopened. The anniversary of the death may be particularly difficult; merely being asked how many children one has can be devastating. “Sometimes I say, ‘I had three but I lost one,’” says a woman whose nineteen-year-old son hanged himself. “Sometimes I say two, but then I feel dishonest, as if I’m denying him.” A year after their son killed himself, one couple was desolate when they received his license renewal application in the mail. Another couple, months after their son’s suicide, received a Christmas card from his therapist, who had forgotten to remove the boy’s name from his computer mailing list. The spring following the suicide of her daughter, a woman burst into tears when she saw purple tulips blooming in her yard; she had forgotten her daughter had planted them. “My hands are just like my mom’s,” says another woman. “Every time I look at them for the rest of my life I’m going to think of her suicide.”
Three years after their daughter’s suicide, Liz and Peter Courtney built a one-room addition to their house. As the contractors tore down the walls, Liz grew increasingly anxious. Some days she exploded at them for their seeming inefficiency; at other times she felt helpless, unable to answer their simplest question. She would come downstairs in the middle of the night, pacing off dimensions, fretting about what furniture would go where, calculating how the addition could be made less expensive, wondering whether the project was a mistake. One day Peter was horrified to find her beating her head on the banister. “I can’t stand it,” she moaned. “I want to give up. I want to die.”
In retrospect, Liz, who went back to Lisa’s therapists for help, believes she had a nervous breakdown. “I couldn’t stand any more destruction,” she says. “Lisa had hurt herself so badly, and I felt this house was being hurt, too.” At the same time her despair helped her understand how her daughter must have felt. “I never wanted to take my life, but I sure wanted to get out of that pain. And I thought, now I know what feeling awful feels like. Really awful. Really, really awful.”
Six months later the addition was completed. “All of a sudden everything lightened,” says Liz. “It was the climax; it just came out, and then the worst was over. I look back on it as being Lisa. It was the final hell. And I’ve felt so much better ever since.”
Many grief counselors believe that healing after a suicide can begin only when the survivor realizes that the question why will never be answered. In a survey by Betsy Ross, the founder of an Iowa City support group called Ray of Hope, more than two hundred survivors were asked whether their explanation for the suicide had changed since the death. Over 70 percent said it had not, but they insisted that their relentless questioning was necessary regardless of the results. “I had to search for a reason even though I think I already knew I wouldn’t find one,” said one survivor. “He had to do it,” said another. “I knew that then, and I know that now. I just don’t know why. I may never know why, but I couldn’t accept that at first and I can now.” Observes Tom Welch, “The search for the reason why is part of what people need to do, but finally they understand that no answer is ever enough. Healing and a sense of self-worth come only when one draws away from feeling responsible for the death. When people learn a way to let go, to give permission for what’s already happened to them, only then will they be able to move on.”
After a suicide, a person’s entire life is often seen through his final act, as if it discredits all the good things that came before. “The suicide totally changed the way I viewed our relationship,” says a young woman a year after her husband hanged himself. “I really felt we were a model couple, and that’s almost embarrassing now. I would like to be able to say to people, ‘My husband and I had a great relationship,’ but I feel too humiliated to do that.” As Tom Rossi told me, “I remember my brother as a happy person—he taught me more about life than anybody. Yet when I tell people about him, about all the good things, I have to have him commit suicide at the end. It’s so odd. I have to create him and then destroy him.” A more accurate balance is restored only as the survivor works back through the bad memories and the good memories begin to resurface. “It may be a picture or a movie or a piece of music,” says the widow of a man who shot himself four years ago, “but now those things remind me of the good times, not the bad.” The widow of a man who jumped from an eleven-story building wrote, “I want Dick’s death not to be bigger than his life.”
Any death shakes our faith in our own world and in the order of the world around us. But suicide in particular forces survivors to question their most basic assumptions, a process in which they may ultimately learn some important things about the person they have lost and about themselves. “I thought I knew my husband,” says a middle-aged lawyer. “I was so confident that I understood him and that I understood the world.” She shakes her head. “My husband gave me the gift of my beginning to realize how powerless we are, how little we control, and how we have to accept that.”
Some survivors speak of positive changes that emerge after a suicide, of families drawn closer together, of becoming more sensitive, loving, attentive, and compassionate. Some speak of the painful lesson of realizing that we can never truly know someone else, that in some way each of us is ultimately alone, and that life is a mystery. Some describe finding inner resources they did not know they had. “The pain I feel is offset by the knowledge that the very worst thing in life has happened to me, and I have survived,” says one man. “Maybe we’re never quite the same people we were before,” says a woman whose son shot himself. “But maybe that’s not all bad. Maybe we wouldn’t want to be that person.” In the years since her son’s death she has led a survivor group, returned to graduate school, and started to write. “I’ve become a kinder human being. I listen more closely to people. I try to use the positive approach.” Her voice slows with each item on the list. “I’m aware of the good things, but I’d give them up in a minute if I could have him back.”