To Those Left Behind After a Suicide,
First, please allow me to offer my sincerest condolences. It’s never easy to lose a loved one, whether it be illness or accident. It’s harder still to lose someone when it is a result of their own personal choice. That choice, that decision, feels like a betrayal — a betrayal to you, a betrayal to your family, a betrayal to everyone who ever cared about your loved one.
Maybe you’re still struggling through the shock of the incident. It’s not uncommon that suicide comes as a complete blindside to everyone. There are rarely ever any indicators, any tells, that give away the fact that a loved one is about to end their own life. You may be plagued with thoughts that if only you had paid more attention or listened more carefully or been available at a critical moment, all this pain could have been avoided because you could have gotten your loved one the help they desperately needed before it had come to this. Please try to assuage yourself of any such feelings of guilt or responsibility. Victims of suicide are masters of deception (and I don’t say this in a negative tone but merely as a point of fact), hiding any depression, anxiety, or other mental health condition they have dealt with that led to their decision to step away from life early.
I know you may also be angry with your loved one, furious even. It may be that you feel like their decision to take their own life was a personal attack on you, that they didn’t love you enough to stick around or trust you enough to come to you for help, that they dropped this mess right in your lap, expecting you to clean it all up. That is a perfectly normal and natural feeling. It’s part of grief. It’s part of loss. And it’s particularly poignant in the case of suicide because you suddenly feel abandoned by this individual you loved.
But, as someone who once very nearly took his own life, let me tell you that those who choose suicide rarely, if ever, do so as a way to attack or punish their own loved ones. They see ending their life, not as a betrayal, but as a deliverance. Their own suffering has been so great and so prolonged that they can’t help but feel like the greatest burden that could ever be placed upon their family and friends. They feel worthless and unlovable. They loathe and despise themselves, partly because this is what their brain has been telling them for years (and therefore feels like the most true thing they know) and partly because they have never been able to get over the hurdle of their own condition, no matter how hard they have tried. By this point, they have very likely been to counseling or therapy. They have tried medications, some of which might even have made them feel worse instead of better. They may have been institutionalized. Multiple times. Maybe they have tried self-medicating with drugs and alcohol. Or looked to hobbies or entertainment to stave off the suffering they feel, or at least distract them somewhat from it.
But ultimately, nothing has helped. They continue to suffer, often in silence, because they don’t want to talk about it. And not because they don’t want help. They do. They desperately want relief. But they also don’t want to be a burden. They already feel like a burden just for existing. This pain, it is their entire life, from start to finish. It is with them from the moment they wake up until the moment they drift into uneasy sleep. And even in sleep, it often follows them. To talk to others about it to the extent to which they experience it, well, in their opinion it would be an unconscionable burden to place on someone else’s shoulders. And so they don’t talk. They don’t share. They keep it to themselves, hidden inside. And they continue to suffer. In silence. Until they can bear it no more. Until they are certain that they are as much of a burden on everyone they care about as they are upon themselves. They become convinced that they are an anchor, an unbearable weight, and their mere presence is enough to drag their loved ones down into the same depths of pain and suffering they live with on a daily, hourly, minute-by-minute basis.
This is something you must understand in order to understand the reason why your loved one chose to leave the world, and you, behind forever. Unfortunately, this is not some great revelation that will ease your own pain right now. It will not change your feelings of betrayal or anger or resentment toward your loved one. But it might help place everything into a proper context and help you along the next days, weeks, months, and years as you try to make sense of this and heal.
Your loved one chose suicide over survival to find relief from their own suffering, yes — but also because they wanted to spare you additional pain and suffering. It is nearly impossible to think clearly in the depths of depression, of anxiety, of any mental health condition. Caught in those deep, dark depths, in those caverns of hopelessness, it feels perfectly and completely logical that taking one’s own life is the perfect solution. It relieves them of the burden of their own suffering, and it relieves the ones they love from the burden of themselves. They believe that in taking their own life, they are actually doing you a favor, and that can often be the tipping point that cements the choice to end their life.
It’s easy to call suicide a selfish act. It certainly feels like one to you, here and now. It feels to you like a coward’s way out. But I assure you it is nothing of the kind. It is desperation to find a solution for pain that has lasted for years — and nothing more. It is not intended to be a personal attack on you or on anyone else. It is, in fact, intended to be the exact opposite — protection for you from themselves. It’s deliverance for you from a burden you never asked for, a burden your loved one assumes you don’t want, certainly one you don’t need. By alleviating you of the burden that is themselves, they are freeing you up to live the life they feel like you should have, a life full of potential and possibilities without the anchor of their own presence and condition holding you back.
So please try not to think of suicide as an act of selfishness or cowardice. Think of it, instead, as a natural consequence of their condition. We who have survived prefer to think of it as an individual who died from suicide, not as someone who committed suicide. Just as someone who has Stage 4 cancer eventually dies because one or more of their physiological systems shuts down, someone who has a severe mental health condition may eventually die from suicide as a natural progression of their condition.
I know this letter probably provides you with very little reassurance and does little to ease the grief and pain you’re currently experiencing. It probably doesn’t help change your feelings toward the loved one you’ve lost. But I hope what it does is help provide you with understanding and maybe even a little context. And that may be key someday to helping you heal, to move on, and maybe even to reach out and help another before it becomes too late for them.
Know, too, that you are not alone in this. There are hundreds upon thousands of others who have been affected by suicide. There are support groups and organizations whose sole purpose it is to raise awareness about suicide, to reduce and eliminate the stigma surrounding mental health so that sufferers might have the courage to get the help they need. Find those groups, surround yourself with others who know what it’s like to go through what you’re currently experiencing, and support each other. The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention and Project Semicolon are two great places to start. Both organizations are on a mission to end suicide so no one else has to feel what you’re feeling right now. We’d love it if, when you’re ready, you joined us on the front lines of this battle.
Again, you have my deepest condolences, and I wish you much love, peace, and healing in the days to come.
Respectfully and sincerely,
A survivor
