How SUICIDE feels to the living
You’ve probably read about the latest research showing a steady and alarming uptick in American suicides. Recently, I saw a headline, took a deep breath and dove in, recalling a friend’s remark after my sister killed herself. “I know what it means to be shocked but not surprised,” she wrote in her condolence letter. And I thought: That’s exactly right. Only someone already familiar with suicide would describe it that way
My sister had been far too sick for far too long, and suicide always loomed. My husband’s descent was faster, steeper and more abrupt, but suicide still loomed. In both cases, the difference between the looming and the loss was the difference between the fear of being punched and a right cross to the head; it’s a blow you want to duck, believe me. You don’t want to know how it feels to lose a loved one to suicide. And yet you should know. You need to know. If more of us knew how it felt, maybe fewer of us would wreak that terrible pain on others.
Suicide is less rare than it was, but it’s still uncommon enough — and not discussed enough — to feel like an aberration from the norm and an outrage against life itself. So it is. But the outrage won’t abate, the epidemic won’t recede, unless and until we can discuss it in a public forum that includes not just grieving survivors, not just people struggling with suicidality themselves, but everyone. Everyone! This is a struggle that needs to be acknowledged, owned and addressed by all, even the people who are not directly affected. and (God willing) never will be. Men wear pink ribbons for breast cancer research, don’t they?
So here’s what I’m going to do right now. I’m going to start by describing exactly how it feels to lose a loved one to suicide — the shock that’s not a surprise.
When you first hear the news 1. It makes no sense. 2. It makes you question the mercy of God and the laws of the universe, even if you believe in both.
After the news has registered 1. It makes no sense.
2. It makes you question the mercy of God and the laws of the universe, even if you believe in both.
3. It’s all you can think about, even when you’re thinking about something else. 4. You feel guilty. 5. You cry until your nasal cavity collapses and your eyeballs melt.
6. You feel shredded to pieces of confetti thinness.
7. You wonder if you’ll ever feel normal again.
After you’ve lived with the news for a little while
1. It still makes no sense.
2. It still makes you question the mercy of God and the laws of the universe, even if you believe in both.
3. It’s still all you can think about, even when you’re thinking about something else, and even when the outside world wishes, for your sake, that you could think about something else.
4. You still feel guilty, even when you know you shouldn’t.
5. You still cry until your nasal cavity collapses and your eyeballs melt, just a little less often.
6. You still feel shredded to pieces of confetti thinness.
7. You still wonder if you’ll ever feel normal again, even as you wear your Hello, I Am Officially Normal! face for the outside world.
8. You wonder whether everyone else you love will leave you, too.
9. You feel as though there must be something wrong with you.
After you’ve lived with the news for a long while
1. It still makes no sense. No way around it.
2. By now, enough joy and beauty have dropped into your life that you’re able to see the mercy of God, if God is something you believe in. You still question the laws of the universe, though.
3. You can now think about other things, but here’s the catch: The loss lingers as white noise, humming under everything. It’s always there. It defines you.
4. No way around the guilt, either. It’s part of the white noise.
5. The further removed you become from the loss, the less you cry. But the loss is as huge as it ever was. And when you do cry, your nasal cavity still collapses and your eyeballs still melt.
6. Same goes for the confetti. You’ll never feel entirely whole and healed, even as you wear your Look At Me, Peeps, I’m Good As New! face for the outside world.
7. And you’ll never feel entirely normal again, either. You begin to realize that only a thin line separates the abnormal from the normal, the insane from the sane, those who kill themselves from those who grieve in the aftermath.
8. Sometimes the people you love do leave you, via death or other avenues. And each successive loss digs up the stinking muck of all the others, making you even more frightened of yet more loss. Forever after, you’ll question the permanence and solidity of everything and everyone around you.
9. You’re now absolutely convinced that there’s something wrong with you, especially when someone in the outside world implies you ought to be over it by now. But you know you’ll never be over it. There is no getting over it. There’s only going through it, again and again and again, with faith in love and a stubborn hope that life, no matter how often it’s hurt you, will lead you to joy in the end.
A morning-after addendum:
I want to make clear one point. I believe that the act of suicide, carried out in a final, distended moment of incomprehensible darkness, is not a choice. In that final moment, people are altered by pain and incapable of rational decision-making. They are other than themselves. But this is exactly why an open conversation needs to happen now: because we need to reach people before they’re other, before they’re altered, before they’re incapable of hearing a story or having an insight that might, someday, prevent them from hitting that final moment.
I often think about the things I might have said to stay my sister’s hand, as it clutched those pills that night, or to stop my husband from jumping on that sad, sunny morning. It’s too late now. Probably it would have been too late then. But perhaps I can say something today that might help someone else tomorrow — so they never reach the airless, senseless dark of their last act.