Facing Grief after a Suicide
Coping with a death that was self-inflicted is extremely difficult. It seems to be beyond question that the stresses on a family where a death is a result of suicide are greater than those imposed by most other forms of death. A great deal depends on the age of the person who takes their life, but in all cases the reactions of family members and friends are likely to be harsh and complex.
Stresses
In addition to dealing with the range of emotions that all the bereaved have to cope with, the families of a suicide face other extreme stresses. Typically they include:
- Denial In common with those who have become bereaved under less tragic circumstances, the families of suicides find it difficult to accept that their loved one has died. Yet, more than this, it’s not unusual for them to deny that the death was due to suicide at all. If the suicide was a teenager or young adult, his or her father tends to take it very badly. Of all of the family members it’s fathers who typically deny the fact of suicide the most. Even when they become more accepting, they commonly rationalize the act of suicide. Instead of recognizing in the tragedy any internal family problem or other unreleased pressures, outside factors such as drugs in society, the company that the suicide kept, and the breakdown of society as a whole are blamed.
- Shame There is such stigma attached to suicide that one of the most powerful emotional reactions to an act of suicide within the family is shame. Registrars are routinely asked to falsify death certificates by grieving family members who don’t want the truth to emerge publicly. Even within the family there is often a conspiracy of silence to keep the dread secret. To neighbours and acquaintances, the death is passed off as an ‘accident’.
- Guilt The guilt in the aftermath of a suicide is unlike the regrets and guilt associated with other forms of death. Instead of bitter regrets over a catalogue of actions or arguments, you might feel almost overpowering guilt not only for what you feel you should have done to prevent the suicide, but also for what you might have done that contributed to its happening. The guilt of parents whose children have taken their own lives may be extreme. Western society holds that they are responsible for the upbringing of children, and with the suicide they are deemed to have failed as stable, nurturing parents. Similarly, adult children may feel overwhelming guilt if their elderly, recently widowed parent died by suicide. They will inevitably feel they should have visited them more often. Partners of suicides may feel a peculiarly acute form of guilt since they more than anyone should have ’seen the signs’.
- Fear A darker, and perhaps more disturbing, reaction to suicide is the fear that it can unleash. Primarily, this is the fear of self and of an individual’s impulse to self-destruct, but in addition it is the fear that someone else in the family might take their own life.
Perhaps more tragic, and very real, is the constant fear that people outside the family will discover the fact of the suicide and almost inevitably interpret it in such a way as to negatively affect the family’s social standing. There seems little doubt that someone who dies as a result of an accident, illness, old age or even violence is more likely to be viewed with sympathy than someone who takes their own life. The act is often interpreted by others as a shocking and violent end to a tragic story of rejection or abuse by (usually) the suicide’s father, and is symptomatic of a dysfunctional family.
These perceptions are increased if the suicide act of your loved one required some determination and energy, such as hanging, as opposed to a more passive end through taking an overdose of pills. Furthermore, even if there are mitigating factors, such as the proven psychological instability of the suicide, these tend not to alter an outsider’s interpretation of events.
