We know that people mean well. They really do. But we often know not what we say. After a suicide, there is no right way or wrong way to speak, but what is said matters a lot. Comments range from meaningless cliché, to hard to comprehend, to shockingly thoughtless. What we can bear to hear, or want to hear, is individual for us all. Everyone is different. The lack of social finesse with language around suicide adds to the trauma of the experience for many of us, although it is understood that is rarely the intention.
If it was not us going through this trauma, we would be just as lost as you in this way. We have compassion for your plight as you try to engage with us. Thank you for coming after us with humanity. Please be understanding if we fail to respond in the way anticipated.
Know we are the Velcro to your views and comments, we absorb everything in a very raw way. Our reactions may be disproportionate and unreasonable from your perspective. Have mercy on us. We scan every tonal hint, every facial expression, every bursting forth and holding back as a statement of judgement on ourselves.
Be gentle. Be real. Be honest. Honest is a bloody great relief. And that means acknowledging that this is shit. It is literally the worst thing that could have happened to many of us. You cant slap a smiley face on it and think that will help. We may come around to smile eventually, or we may not, but that will be in our time frame, and it cannot be rushed.
Some things said to me in the early days I found to be particularly excruciating are below.
“At least she is now resting at peace.”
No! She’s not. She is dead. I don’t need to hear your ideas about death as I have my own and they do not include death as rest. Or peace. To me.
‘She doesn’t have to see the terrible things that are happening in the world.’
No – she is not seeing anything – good or bad – her eyes no longer exist. Her sight came from biological materials, now burnt to dusty gravel, and sitting in a plastic container at the centre of my house surrounded by trinkets and flowers and pictures of Gabs.
This statement only offers me complete discouragement about the planet we live on and showcases your feelings of powerlessness. How can that help?
What would be helpful to me is that you have a perspective that it is worth while being alive. If you think this will help us feel better? It doesn’t. We need help to be here. Without them now. And live on in the world doing whatever good that we can. We so easily want to be with the dead one, don’t encourage us in that direction. We need to grieve our loss. And say our eventual goodbyes. I am convinced that will take years to do.
“She abused you ”.
Whatever Gaby did, if she behaved badly, I was her mother – it was my responsibility to not let her grow up like that.
Please don’t turn her into an evil one and make me the victim here. I cannot hear your criticism of her. I may have my own criticisms, but I am not going to tell you because I cannot bear you to think badly of her. Not now. Not ever. No matter how much you think you know, you don’t know the whole story, and how hard she tried.
I am not powerless in the relationship with my daughter. I have responsibilities to face as Gabs herself did. Your attempts to let me off the hook land nowhere. Reason all you might. Talk it through, ration it out – but one truth is the child was neglected and abused as a young one and I failed as her parent in many ways. A huge part of coming to terms with her death is facing what I, as her mother, did. Trust me to speak my truth.
It is extraordinarily useful for me to own up, show up, reveal our life’s raw materials, Yet I also know there is an ancient historical blaming of females that is just plain wrong. Mothers often get the blame for everything about how a child turns out.
Any descriptions that you use to make sense of a suicidee to their mother will, well, suck. Any rationalisations that contributes to the suicide and that puts you on the outside of it – safe, superior, different, can’t happen to you. Because I know that you feel it can’t happen to you. We all feel that. Until it does.
Your analysis, your judgement, your assessment, your understanding adds nothing. My wellbeing has to come from the recovery of my grieving brain. The only way I am living now is by my decision to go on.
I am the mother of a daughter who suicided. I cannot be helped. Please accept that. Impossible as it sounds. I just need you to try as much as you can not to say dumb things.
Because whatever you say will feel like my failure, or worse, hers.
Someone also said to me.
It is not too late for her.’
What? Hello? Yes! it is too late. It is the very definition of too late. Their lost potential is utterly lost. There is not one single thing they can do do now. Their life is over. Finished. Kaput. Please don’t reassure me about things not being too late. That is just weird.
We don’t want a stale recording of hopefulness. And after they have died everything is stale because it is only life that refreshes the mind. There is no hope in death. There may be hope in my life for me but not for her. Toxic positivity describes the phenomenon well. From the grievers perspective, it sounds like we are supposed to feel grateful to a person who is invalidating our experience. Double negative does not make a positive. Please don’t do that.
It’s not your fault – we all are trying to be helpful. Many of us love our friends or family and want to be the ones who can help. The only thing that can be guaranteeing of helping us is to be a human being with us. To witness generously, wholeheartedly, openly the distinctive and unresolvable failure of a life. And as time goes on it may get even harder, not easier, to be around us.
The shock wears off and the impossibility of the situation becomes more pronounced as time goes on. We may be moody, angry, rude, offensive, lonely or needy or just have days where it is too much. Everything and anything becomes just too much sometimes.
No matter the failures, no matter the shortcomings. Parents work tirelessly, including me, when I finally got it together. Messages to parents, surviving the suicide of your offspring, should always be along the lines of:
You did everything you possibly could have done and it resulted in their death. Your loss. Their loss. Failure of the most profound and human kind. I honour you. I respect you.
I am so so so grateful there are people who still can bear to approach me. Who seek me out. I don’t blame anyone for not being able to come to that party but holy hell I appreciate those individuals who can. They push themselves to come near the source of a living, bleeding heart. The real bleeding heart not the cliched use of the term.
I don’t know the right thing to say either.
But I do know that I am super raw and that most of what you say is very hard to hear. Be generous. Be thoughtful. Mistakes are fine but a little hard if you relish them too much. It’s ok to say nothing. I may not be comforted, but I am companied and that is golden.
Have unhelpful things been said to you? Let me know.
What has been the worst and the best things that have been said to you?