suicide survival guide

Suicide still has a huge stigma attached to it. When a death occurs people always want to know how they died. When you tell them they suicided, a chill enters the conversation and the topic is changed. It makes us feel like we are to blame, we could have done something, it is somehow our fault. A more noble death is heart attack, car accident, even cancer.

My husband suicided nearly three years ago. Depending on what mood I'm in when people ask I either tell them the truth or that he died of a heart attack. Sometimes I just can't handle the "Oh....." Some days when I'm feeling really strong I can and I stand up for us, those of us left behind.

It's not our fault. If we did see it coming, chances are we tried to get help. If we didn't see it coming, but did in hindsight, well, it's still not our fault. We are only human and this journey is to learn something every day. To learn in hindsight is to still learn.

And if we just plain didn't see it coming at all, which is sometimes the case, we weren't meant to and could not have done ANYTHING to change things.

I'm not going to talk about the stages of grief, because for me they are not applicable. I also personally think they can be detrimental because we feel that if we don't go through those stages we are not grieving 'right'. Suicide has its own set of grief and it is not definable. Society loves to define everything and put it all in a neat little box and tell us, right then once you've done x, y z, you'll be cured. Suicide just doesn't work like that.

Why?

Why?

Why?

This question alone can haunt us for years, interrupting our phone conversations, our trains of thought, popping up on a train, in the shower.

Why did they do it?

Why didn't I see it coming?

Why didn't I do something?

Why didn't they get help?

The list of whys goes on and on. And with every new person we tell, they are stirred up again. You double check your reasons. You can't quite put it to bed.

And guess what?

IT'S OK.

You deal with this in your own time. In your own way.

Sometimes the way a person commits suicide can haunt us even more. The imagining of it. The tools they used can make us sick when we see them in real life. It is pure horror to us.

This is where anger can enter the equation. You are angry that they 'did this to you'. And they did, do this to you. It's not just what they did to themselves but the consequences to your life, your children's life, your friend's lives. You are angry at them for keeping you awake at night, for haunting your waking hours, for making you feel guilty. It's not your fault. How could you do this to me? How could you leave me? How could you do this to your children?

The How questions are as endless and mind bending as the whys.

Let's take a little break for a second.

The more you do something, the more you feel comfortable doing it. The more you practice golf, the more comfortable you become holding the club, swinging, holding your hips a certain way, digging up divots, and starting again.

Suicide is the largest silent epidemic of our times. Rates are up 60% since 1950. I'm not going to analyze why on this lens, but I will elsewhere. So why is it so hard to talk about?

My thoughts on this are many and varied but the one I'll share here is this. Everyone, whether they admit or not, has thought about committing suicide at least once in their life. It is part of acknowledging our own mortality. It is part of our development to realise that we are in fact in control of our own existence and can terminate it at will. Sometimes we think about how we might do it. And the thought usually passes.

But when someone actually does it, well it rocks us all to the core. OMG they did it. They left here and went - there. Some say they had courage to 'go see' what else there is. Some say it is the most gutless act to exist. It's a personal experience.

But we don't want to talk about it, because, you know it makes us think about it. It makes us remember our dark days when we thought about it. And if we're on the edge of depression and stressed out, well - let's just not go there. You sort of understand where I'm coming from here. It resonates with us as humans. We can empathise a little as to - yeah I can understand how you might have felt. But we will never ever admit that out aloud to anyone because, you know, we don't want people to think we're - crazy or depressed. Let alone - normal.

Don't be afraid of telling people that your relative or aquaintance 'died at their own hand'. They committed suicide. They took their own life. Make others face it for what it is. Don't make allowances for their feelings because by doing that, you deny your own.

Don't take responsibility for what they did. It's not yours to take. It's not your fault. Blame them by telling everyone what they did. You didn't do it by what you didn't do or might have done, they did it and probably would have done it anyway.

You are going to miss them. You are going to have 'normal' grief reactions as well as 'other' reactions that only you can really determine.

Whatever the case, it's important for you to seek support now and not to bottle the blame within yourself.

Here are some more links which I hope will help.

I'm also working on my book Suicide Survival Guide which will be available in early 2009.

Take care and be easy on yourself. You're the only one of you we've got.

I've had the misfortune of experiencing three close suicides, my mother at age 8 and my sister at age 24 and my husband when I was 40. My father passed when I was 23 and my elder brother passed when I was 12. So I have experience in grief and suicide and I hope you can learn something from it.

You can pre-order the Suicide Survival Guide by visiting www.suicidesurvivalguide.com