How to remember
Step 1: Let it hit you.
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross said that denial is the first stage of coping with death, and this is perhaps truer when a loved one takes their own life. The news of it dazes you. You are detached and unaffected, as if this news is about someone you’ve never even met. But it is about someone you love. A person whose hand you held, whose meals you prepared, whose text messages are fresh in your phone. This entire person has vanished. Take your time; let this hit you.
You will likely go through the other stages: anger, bargaining, depressive states. You might be angry that your beloved didn’t hold out longer. How selfish of them, how weak! They could’ve talked to us more often, attended more therapy sessions, prayed more incessantly. Did they not think of the ones left behind? Did they not care about their family and friends at all?
Eventually, you will find this anger giving way to a more palpable sense of loss. In your mind, you may be exploring what kind of bargains you could strike with a higher power, with Time, with Death, just to avoid dealing with this loss.
But you must yield, because there is no bargain that can stop the most natural, excruciating sorrow that descends on you after the death of a loved one. You must go through this painful stage; let yourself.
The Kübler-Ross model enumerates that after denial, anger, bargaining and depression comes acceptance. If only it were that simple. Before you arrive at that elusive doorway of grace, you experience more persistent, troubling themes unique in the aftermath of a suicide.
For one, the questions will hound you—all sorts of whys. It’s possible the answers will never satisfy you, because there is nothing logical about someone taking their own life. There is no neat little explanation or a bullet list of pinpointed reasons. It’s more like an avalanche, or the frenzied firing of a billion neurons, or a handful of scratched-out journal pages. The whys are chaos; learn to reign them in so you can at least sleep at night.
Then there’s shame, so subtle, so powerful. Sometimes, you will want to speak honestly about your beloved, but you won’t, because the story is so easy to misunderstand. You might worry about what people would think of you, your family or your loved one. You yourself might shy away from the mere mention of “mental health.” And so you refrain from telling the story, when you shouldn’t, not when the storytelling could actually help you and others around you.
But the trickiest of these themes is guilt. You feel you could have done more to prevent the hurt. You think maybe you could have stayed closer or maybe kept more distance. Maybe said something differently or said nothing at all. Maybe you could have insisted on continued medication. Who knows? Guilt can’t be founded on the firing of a billion well-loved neurons.
At some point, you must stop beating yourself up with the maybes and the whys, and acknowledge what you know for sure: That you tried, and that every effort you made was borne from a genuine yearning to ease your loved one’s struggle. That your beloved was fighting flames you could not see or understand, but you stayed right there with them with arms always outstretched.
Open yourself up. Talk about death.
Read about mental health. Acceptance means embracing these and embracing your revised future.
And, after all of these (though not “finally,” because this process is never final), let yourself carry on, but with a new lens into the world. Slowly, without you realizing it, seasons will rinse away the pain and the trying. Let yourself remember some. You are not just going to grieve, but to remember. Keep the warning signs and the counselors’ numbers and the leaflets. Keep learning and sharing about mental health. Keep in touch.
Because you are a survivor now—a survivor with an important story to tell. This is your tribute. Someone will need to hear your words—maybe a friend, a partner, a stranger on social media—and your words could make a difference in their own fight. But you will know what to say now. You will know how to help. You will know, because your beloved taught you to.
