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Key points
- A death by suicide changes a family's life forever.
- Sometimes we try to run away from grief, but time is the only thing that truly helps.
- Compassionate perspective and strong ties can keep a family from falling apart.
This one requires what we used to call a trigger warning, but what we now, out of sensitivity, call emotional activation. This post is about suicide by gunshot.
When people ask grief expert David Kessler what the worst kind of loss is, his stock response is, “The worst loss is your loss.” It’s true that comparing loss and grief is pointless and unhelpful. Still, the death by suicide of a young person is perhaps among the most shocking losses.
Ten years ago Rachel Dickinson’s teenage son took his own life, and she has written about her slow, excruciating path from paralysis back to living in an elegant new memoir, The Loneliest Places: Loss, Grief and the Long Journey Home. I invited Rachel to write a guest post here. While our losses are very different, I relate to many of her emotions and impulses. Grief is both very personal and universal. Here is Rachel’s story.
When everything changed
On the night of February 6, 2012, at 8:00 p.m., my family’s world exploded. With a single shot from a shotgun, my 17-year-old son Jack ended his life. He was in his bedroom. I ran up the stairs when I heard a loud pop and found him lying across his bed, the gun across his body. I ran downstairs and screamed for my husband to go to Jack’s room. He checked on our boy and slowly came down the stairs, looked at me and said, “Our life will never be the same.”
Everything else on that night is a blur of flashing lights of police cars, the wail of an ambulance, and the somber tones of the funeral director. But the thing I often think about is how did we ever go back up those stairs and walk past Jack’s room to go to our bedroom? And how have we continued to do that for thousands of nights since then?
My husband was right when he said, “Our life will never be the same.” It hasn’t been. We’ve gone through so many stages and phases that I’ve lost count. Jack’s three sisters were now brotherless and would be living with the aftermath of Jack’s suicide for the rest of their lives. One was 12 when he died, another 18 and in her first year of college, and the oldest was 25. The youngest kind of sleepwalked through high school, then attended four different colleges before getting her degree. The middle sister transferred colleges and didn’t speak to me for a year (I’m still not quite sure why). The oldest had such a thorough mental health collapse that she couldn’t work for two years.
Our lives have never been the same.
A family copes, somehow
I look at my girls today, over a decade after Jack’s death, and they are all doing a-okay. How did that happen, I wonder. Sometimes I can only seem to focus on the tag-team breakdowns our family suffered through. But then I remind myself that these confident, thoughtful women are all products of their experiences, including Jack’s death. That they have managed to incorporate the fact of his violent end into their stories seems almost miraculous to me.
My husband became the caretaker after Jack’s death. His worry about all of us was how he could cope with the loss of his son. We gratefully accepted his help.
My path was different. I did one of two things for the first several years after Jack’s death. I was either catatonic in a green chair, wrapped in a red quilt, watching hundreds of hours of, preferably, British crime shows. (I think I was trying to solve the crime of Jack’s death, which seemed mysterious to me.) Or I was running away from home.
Distance, time, and professional help
I had been a travel writer and still had those connections and managed to visit the Falkland Islands, Ireland, Italy, and Iceland in those first post-Jack years. That trip to the Falklands – 6,000 miles from my home in upstate New York – happened only five weeks after Jack’s suicide. I wanted to go where no one would know my story and to a place where there was no association with Jack. I made it a rule that I would not see my boy as a ghost in any place he had never been.
This extensive travel baffled my family. How could I possibly leave home (leave them) and be able to function? My mind was so skewed that leaving home became the only way I could function. There were no prying questions to answer, no pitying looks from those who knew my backstory. I convinced myself that this was how I could survive. At some point, maybe three or four years into my grief travel I stopped having the overwhelming need to leave home. I think that time – temporal distance from the event – made me realize that I wasn’t likely to see a ghost Jack even in familiar places. He had dispersed like his friends who had gotten older and left home.
During the first years of my grief, even when I was traveling, I could not see beyond myself because I was concentrating so hard on trying to keep myself alive. I finally scared myself. My doctor prescribed antidepressants, anti-anxiety medication, sleeping pills, and Valium. That, in combination with talk therapy concentrating on my serious case of PTSD, helped me inch forward as I tried to solve, or at least understand, the mystery that was Jack.
Coming together instead of apart
My next phase was a desperation to move out of the family home, the house where Jack had killed himself. I sent my husband numerous Zillow listings of cottages perched on cliffs above Maine’s rocky shore. He finally told me that he didn’t want to move; that this was the touchstone for him and the girls – to them the house represented the past and the future. I was stuck on the violent event and could not see either before or after, so his reaction shocked me. But rather than pack my car and head toward a rental cottage on the shore, I gave myself permission to really consider my husband’s point of view. This house – as sad as it was for me – was the gathering place for the daughters even when, or particularly when, they were having tough times. My family needed the house and I had to come to terms with that need in order to remain part of the family. I chose family.
Often when I reflect on the past decade, I think it’s a miracle that I’ve stayed married and that everyone in the family seems to be moving forward. But I’ve come to realize that the strong bonds our family had before Jack’s death helped us continue as a family unit. We’ve always (mostly) really liked the company of each other. We poke at the edges of our tenderness when we gather for family meals but then we let it go and laugh and eat and watch bad movies.
A place of relative peace
My husband was right when he said our lives will never be the same. There are still days when sadness washes over me and I engage in what-if scenarios – what if I had paid more attention to Jack on that day, what if I had figured out he was in crisis and saved him from himself, what if what if what if . . . and then I cry a little. But it’s not like the choking sobs of the past, when it was hard to even breathe. This is how progress is measured: In halting baby steps that go two steps forward and one step back. This process cannot be rushed. The grief journey does not have to adhere to anyone’s schedule but your own. There is no right way to wander through grief, but it does help to know that time is your friend.
If you or someone you love is contemplating suicide, seek help immediately. For help 24/7 dial 988 for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, or reach out to the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741741. To find a therapist near you, visit the Psychology Today Therapy Directory.
