Mary's Shortcut: About Suicide Bereavement

I have held in my hands two suicide notes. My daughter Mary left hers in her bedroom after overdosing on anti-depressant medication in 1995. An elderly medical patient of my husband’s sent his in the mail just before shooting himself in 2009–the subject of my last three posts.

My daughter wrote that she hoped every night she wouldn’t wake up the next morning, that she couldn’t take the “hassle” of life anymore, that she was weak and hated herself.

My husband’s elderly patient said he could hear the “rapids” in the distance leading him–all alone in his canoe–to the waterfall of death. Before reaching the waterfall, however, he planned to go ashore by means of a revolver.

There is a certain composure in both notes; neither comes off as the product of extreme mental agitation. Studying them, however, I have to remind myself not to underestimate the pain underneath the words. “In almost every case,” writes Edwin Shneidman, “suicide is caused by pain, a certain kind of pain–psychological pain, which I shall call psychache” (Edwin Shneidman. The Suicidal Mind. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996, p. 4).

As professor at the UCLA School of Medicine and founder of the American Association of Suicidology, Shneidman maintains that the keys to understanding suicide are “made of plain language . . . . [They are] the words that suicidal people say–about their psychological pain and their frustrated psychological needs–that make up the essential vocabulary of suicide.”(The Suicidal Mind. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996, viii) These “keys” to understanding someone’s suicide usually appear in their suicide notes.

If anything might have given my daughter and the elderly gentleman hope before their deaths it was having someone ask them, “Where do you hurt?” and “How can I help you?” (p.6)

If only anyone had known to ask those questions.