Mary's Shortcut: About Suicide Bereavement

Immediately after calling 911 on the Sunday afternoon of my daughter Mary’s suicide, I called my mother who lived a block away. She then called my sister who lives next door. The two of them rushed to my house as the rescue squad and my physician husband John labored upstairs to save Mary from the horrific results of having taken a lethal dose of anti-depressant medication fourteen hours earlier.

My mother and sister were first responders in a way that I have come to appreciate increasingly over the seventeen years since Mary’s death. In most ways equally distressed as I at that moment, they supported me by focusing on the crisis and refraining from asking questions or making implications.

They did not ask, for example, where my husband and I had been all day as Mary lay dying in her room behind a locked door. They didn’t ask what medication she had swallowed and how it was possible we’d allowed her access to it. They did not imply that perhaps John or I had upset our daughter the night before and might therefore be the cause of her pill-swallowing. All the unasked questions would be asked repeatedly by John and me over the next several years. But on that day of chaos and heartbreak, my first responders refrained from asking them, and their restraint was a kindness which shaped the healing, eventually.

“In the aftermath of the [suicide] death,” write clinical scholars John Jordan and John McIntosh, “families might become more splintered and more troubled as a result of the loss, might become closer, or might experience a complex combination of both” (Grief After Suicide, p. 32). A family changes as it goes through suicide bereavement, and not always for the worse.

Of the thousands of words my mother spoke to me in our sixty-three years together, none were more significant than the ones she offered an hour after Mary died: “You and John had a right to be out of the house today.”