Mary's Shortcut: About Suicide Bereavement

A year before my daughter died by suicide in 1995, an aquaintance named Anthony told me that after being diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor, a friend of his had driven out west and shot himself on a desert highway. In his anguish, Anthony received little comfort, I’m sure, from my ill-considered response: “Well, you know, it’s all about free will.”

(When I began to grieve for Mary the next year, Anthony generously sent me a Mass card with an inscription from Lamentations [1:12] that I treasure to this day: “O all ye that pass by the way, attend and see if there be any sorrow like to my sorrow.”)

Talking to Anthony the year before, however, I was just saying “stupid things.” Jill Bialosky describes “stupid” this way: “Friends, meaning to help and offer sympathy [about her sister’s suicide], said stupid things. One of the most common was that suicide was her choice. How would it have been her choice, when she was only twenty-one years old? She hadn’t yet developed the maturity to understand how to cope with her challenges and believe she could get through them or have the foresight to understand the repercussions of what she did.” (History of a Suicide: my sister’s unfinished life. New York: Washington Square Press, 2011, pp. 11-12.)

I appreciate Bialosky’s insight regarding the lack of choice surrounding her sister’s suicide. What she writes applies to my daughter, as well. Mary was not using free will when she chose death; her will was not free. Like most suicide victims, my daughter’s reasoning ability was clouded by the “psychache” of despair which drug therapy and psychotherapy had not yet alleviated.

But she also lacked a depth of knowledge–a heart knowledge–that is essential to the task of profound and human decision-making. One of my first reactions upon finding Mary after her overdose was, “She can’t possibly have known what she was doing. She can’t possibly have known what her death is going to mean.” She was seventeen and not, I insist, freely choosing suicide.