Mary's Shortcut: About Suicide Bereavement

“The suicide of a loved one irrevocably transforms us,” wrote Carla Fine after the suicide of her husband. “Our world explodes and we are never the same. Most of us adapt, eventually learning to navigate on ground we no longer trust to be steady. We gradually come to accept that our questions will not be answered. We try not to torture ourselves . . .” (No Time to Say Good-bye: Surviving the Suicide of a Loved One. New York: Broadway Books, 1997, p. 20).

Others, too, characterize suicide bereavement as life-altering. “Being a suicide survivor becomes an integral part of one’s identity,” explains Karen Mueller Bryson. “I feel as though an entire segment of my life was defined by my father’s suicide. It colored everything that followed. The tragedy seemed to be like a musical score always playing underneath the action of my life” (Those They Left Behind. 2006, pp. iii-iv).

Pychiatric professor Kay Redfield Jamison describes suicide bereavement as “a half-stitched scar,” adding this note of clarity: “Time does not heal, / It makes a half-stitched scar / That can be broken and again you feel / Grief as total as in its first hour” (Night Falls Fast: understanding suicide. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999, p.290).

“Suicide,” writes grief educator Harold Ivan Smith, “initiates the long shadow on survivors left to wander across the fragile landscapes of the heart toward a magic kingdom called ‘Answerland.’ Suicide, like a volcano’s lava flow, changes everything in its path” (A Long-Shadowed Grief: Suicide and Its Aftermath. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Cowley Publications, 2006, p. 3.).

Given the profound turbulence following suicide, how does anyone manage? Carla Fine speaks of the “mystery and power” of her will to survive her husband’s suicide as a “testament” to his memory that she wants to honor throughout her life (pp. 222,224). Kay Redfield Jamison offers a single line of poetry to the bereaved: “Look to the living, love them, and hold on” (p. 311).

Harold Ivan Smith extends his “long shadow” metaphor to include divine compassion. “Suicide is the long shadow . . . but a shadow can exist only if somewhere a bright light shines.” He prays, and I with him, that God “sees my wounds, hears my pains, and invades my sorrow with hope” (p. 13).