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On The Day of Suicide, Silence

October 21, 2012 by Marjorie Antus

My daughter’s last hour was a silent one. Late on a Saturday night when my husband, son, and I had gone to bed in a quiet house, Mary took a bottle of Korbel Brut from a basement refrigerator, went to her bedroom, locked the door, and began downing the champagne along with all the prescription antidepressant medication she had on hand.

Hers was a stealthy silence. The suicide note indicates she felt “lucky” not to have been detected when the champagne cork popped and hit her bedroom ceiling. Yet, the truly dangerous silence of that last hour was not the absence of a sound that might have alerted the rest of us. It was Mary’s inner silence, the feeling of complete aloneness and hopelessness she described in her suicide note as she began swallowing the pills.

Unaware of what had taken place, my husband and I left the house early the next morning to spend several hours at a monastery in Washington, DC. We would be joining Catholic adults–Discalced Carmelite Seculars–who’d discerned a call to silent prayer in their lives and promised to practice silent prayer each day as a service to the Church and world.

So while Mary was alone and silently cutting herself off from community, John and I were silently praying in community. That reality has haunted me from the beginning, and its message remains unclear.

But one truth is clear: the inestimable healing value of silence after Mary’s death. “We must have the courage to become more and more silent,” writes John Main, O.S.B. “In a deep creative silence we meet God in a way that transcends all our powers of intellect and language” (Word into Silence. New York: Continuum, 1998, p.7).

When every imaginable detail and speculation about Mary’s suicide had been uttered multiple times, ending in heartbreak and frustration, silence became the only safe house.

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The Silence of The Suicide Bereaved

October 15, 2012 by Marjorie Antus

“It is difficult for suicide survivors to express their thoughts after a suicide,” write Christopher Lukas and Henry Seiden. “In contrast to the aftermath of ‘normal’ deaths, friends and relatives often don’t want to talk about the events surrounding a suicide. In fact, many people don’t want to admit that the death was a suicide….[One reason for this unwillingness] is surely that family members don’t want to expose the blame and guilt they feel: the blame they feel toward other family members, the guilt they feel about themselves” (Silent Grief: Living in the Wake of Suicide, pp.111-112).

To Lukas and Seiden, silence becomes the “Grand Bargain” following suicide that, while apparently addressing the problem of blame and guilt, also compounds the impact of suicide and damages the grieving process. “Silence,” they state, “is an enemy.” (pp. 112-113).

With everyone in my family, there was never any doubt about the cause of Mary’s death. It was called “suicide” from the first hour and not muddied by the words “accidental overdose.” We took hold of the bitter reality together, and no energy went toward maintaining the illusion that Mary died other than self-destructively.

That isn’t to say there was no family silence over the years; silence prevailed. Whenever family members came together during the holidays or for birthdays, there was silence about Mary but also gratitude–however muted–for the moment we were sharing. Far from being a blame-suppressing ploy, I think our silence was a sign of respect for deeply shared sorrow.

Might a family gathering designed for the disclosure of thoughts and feelings have helped? Possibly. Might it have soothed my mother and me to sit down and weep together? Probably a little. But we were all suicide survivors, all devastated, all trying to make it through the day. The kind of extensive talking and listening I needed–therapy, by another name–members of my family couldn’t be expected to provide. And I never thought a “Grand Bargain” had anything to do with that.

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Social Uncertainty in Suicide Bereavement

October 8, 2012 by Marjorie Antus

In the hours after my daughter Mary’s suicide in 1995, my grieving family was treated well. First responders–rescue squad, extended family, neighbors, medical emergency team, clergy and police–acted with compassion. I’ve always thought it was their collective good will that stabilized us and aided our recovery. And I don’t even want to think how much worse our lives would have been without the kindness of those good people–strangers, many of them.

Only a couple weeks after the suicide, though, awkwardness set in. By that, I mean social uncertainty–the raw emotion, avoidance, silence–that marked my interactions with others and seemed, in fairness, to cut both ways. In the first place, I wasn’t the person I’d been before Mary died. Whatever meaning Mary gave my life, and it was considerable, had been buried along with her. I was driven to talk about my daughter in order to make sense of that catastrophe, and I craved getting her name into conversations because I simply needed to say and hear it.

It was too intense for what would normally have been polite conversations. Friends were trying, it seems, to help me and protect themselves by switching to lighter topics, getting my mind off the devastation of my daughter’s life and giving me perspective. One motherly friend said, “Well, Marj, it could have been worse.” My unspoken response to that was, My daughter is dead. Please tell me how it could have been worse. I guess if she’d machine-gunned us all, that would have been worse.

Before long, my family began receiving professional therapy. I did finally learn to modify my comments about Mary, saving the unvarnished ones for my spiritual director behind a closed door. I learned discretion, eventually.

But I still appreciate the honesty of a sixty-five-year-old college professor several years after the suicide of his son: “I will keep friendships only with people whom I can bring up with ease these issues [of my son’s suicide]. Some people have a knack of saying insensitive and uncaring things. One good friend said why don’t you go out dancing instead of attending a suicide support group meeting. People can sometimes be hurtful and say stupid things. I’m glad some of the jackasses are gone—pseudo-friends and kin who are unable to handle anything like this—good riddance” ( Karen Mueller Bryson, Those They Left Behind, p.18).

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After Mary’s Suicide, A Methodist Minister Visits My Family

October 3, 2012 by Marjorie Antus

“Only recently have organized religions changed from a punitive approach toward the suicidal person to a relatively beneficent one,” write Christopher Lukas and Henry Seiden in Silent Grief: Living in the Wake of Suicide. “For centuries, people who killed themselves were buried at crossroads, their hearts often pierced with a stake. Survivors were shunned, excommunicated, robbed of the [dead person’s] possessions” (p. 19).

On the afternoon of Mary’s death, my mother phoned her Methodist minister who came to our house to be with her, my sister, my sister-in-law, my niece, nephew, and two children while my husband and I were at the hospital. Dr. Martin was leaving our house when John and I arrived but, seeing us, turned around and went back inside.

Wearing a dark suit and red tie, he eased his way into a weeping family that had just been told of Mary’s death. Too shocked to cry, I observed that everyone in the room seemed caught up in a kind of shattering, lonely sorrow–a roomful of people shedding tears separately. My twenty-seven-year old nephew had even slid off his chair onto the privacy of the floor.

Pausing a moment, Dr. Martin asked us to stand together for a prayer. His voice was warm and his manner confident as he spoke of God’s love for Mary and for us and for the great sadness we were experiencing. In that instant, he put us back together again as a family, bridged doctrinal differences between Catholics and Protestants (which never seemed so irrelevant) and reversed the punishment and shunning which, out of fear, have afflicted suicide victims and their families for most of Christian history.

It was a brilliant moment and a kind one. Over the next several weeks, others provided brilliant, kind moments–John’s Presbyterian colleagues, his Baptist patients, Episcopal aunts and uncles, and Catholics with whom we’d worshipped for decades. It was the willingness of all those people to enter into our pain and bewilderment without passing judgment that was most striking and which, to this day, continues to heal.

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My Suicide-Bereaved Family and the Police

September 28, 2012 by Marjorie Antus

When my husband John and I got home from the hospital on the afternoon of our daughter Mary’s suicide, half a dozen family cars lined the driveway and a bright blue police car sat at the curb in front of the house. A police detective was still upstairs going through trashcans, placing Mary’s suicide note in an envelope marked “Evidence,” and trying to determine what the crime scene, Mary’s bedroom, might be revealing. Members of my family were seated downstairs while the investigation took place.

“Many survivors [of suicide] report that detectives spend a good deal of time looking for evidence of ‘foul play’; they do not–or cannot–accept, at face value, the story of a suicide,” write Christopher Lukas and Henry Seiden. “The way survivors are questioned is often vigorous and accusatory as the police go about their business” (Silent Grief: Living in the Wake of Suicide, pp.17-18).

But as far as I know, no family member seated in the living room was questioned at all. In fact, when I walked in to deliver the terrible news to them, the detective was still upstairs and didn’t come down for several minutes. After he appeared, he politely asked if I was her mother, said “I’m sorry, Ma’am,” and then took his briefcase full of evidence and left.

It was a relief to know he’d be driving his blue cruiser away from the curb. To my thinking, the car had been a billboard announcement of something gone drastically wrong in our home, possibly something illegal; and I resented having that message flashed to the world.

At a remove of seventeen years, however, I appreciate what the detective was trying to do at our home that Sunday: his job. I can’t imagine living in a country where the death of a teen aroused no legal concern or investigation. Though I never learned his name, I did finally understand the value of the detective’s respectful, unobtrusive presence at the scene of my daughter’s suicide: it didn’t make things worse. By not making things worse for my family, by not retraumatizing us, the unknown detective ended up helping.

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A Priest Waits With Us in the Emergency

September 20, 2012 by Marjorie Antus

Because a neighbor had called the parish rectory on the afternoon of my daughter Mary’s suicide, Father Don showed up in the private hospital waiting room where John and I had arranged ourselves in chrome and plastic chairs. My husband and I were waiting for the medical team to save our daughter. We were waiting for hope, for some sign that Mary’s overdose had not been lethal, after all, and that she would wake from her coma. We were quietly frantic.

Father Don rapped on the door, walked in without pleasantries, and sat down with us. It was late on a Sunday afternoon, and he may have been at home relaxing over football when the call came, but he showed up for work wearing clerical black and Roman collar. He’d just gone behind restrictive double doors to be with Mary and celebrate the sacrament of the anointing of the sick. But he told us he’d anointed only Mary’s feet because her forehead and the palms of her hands had been occupied by medical paraphernalia.

Over my dying daughter, Father Don had said these words: “Through this holy anointing, may the Lord in his love and mercy help you with the grace of the Holy Spirit. Amen. May the Lord who frees you from sin save you and raise you up. Amen.”

Along with the application of healing oil, Father Don had prayed for Mary’s help, for her release from sin, for her salvation and resurrection. It was not to be the last prayer he offered during our time together in the waiting room that Sunday. When the lead doctor finally opened the door and told us Mary had died, Father Don offered one last prayer of commendation beginning with comforting and piercing words: “Go forth, Christian soul, from this world . . .”

In the two-hour period between those formal prayers, Father Don sat quietly with John and me. He asked no questions and offered no advice. He merely listened to our horrified account of the afternoon. But there was really nothing “mere” about his listening. I finally came to regard his listening presence as the essence of caring about someone in crisis. I finally came to think that anyone ought to be able to provide personal presence and careful listening. Over the course of many years, I also came to realize how few of us actually do.

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How My Suicide-Bereaved Family Helped Me From the Start

September 13, 2012 by Marjorie Antus

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.”

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Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in Suicide Bereavement

September 9, 2012 by Marjorie Antus

I can speak only for myself about Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. No doctor or therapist diagnosed PTSD in me or even suggested I might be undergoing some of the symptoms of this anxiety disorder after my daughter’s suicide in 1995. It wasn’t until 1998 when I came across a passage in Silent Grief: Living in the Wake of Suicide that I began to understand more clearly what I’d been experiencing.

“It is likely that any survivor of a suicide will recognize the symptoms [of PTSD] immediately,” write Christopher Lukas and Henry Seiden, “reexperiencing the trauma [through] recurrent recollections of the event, dreams of the event, and a sudden feeling that the event is recurring.” I began to recognize PTSD not only in flashbacks of finding Mary on her deathbed but also in night dreams of trying to talk her out of self-destruction.

Lukas and Seiden state that those with PTSD experience a numbing or “reduced involvement” with the world through a “lessening of interest in important activities, a feeling of detachment from others, and a flat, emotionless feeling.” Added to that are the sleep disturbances, guilt about surviving, difficulty concentrating, loss of memory, exaggerated startle response, and avoidance of activities that arouse recollection of the trauma (pp. 28-29). With the exception of not feeling guilty about surviving–I was rather proud to be surviving–all of those symptoms found a home in me.

One moment of avoidance behavior I remember to this day. While walking through a parking lot a few months after Mary’s funeral, I noticed a large tool box bolted to the bed of a pick-up truck; and a wave of anxiety rolled through. “It’s just a tool box,” I had to reassure myself before hurrying away, “it’s not Mary’s casket; it doesn’t mean anything.”

Avoidance behavior finally faded away as did all the shapes and forms of PTSD. That fading away came about in large measure because of the wonderfully supportive and non-judgmental care I received in the earliest days of bereavement, a topic that deserves and will receive further attention.

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Denial in Suicide Bereavement

September 6, 2012 by Marjorie Antus

After my daughter’s suicide in 1995, there were three instances of denial I used as a psychological defense against my overwhelming emotions. The first was short-lived. It was the denial that Mary’s intentional overdose was, in fact, a suicide attempt. That is to say, I told the 911 operator my daughter had suffered a seizure (which was true) because I couldn’t bring myself to say she had overdosed. That particular denial ended a few minutes later, however, when a neighbor asked what had happened upstairs with Mary and I decided to tell him and everyone else the truth.

The second instance of denial lasted for the better part of a year and protected me against the depression, anger, and anxiety that threatened to undo me after my daughter’s death. Here’s a sample of this denial: A week after Mary died, I told a friend, “You know, I really think I can do this. I really think I can handle this loss.” It was early in the day, I was more or less rested, the inner defense system was firmly in place, and I believed what I was saying. As the day wore on and I began to tire, though, I always found that kind of denial more difficult to maintain. It gradually collapsed, as it needed to, and the working through of emotions and the formidable task of accepting the loss began to take place.

The third instance of denial had more to do with the circumstances of my daughter’s death, the profound psychological pain or “psychache” she endured while living under my roof and sitting at my breakfast table. It took a dozen years and a great deal of prayer, soul-searching and study to overcome the denial that Mary had suffered to the extent she obviously had. Even now, seventeen years after her death, I can slip into denial about it.

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Shock And Disbelief After Suicide

September 1, 2012 by Marjorie Antus

Once in a funeral Mass homily, my pastor remarked that the death of loved ones, no matter how elderly or infirm they may be, always brings a certain shock to mourners. I knew what he meant, having watched my father dwindle over a period of years and finally die of Alzheimer’s disease at the age of 81 in 1997. It was a shock that someone so familiar to me had passed into Mystery–a reality utterly different from the one I was living, a hiddenness that was unfathomable.

Even so, my daughter’s suicide two years earlier had sent shockwaves through me unlike any I’ve ever experienced. In truth, the shock of her death manifested not as waves of emotion but rather as enveloping numbness that lasted for at least a year. In Suicide: Survivors, Adina Wrobleski describes shock as a “physical reaction that makes us feel as if we’re wrapped in cotton, that we’re sleepwalking. Shock makes our pain feel far away” (p.91).

Shock protects us not only from the outside world but from our own overpowering feelings. It got me through the first year of bereavement in a more or less stable way: clothes got washed, dinners got put on the table, the family held together, and nothing worse happened.

Clinical researchers John Jordan and John McIntosh write that “shock and disbelief [are] more likely a characteristic of most or all sudden and unexpected deaths–not simply suicide” (Grief After Suicide, p.32).

But I say the suicide of my seventeen-year-old daughter in 1995 was a great deal more than sudden and unexpected. It was brutal, irrational, and void of meaning. It forced me to look at my own blindness and accept a loss I never could have imagined. Above all, it magnified a hundred times the normal shock and disbelief most of us experience in bereavement.

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