One of the worst parts about surviving suicide is the intense complexity that uniquely separates this type of loss. The departed cannot simply be mourned — survivors must realistically analyze their lives for hints of where did it all go wrong?

Instead of deifying the departed for their one glorious life, suicide survivors must confront the reality of who their beloved was and discover ways they don’t want to be like their loved one.

We survivors must look death in the face and admit that our person wasn’t altogether wonderful and beautiful and blameless. Who wants to think about the less amiable qualities of their beloved when all that we miss is everything that he or she was?

And yet, we must. When you’re a survivor of suicide, especially from a parent, you must reevaluate your entire life. You must consider the actions and beliefs your love one upheld that were not only inaccurate but also deadly.

When your parent commits suicide, you innately become afraid of the pieces of yourself that are like your deceased parent. Every character quality you share with that parent becomes scary — Does this quality mean that I am doomed to the same fate? Does that quality indicate that I’m _________.

You’re forced to deconstruct your life and, in doing so, deconstruct yourself.

We want to honor our loved ones for the incredible people that they were, and yet we are afraid to emulate them. We carry both, simultaneously, as walking contradictions mending two broken tapestries together.

Our histories guide us and carry us and support us, but our bleakest history does not determine the light and depth of our future.

I can be proud to be like my mother and terrified of that, too. Right now, I have to be. I have to learn to accept the parts of her that I reflect while learning to reject what caused her harm.

Grief’s complexity weighs on the mind as it tries to invent a new world while it cannot let go of the old: neurologically, to the mind, our loved ones cannot die and yet the mind has to learn to make sense of their absence (for more resources, refer to Mary Francis-O’Connor’s The Grieving Brain). Loss physiologically affects the brain enormously and clouds it with the infamous “brain fog,” for years until the brain can make sense of the absence… and all of this occurs with “normal” loss.

In “normal” grief one has the luxury [and hell] of missing the departed and mourning their life. In suicide, it’s our loved one who murdered his and/or herself. It’s a heavy complexity that few have to live through and few want to lean into.

Supporting suicide survivors looks like holding their hands while they fumble through the incomprehensible and what culture views as unspeakable. It looks like compassionately listening and asking kind questions, it’s creating a safe atmosphere, and it’s holding survivors with open hands. Survivors may not have the capacity to reach out, and they will not have the capacity to show up for you in the way you would like at this stage in your life.

It’s incommunicable, this weight we carry, and yet honest words open doors into this darkness. Each opened door carries light with it, illuminating these hallowed hallways of our lives, and light is life; when nurtured, life returns.