My Forever Son: Grief and Healing After Losing a Child to Suicide

My Forever Son: Grief and Healing After Losing A Child to Suicide

My Forever Son is a deeply personal, authoritative grief resource that includes:

• A mother’s lived experience of losing her son Dylan to suicide
• Over a decade of longitudinal grief writing (Year 1 through Year 14+)
• Practical guidance for parents navigating suicide loss
• Extensive poetry as a primary healing language
• Education that breaks stigma around suicide and suicide grief
• Resources for parents, supporters, grandparents, and loved ones

Summary

My Forever Son: Grief and Healing After Losing a Child to Suicide is a moving blog that speaks to anyone who has faced the loss of a child. It chronicles a mother’s journey with grief and healing after her son’s suicide. Author Beth Brown courageously opens her heart, creating a supportive space for those wrestling with similar pain. My Forever Son serves as a beacon of comfort for parents navigating this unimaginable path.

Start with These Pages

• Surviving the Suicide of Your Child
• Understanding Suicide Grief
• Navigating Guilt After Suicide Loss
• Finding Support Right Now

You Are Not Alone

My Forever Son exists because I lost my son, Dylan, to suicide—and survived. This site holds reflections from early shock through long‑term grief, written for parents walking this same road.

Start here if your loss is recent:

• If You Just Lost Your Child
• Surviving the Suicide of Your Child

 Read more about understanding suicide grief:

• Understanding Suicide Grief
• Why Guilt Is So Common After Suicide Loss

About My Forever Son

• My Forever Son features beautiful images from the author’s gardens that bring calm and peace during the journey of grief.
• Emotional poems reflect on a parent’s grief. They capture deep loss and the search for understanding, conveying despair while seeking comfort and healing.
• Beth shares personal stories and reflections on grief to comfort grieving parents, revealing her search for meaning in sorrow.

Powerful Message of Hope: “That We Might Understand”

[Suggested Read]: When Love Isn’t Enough: “Ode to Suicide: That We Might Understand”

I hope that someday we will have a better understanding – one that perhaps permits us to give grace to the one who took their life and see it as something that happened to them, rather than something they did to themselves and others. –Anonymous

Top Posts

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A Note from the Author

Navigating the Path from Grief to Healing

“To Hold This Pain and This Beauty Side-by- Side”

The light is soft, it is beautiful here, there is a breeze. The pain is always there for us. It will be waiting at the apartment when we return tonight, it will be lying next to us in bed or come to us when we wake; we always have it. But we have to let this beauty in, too. That will be the work of all the rest of our days: to hold this pain and this beauty side by side, without letting the one crush or crowd out the other. We have to let this beauty in, too.

Sarah Wildman, “I Am Trying to See What My Beautiful Daughter Saw,” Aug. 25, 2023, New York Times

Grieving the Deep Wound of Losing My Son to Suicide

Healing the deep wound of losing my son is ongoing in my life. It always will be. Always he is there. In my sleep, my waking hours. On his birthday and mine. When on his memorial date I go to see him where he is not. His grave. For he walks with me. We remember, and I smile with love and with heartbreak. These are not easily separated. Ache and love walk together, joined in my heart. In early grief, only ache flowed through me. All the time. Everywhere. In his room. In my work. I couldn’t breathe without him.

Healing Through Carrying Pain and Love Together

Now, fourteen years later, my love for my son and my ache of missing him have joined together. My ache is my love, and I have grown accustomed to carrying the weight. I have moved forward in my life. Not moved on, for that implies I left something, someone, behind. Dylan is always with me. Nudging me to smile at the little things in life. The silly antics of my two rescue kittens. The depth and brilliance of my gardens–flowers, shrubs, trees, a water pond. He reminds me how precious life is. How fragile.

My Forever Son Reminds Me How Precious Life Is. How Fragile.

I capture life’s fragility in my photographs of my gardens. I find color, hope, and peace in nature. Spring brings the reawakening of all the flowers, shrubs, and trees that lay dormant over the long, cold, bitter months of winter. Each year, purple and yellow crocus emerge from their winter’s sleep. Then yellow and white daffodils bloom. Shortly thereafter, red tulips rise tall, even when cooler temperatures still prevail. But come spring, when the brilliance of sun, blue skies, and flowers seemingly appear against an impossible, immutable winter,I find hope in nature’s resilience.

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Finding Hope & Healing

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Navigating Grief & Guilt

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Support & Resources

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If You Need Immediate Support

Online Directory for Coping with Grief, Trauma, and Distress

After A Suicide Resource Directory: Coping with Grief, Trauma, and Distress
http://www.personalgriefcoach.net
This online directory links people who are grieving after a suicide death to resources and information.

Alliance of Hope for Suicide Survivors
http://www.allianceofhope.org
This organization for survivors of suicide loss provides information sheets, a blog, and a community forum through which survivors can share with each other.

Friends for Survival
http://www.friendsforsurvival.org
This organization is for suicide loss survivors and professionals who work with them. It produces a monthly newsletter and runs the Suicide Loss Helpline (1-800-646-7322). It also published Pathways to Purpose and Hope, a guide to building a community-based suicide survivor support program.

HEARTBEAT: Grief Support Following Suicide
http://heartbeatsurvivorsaftersuicide.org
This organization has chapters providing support groups for survivors of suicide loss in Colorado and some other states. Its website provides information sheets for survivors and a leader’s guide on how to start a new chapter of HEARTBEAT.

Professional Organizations

American Association of Suicidology
suicidology.org • (202) 237-2280
Promotes public awareness, education and training for professionals, and sponsors an annual Healing After Suicide conference for suicide loss survivors. In addition to the conference, they offer a coping with suicide grief handbook by Jeffrey Jackson. This booklet is also available in Spanish.

The Compassionate Friends
compassionatefriends.org • (877) 969-0010
Offers resources for families after the death of a child. They sponsor support groups, newsletters and online support groups throughout the country, as well as an annual national conference for bereaved families.

The Dougy Center
The National Center for Grieving Children & Families
dougy.org • (503) 775-5683
Publishes extensive resources for helping children and teens who are grieving a death including death by suicide. Resources include the “Children, Teens and Suicide Loss” booklet created in partnership with AFSP. This booklet is also available in Spanish.

Link’s National Resource Center for Suicide Prevention and Aftercare
thelink.org/nrc-for-suicide-prevention-aftercar • 404-256-2919
Dedicated to reaching out to those whose lives have been impacted by suicide and connecting them to available resources.

Tragedy Assistance Programs for Survivors (TAPS)
taps.org/suicide • (800) 959-TAPS (8277)
Provides comfort, care and resources to all those grieving the death of a military loved one through a national peer support network and connection to grief resources, all at no cost to surviving families and loved ones.

LOSS
losscs.org
Offers support groups, remembrance events, companioning, suicide postvention and prevention education, and training to other communities interested in developing or enhancing their suicide postvention and prevention efforts.

Crisis Services

988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline
988lifeline.org
Call or text 988 (press 1 for Veterans, 2 for Spanish, 3 for LGBTQ+ youth and young adults) or chat 988lifeline.org
A 24-hour, toll-free suicide prevention service available to anyone in suicidal crisis. You will be routed to the closest possible crisis center in your area. With crisis centers across the country, their mission is to provide immediate assistance to anyone seeking mental health services. Call for yourself, or someone you care about. Your call is free and confidential.

Crisis Text Line
crisistextline.org
Text TALK to 741-741 for English
Text AYUDA to 741-741 for Spanish
Provides free, text-based mental health support and crisis intervention by empowering a community of trained volunteers to support people in their moments of need, 24/7.

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Related Reads

• Finding Immediate Support Resources for Suicide Loss Survivors
• 2023 Suicide Statistics: A Deep Dive Into the Crisis
• Understanding Suicide Grief
• 3 Years of Grief: Healing After Losing My Son to Suicide
• The Magnolia Tree: A Symbol of Grief and Resilience

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