Exploring the Impact of Suicide on Families: Finding Light in Darkness

Exploring the Impact of Suicide on Families: Finding Light in Darkness

Summary

Exploring the Impact of Suicide on Families: Finding Light in Darkness delves into the profound sorrow and struggles encountered by those left behind after a suicide. Through heartfelt excerpts from “The Healing of Sorrow” and “When Someone is Too Bruised to Be Touched,” readers are offered comforting insights and perspectives that portray suicide as an illness rather than a sin.

The post content compassionately unfolds the layers of grief and despair, shedding light on the paths to healing. The personal reflections shared within the text bring authenticity and relatable depth to this sensitive subject. Additionally, the inclusion of related posts and the opportunity to subscribe for new content via email foster a sense of community and support for those navigating these challenging experiences.

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My Forever Son

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Table of Contents

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Finding Light in Darkness: “The Healing of Sorrow”

An Excerpt from “The Healing of Sorrow” by Norman Vincent Peale

In many ways, this seems the most tragic form of death. Certainly it can entail more shock and grief for those who are left behind than any other. And often the stigma of suicide is what rests most heavily on those left behind.

Suicide is often judged to be essentially a selfish act…I think our reaction should be one of love and pity, not of condemnation. Perhaps the person was not thinking clearly in his final moments; perhaps he was so driven by emotional whirlwinds that he was incapable of thinking at all. This is terribly sad. But surely it is understandable. All of us have moments when we lost control of ourselves, flashes of temper, or irritation, of selfishness that we later regret.

Each one of us, probably, has a final breaking point–or would have if our faith did not sustain us. Life puts more pressure on some of us than it does on others. Some people have more stamina than others.
When I see in the paper, as I do all too often, that dark despair has rolled over some lonely soul, so much so that for him life seemed unendurable, my reaction is not one of condemnation. It is, rather,
“There but for the grace of God”

And my heart goes out to those who are left behind, because I know that they suffer terribly. Children in particular are left under a cloud of “differentness” all the more terrifying because it can never be fully explained or lifted. The immediate family of the victim is left wide open to tidal waves of guilt “What did I fail to do that I should have done? What did I do that was wrong?”

To such grieving persons I can only say, “Lift up your heads and hearts. Surely you did your best. And surely the loved one who is gone did his best, for as long as he could. Remember, now, that his battles and torments are over. Do not judge him, and do not presume to fathom the mind of God where this one of His children is concerned.”

A few days ago, when a young man died by his own had, a service for him was conducted by his pastor, the Rev. Warren Stevens. What he said that day expresses, far more eloquently than I can, the message that I’m trying to convey.

Here are some of his words:

“Our friend died on his own battlefield. He was killed in action fighting a civil war. He fought against adversaries that were as real to him as his casket is real to us.

They were powerful adversaries. They took toll of his energies and endurance. They exhausted the last vestiges of his courage and strength. At last these adversaries overwhelmed him. And it appeared that he lost the war.

But did he? I see a host of victories that he has won!
For one thing — he has won our admiration — because even if he lost the war, we give him credit for his bravery on the battlefield. And we give him credit for the courage and pride and hope that he used as his weapons as long as he could.

We shall remember not his death, but his daily victories gained through his kindnesses and thoughtfulness, through his love for family and friends, for animals and books and music, for all things beautiful, lovely and honorable.

We shall remember the many days that he was victorious over overwhelming odds. We shall remember not the years we thought he had left, but the intensity with which he lived the years he had!
Only God knows what this child of His suffered in the silent skirmishes that took place in his soul. But our consolation is that God does know and understands!”

Norman Vincent Peale, excerpt from “The Healing of Sorrow”

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“When Someone is Too Bruised to be Touched”

“When Someone is Too Bruised to be Touched” (by Ronald Rolheiser) is a compassionate look at how God can reach through closed doors–even when we cannot–to comfort our loved one struggling with depression and suicidal thinking. Ronald Rolheiser writes regularly about depression and suicide focusing on where God is in the midst of our sadness, ache, grief, and suicidal thinking.

An Excerpt from “When Someone is Too Bruised to be Touched” by Ron Rolheiser

  By Ron Rolheiser
 
A few days ago, I was asked to visit a family who had, just that day, lost their 19 year-old son to suicide.
 
There isn’t much one can offer by way of consolation, even faith consolation, at a moment like this, when everyone is in shock and the pain is so raw. Few things can so devastate us as the suicide of a loved one, especially of one’s own child.

There is the horrific shock of losing a loved one so suddenly which, just of itself, can bring us to our knees; but, with suicide, there are other soul-wrenching feelings too, confusion, guilt, second-guessing, religious anxiety. Where did we fail this person? What might we still have done? What should we have noticed? What is this person’s state with God?

What needs to be said about all of this: First of all, that suicide is a disease and the most misunderstood of all sicknesses. It takes a person out of life against his or her will, the emotional equivalent of cancer, a stroke, or a heart attack.

Second, we, those left behind, need not spend undue energy second-guessing as to how we might have failed that person, what we should have noticed, and what we might still have done to prevent the suicide. Suicide is an illness and, as with any sickness, we can love someone and still not be able to save that person from death. God loved this person too and, like us, could not, this side of eternity, do anything either.

Finally, we shouldn’t worry too much about how God meets this person on the other side. God’s love, unlike ours, can go through locked doors and touch what will not allow itself to be touched by us.

Is this making light of suicide? Hardly. Anyone who has ever dealt with either the victim of a suicide before his or her death or with those grieving that death afterwards knows that it is impossible to make light of it.

There is no hell and there is no pain like the one suicide inflicts. Nobody who is healthy wants to die and nobody who is healthy wants to burden his or her loved ones with this kind of pain. And that’s the point: This is only done when someone isn’t healthy. The fact that medication can often prevent suicide should tell us something.

Suicide is an illness not a sin. Nobody just calmly decides to commit suicide and burden his or her loved ones with that death any more than anyone calmly decides to die of cancer and cause pain. . . .

Ronald Rolheiser, When Someone Is Too Bruised to Be Touched

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Understanding the Impact of Suicide: Navigating Depression and Grief

There is no hell and there is no pain like the one suicide inflicts. Nobody who is healthy wants to die and nobody who is healthy wants to burden his or her loved ones with this kind of pain.

Fr. Ron Rolheiser, When Someone is Too Bruised to Be Touched

Understanding the Metaphor of the “Black Dog” in Depression and Grief

The metaphor of the “black dog” is widely used to describe the experience of living with depression. This concept, notably explored in Matthew Johnstone’s book, “I Had a Black Dog, His Name Was Depression,” and popularized by Winston Churchill, illustrates how depression can feel like a constant companion—always present and oftentimes overwhelming. The metaphor has become a relatable way to discuss depression’s pervasive nature and the unique challenges it brings to daily life.

Struggling with Depression: A Constant Companion

Depression is not a fleeting feeling; for many, it is a daily battle that can consume every moment. Sometimes it is present without any clear reason, making it difficult for others to understand. Matthew Johnstone’s “I Had a Black Dog, His Name Was Depression” uses the image of a black dog to represent the shadow depression casts—always present, weighing individuals down, and creating barriers to interacting with friends, family, and everyday life.

Those struggling with depression do not always present as “sad.” Depression can be masked by outward signs of happiness, such as laughter and humor, which may hide deeper struggles. The black dog, in this context, becomes a symbol that combines both personal experiences and the broader emotional reality of depression.

Connecting Depression to Grief and Healing After Losing a Child to Suicide

On My Forever Son: Grief and Healing after Losing a Child to Suicide, the “black dog” metaphor resonates deeply. Losing a child to suicide and depression is a profound and life-altering experience. The metaphor not only describes the daily struggle with depression but also the enduring grief that follows such a loss.

By sharing resources, personal reflections, and pathways to support, My Forever Son blog offers hope and understanding to parents and families navigating the complex journey of grief and healing. Recognizing depression’s impact and seeking help are vital steps in honoring your child’s memory and fostering resilience within yourself and your community. 

“The Black Dog”: Understanding Depression and Grief

The Black Dog: Understanding Depression and Grief includes an article and two compelling, relatable videos about depression: “I Have a Dog, His Name is Depression,” and “Living with the Black Dog,” both based on books by Matthew Johnstone and developed in conjunction with the World Health Organization (WHO). A pervasive and serious mental health condition that affects millions worldwide, depression is one of the most common mental disorders in the United States.

Depression can affect how you think, feel, and navigate your everyday life, often leading to a pervasive sense of hopelessness and disinterest. You may not know why you feel this way, but the symptoms can manifest in various aspects of your life, making it challenging to engage fully in activities you once enjoyed.

Even basic daily activities such as sleeping, eating, or working may become difficult, creating a challenging cycle that exacerbates feelings of fatigue and disconnection. This emotional toll can affect relationships with friends and family, as well as hinder your ability to perform well at work or school, leaving you feeling isolated and misunderstood.

“Black Dog” Metaphor

The “black dog” metaphor, popularized by Winston Churchill and illustrated in Matthew Johnstone’s book, “I Had a Black Dog, His Name Was Depression,” captures the persistent and burdensome nature of depression. This metaphor helps communicate the emotional weight and daily challenges faced by those living with depression, as well as the importance of recognizing symptoms and seeking professional support. For individuals and families impacted by depression and suicide loss, understanding this metaphor can foster empathy, reduce stigma, and encourage pathways to healing. 

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Related Reads

• Breaking the Stigma: Facts About Suicide and Compassion
• Understanding Suicide: It’s Not a Choice
• Twenty Years of Love: Dylan
• Navigating Grief After Losing a Child to Suicide
• On the Wings of Hope: The Dragonfly Story

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A Note from the Author: Reflections on Grief and Healing After Losing My Son

Others can come alongside us for awhile, but our journey into the deep, dark night must be our own. Here, we rally against the darkness, awaken our soul’s deep slumber of the “normalcy” of everyday life, and do fierce battle with an enemy unseen. Grief torments, ruminates, is recursive and in the end, in losing a child to suicide, is unfinished. My son is a warrior son, and I, by default and through journeying my soul’s dark night in grieving losing Dylan to suicide, am a warrior mama.

One day, there will be reconciling and resolution, but it is I who must learn to walk unfinished here, finding, once again, love, meaning, and purpose in the walking out of my life’s journey. I walk with grief. I carry the weight of bearing deep sorrow in my soul. I am a survivor of suicide. No matter how “good” things get, no matter the profundity of my joy and happiness here, as is, as now, I will always be tinged and laced with the bittersweet. 

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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

• Understanding the Pain of Suicide Loss
• A Decade After Suicide Loss: Reflections on Long-term Grief
• “He Left Too Soon” Poem: A Mother’s Deep Sorrow
• Understanding Suicide: Grief and Healing Insights
• Healing After Suicide: Essential Books for Parents

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Beth Brown, Author

About the Author

Beth Brown is a writer, educator, and bereaved mother who shares her journey of healing after losing her only son, Dylan, to suicide. Through poetry, essays, and her blog My Forever Son, Beth offers comfort and hope to others navigating grief, honoring the enduring bond between parent and child and celebrating the small joys that illuminate the path toward healing.

Meet the Author: Writing Through the Abyss

by Beth Brown

There are places that cannot be mapped, only entered—terrains of loss where language falters and the heart, stripped of its certainties, must learn to speak again. I am Beth Brown, a mother whose son, Dylan, died by suicide at twenty. My life, once measured by the ordinary rhythms of teaching literature and nurturing a child, was pierced in two: before and after. In the aftermath, I found myself wandering a wilderness where time bent, memory ached, and the world’s colors dimmed to the hush of grief.

On baby’s breath and angel wings,
You bring me love yet still,
— “On Baby’s Breath and Angel Wings”

I did not choose to become a chronicler of sorrow, but grief, relentless and unbidden, pressed its ink into my hands. I wrote because I could not bear the silence. I wrote because the ache demanded witness. In poetry, I found a way to hold both the weight of absence and the persistence of love—a language for the unspeakable, a vessel for memory, a place where my son’s name could still be spoken.

He left too soon,
Lifting life from June,
Casting torrents of rain.
— “He Left Too Soon”

There are nights when the world tilts, and I am returned to the moment of loss, the fracture that remade me. Yet even in the deepest dark, I have learned to listen for the faint music of hope, the pulse of love that endures beyond death.

Beat still my heart,
Beat still my mind,
Weary though thou art,
Carry his love along with thine,
Though heavy on thy shoulders
Crost fields throughout all time.
— “Beat Still My Heart”

My poems are not answers. They are offerings—fragments of a life lived in the shadow of absence, pieced together with longing and the fierce, unyielding devotion of a mother’s heart. They are the record of a journey through the labyrinth of grief, where each turn reveals both the ache of what is lost and the quiet radiance of what remains.

My child sleeps in a cradle of stars,
Gently rocked by the moon
Lullabies in his heart,
Heavens in galaxies swirl round to the sound
Of a mother and child’s love beating on.

Meteor showers, on the darkest of nights,
Bring comfort and joy to my child’s delight,
Aurora Borealis tints sky blue and green,
Where my child remembers his mother in dreams.

–“Falling Stars in a Moonless Sky”

There are questions that haunt the bereaved: Could I have known? Could I have saved you? The mind circles these unanswerable riddles, but the heart, battered and tender, learns to rest in the mystery.

I’d have reached right in to your dark night’s soul—
I would have held on, I would have clutched you,
I would have never let you go
But you told me “Mom I love you”
Oh my child, if I’d only known.
— “Once Upon a Blue-Sky Moon”

In the landscape of loss, I have discovered that love is not diminished by death. It is transformed—becoming both ache and solace, shadow and light, the filament that binds the living to the lost.

Body, mind, soul, rough and ragged,
Weeping tears falling still throughout time,
Carrying weight of mourning and grieving
Falling broken when thou wert mine.
— “Beat Still My Heart”

I write for those who walk this wilderness with me—for the mothers and fathers, siblings and friends, whose lives have been marked by the unthinkable. My hope is that in these poems, you will find not only the echo of your own sorrow, but also the quiet assurance that you are not alone.

Starlight for a mobile twinkling ‘ere so bright,
To remember his mother that darkest of nights,
When slipped he from her grasp and fell through this earth,
Tumbling still planets, sun, folding time in rebirth.
— “Falling Stars in a Moonless Sky”

That we might understand we cannot separate mental illness from physical illness and that try as we might, we cannot see inside another’s pain.

–“Ode to Suicide: That We Might Understand”

And how my heart keeps on beating
Is a mystery to all,
For without you beside me
Through life’s depth I crawl.

I live now life backwards
My heart beating in time,
To the life that we lived
When you, child, were mine.

Try as I might
I can’t seem to live,
For my dreams all belonged,
To your future forward lived.

—“Bury My Heart”

If you have come here searching for words to companion your grief, I welcome you. My poetry is not a map, but a lantern—casting light on the path we walk, together and alone, toward a horizon where love, undiminished, endures.

But boughs break and love falls through the cracks in the earth,
And the centre can’t hold when orbits, slung far, break their girth,
Gravitational interference, passing stars in the night,
Jetting orbs, falling stars in a moonless sky.
— “Falling Stars in a Moonless Sky”

Grief is wild—untamed, unending, and full of shadows. Yet within its depths, I have found moments of light: a memory, a poem, the gentle rustle of leaves, the warmth of a cup of tea. My words are both ache and love, a testament that even in the deepest sorrow, we can find meaning, connection, and—sometimes—hope. Through poetry, I reach for my son and for all who walk this path. If you find yourself here, know that you are not alone, and that love—like poetry—endures.

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If you wish to read more, my collection, Bury My Heart: 19 Poems for Grief and Healing After Losing a Child to Suicide is available on Amazon Kindle. and many other reflections await you at myforeverson.com.

Bury My Heart

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