Understanding Suicide: The Questions I Cannot Lay Down

Understanding Suicide: The Questions I Cannot Lay Down

Unanswered questions and compassion, fourteen years after losing my only child, Dylan, to suicide.

By Beth Brown | My Forever Son

Reader note: In “Understanding Suicide: The Questions I Cannot Lay Down,” I write as Dylan’s mother about suicide, unanswered questions, and the grief of losing a child. Please read at your own pace and pause whenever you need.

Fourteen years after losing my only child, my son Dylan, to suicide, I am still his mother. For me, understanding suicide begins with the questions I cannot lay down. Time has not changed my love. Neither has his absence. I carry him into the life I am still living, into the words I write, the gardens I tend, and the songs I write.

At the heart of those questions is the one that followed my son’s death: Why suicide? Why? Still I seek answers to what will forever remain questions.

A question I carry in the shadow of my vast sorrow. A question I cannot lay down. Always echoing through my thoughts, my days, this life I’ve built to endure my son’s loss.

If you have lost your child to suicide, perhaps you know that reaching. Perhaps you have returned to a conversation, a memory, a moment that now seems to hold a meaning you could not have known then. I know how grief can turn remembrance into questioning. How love can search the past as though, by looking long enough, it might find a way to change what happened.

I cannot write us back to before. I wish I could. What I can do is stay here with the questions, with the pain, and with the love that has outlived the life of my son.

Understanding Suicide: The Questions Grief Carries

After Dylan died, I felt both the pain of losing my son and a frantic need to understand his death. I missed my son. I questioned everything. Memories that should have held only love became places where I searched for something I might have missed.

There is a particular cruelty in that search. From the far side of loss, we look back with knowledge we did not have while we were living those days. In my grief, I have had to learn the difference between a question and an accusation against myself. They can sound so much alike.

Questions and self-doubt run parallel paths that cause upheaval and guilt in my quest for a reason why. They both lack compassion for a mother’s grief. Relentless in their chase, both the question and the self-accusation run vicious cycles on repeat in my brain. Always scanning. Always active. Alert for clues and ready, always, to indict.

Understanding suicidal pain with compassion

I have turned to research because I want understanding, not because I believe a study can explain all of Dylan. No theory can contain my son. No description of suicidal pain can tell me everything he thought or felt. But a compassionate explanation can help loosen the harshness of the stories grief tells.

Nationwide Children’s Hospital explains in “Don’t Say It’s Selfish: Suicide Is Not a Choice” that overwhelming emotional pain and a narrowed sense of the future can compromise a person’s ability to see alternatives. The article describes people who do not typically want death itself, but want unbearable pain to end. The articles emphasizes that suicide is complex, not reducible to one decision, one event, or one person’s fault.

I return to that distinction carefully. I cannot know exactly what happened inside Dylan’s mind. I saw Dylan’s struggle with depression, and I know he reached out to classmates who were feeling suicidal. I know he was there for others in a way he could not be there for himself.

Perhaps it is enough to say that my son couldn’t let his insides outside. That Dylan took in all the pain of the world, but couldn’t express that pain. I saw my son’s pain from the outside in, and I tried to help from the outside in. And I felt helpless in the wake of it all.

I didn’t know then that what may seem visible from outside a crisis may not feel reachable to the person within it. And while understanding that truth does not make my son’s death less devastating, it does change the tenderness with which I hold the question. I simply could not have known everything about my son.

Guilt After Suicide Loss: The Weight of What If

What if I had known? What if I had understood more? What if there had been another conversation, another moment in which something could have changed?

I know those questions. They follow the channels grief has grooved into my writing, and they trail through the longing I still feel to save my son. Perhaps it easier to feel regret and guilt than live with the sheer helplessness of losing my son to suicide. Perhaps the questions have become a part of my love.

What hindsight cannot tell a grieving parent

Yet I do not want the language of prevention to become another burden laid upon a bereaved parent. The need for better understanding and care belongs in our conversations about suicide. It does not give me the whole truth of an individual death, and it does not turn my hindsight into proof that I could have known everything then.

If your own questions have become a place where you punish yourself, I will not offer you a neat sentence and pretend it can undo that pain. I will offer something quieter: I know the ache of wanting to have reached my child. I know that wanting still. Here, you do not have to defend the depth of your love.

Remembering Dylan Beyond His Death

When I write about suicide, I am also writing against the smallness of the words that can gather around it. Selfish. Weak. A choice. Words that seem to explain, but close the conversation before it has begun.

I want a different language for my son. A language that can acknowledge his suffering without making suffering his entire identity. A language in which I can say Dylan and mean my child, not only the way he died.

His death belongs to his story. But his life mattered too. The sum total is the whole of my child.

A child’s life is more than how it ended

I do not want my memories to become only evidence in a search for what went wrong. I want room for the love that was there before the questions. For twenty years of being his mother. For the life that cannot be reduced to its ending.

And I want that room for you, too. Room to speak your child’s name without having to explain the death each time. Room for sorrow, anger, tenderness, silence—whatever is true for you when you arrive here. You do not have to make your grief orderly before it is worthy of being heard.

Living in two worlds

Long-term grief after losing my son to suicide

In my own life, I carry both ache and love. I live in two worlds at the same time, though there is no clean boundary between them. In one, I am always with Dylan, always feeling the shape of where he should be. In the other, I move through the ordinary work of being here. His absence runs beneath that daily life like deep roots beneath majestic trees: unseen, but woven through the ground on which I stand.

My writing, my gardens, my cats, my art and music keep me grounded in the present. Yet the present is not a place from which Dylan has disappeared. The words I write can hold both longing and the life around me; music can make room for sorrow without silencing everything else. I can find happiness in daily living and still feel the ache of his absence. They are not rival truths. They belong to the same heart.

There was a time when I could not have imagined how those truths could live together. Even now, I do not mistake their coexistence for an ending to grief. Joy does not close the door on sorrow. Sorrow does not erase every opening through which joy might come. I am not finished loving my son. I am not finished missing him.

Moving forward without leaving love behind

To move forward, for me, is not to move away. It is to carry what I cannot leave behind into a life that continues to ask something of me. Some days, there is more room around the ache—room for words, for music, for the living world of my garden. Some days, the ache fills that room again. Neither day takes me farther from being Dylan’s mother.

Fourteen years is not a prescription. My life is not a timetable for yours. If your loss is new, you do not have to look down the whole length of the years ahead. If you have been grieving for years, you do not have to apologize for still missing your child. There is no date on which I stop being Dylan’s mother, no distance time can place between me and the love I carry.

Why the Pain Matters After Suicide Loss

The pain matters because it belonged to someone we love. Because it deserves to be met with care rather than contempt. Because understanding asks us to look beyond a judgment and toward a human life.

And the pain of those of us who remain matters, too.

I write My Forever Son from that place: not from above the grief, not from a life that has left it behind, but from inside the long work of carrying it. I write because my son lived. Because I love him. Because there are other parents searching for words in the aftermath of a loss they never imagined they would have to survive.

I cannot promise that understanding will take away the ache. It has not taken away mine. I can tell you that my life now holds more than sorrow, even while sorrow remains. There is the garden. There is music. There are words. There is love, still.

Dylan is my forever son. Fourteen years after his death, I am still reaching toward him—not only through the question of why he died, but through the life he lived and the love I continue to carry.

If you have found your way here, grieving your child, I hope these words offer a little room—a place where the ache is heard and the love is welcome. You do not have to set one aside to make space for the other. Neither has to be explained away.

If these words hold something you have struggled to explain, you are welcome to share them with someone you wish could understand. You do not have to find all the words yourself.

Support for Parents Grieving a Child’s Suicide

If these words have brought your own pain close, you do not have to sit with it alone. I have kept the resources below brief, with a place for immediate crisis support and a place for sharing grief with others.

Immediate support in the United States

988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline: Call or text 988, or use online chat. Free, confidential support is available 24/7 for emotional distress or suicidal crisis; you do not have to be suicidal to reach out.

Crisis Text Line: Text HOME to 741741 in the United States for free, confidential, 24/7 support from a trained volunteer crisis counselor.

If there is an immediate safety concern, call 911 or go to the nearest emergency room.

Companionship after suicide loss

Alliance of Hope community forum: A free, moderated online community for people grieving a loved one’s suicide, where you can read, share, and connect with other loss survivors.

The Compassionate Friends: Peer-led support groups for bereaved parents, grandparents, and siblings after a child’s death. These groups offer shared understanding; they are not professional counseling or emergency services.

Companion Reads

If you would like to stay a little longer, these writings offer other places to sit with the questions, the ache, and the love that remains.

If you are still searching for somewhere to begin, I have gathered words and support in Losing a Child to Suicide: A Parent’s Guide to Grief. I offer it as another place to pause, not a path you must follow. Take only what meets you where you are; the rest can wait.

• Carrying Ache and Love: Healing Longterm Grief After Suicide Loss — Continue with the two truths at the heart of this reflection: missing our children and carrying our love forward.
• “Ode to Suicide: That We Might Understand” — Turn toward poetry when the questions need a different kind of language.
• What to Say to Parents Who Lose a Child to Suicide — A companion read to share with someone who wants to be beside you in your grief.

About the Author

I am Beth Brown, Dylan’s mother, a writer, poet, musician, and gardener. My Forever Son is where I write from the grief of losing my only child to suicide and the love that continues fourteen years later. I find language in poetry, music, and the ordinary life of my gardens and cats. Here, I share the long work of living with loss—not because I have left the sorrow behind, but because I am still his mother, still writing, still carrying ache and love.

I have gathered more of these words in Where a Mother’s Grief Resides: Poems of Child Loss and the Work of Living On, my collection on Amazon Kindle. If poetry is where you turn when prose feels too small, you are welcome there, too.

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