Understanding Suicide: What a Mother Carries

Understanding Suicide: What a Mother’s Questions Carry

By Beth Brown | My Forever Son

Reader note: In “Understanding Suicide: What a Mother Carries,” 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, still I am his mother. 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.

This is my story about seeking answers to the questions a child’s suicide loss leaves behind. 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.

“Why” and “if only” are questions I carry in the shadow of my vast sorrow. What I missed and what I did or didn’t do are questions I cannot lay down. These questions reverberate through my grief and this life I’ve built now to endure my son’s loss.

I’ve spent fourteen years reaching for answers that come only in part from the questions I carry. Guilt and longing for my son have been especially heavy. Self-forgiveness has been long in the making. Glimpses of hope along the way have lightened what I carry, enough so to show me that love endures. Always.

If you have lost your child to suicide, perhaps you know that reaching for answers to questions that can’t fully be answered. Perhaps you revisit memories, moments that now seems to hold meaning you could not have known then. I know how grief can turn memories into questioning. How love (and guilt) can search the past looking for 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.

Carrying Guilt: “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 My Only Child Beyond His Death

When I write about suicide, I am also writing against the stigma of the words that can gather around it. “Selfish. Weak. A choice.” These word choices both incriminate the beloved child who died by suicide and the parents who raised, adored, and loved their child. Harsh words enshrine the longstanding stigma of suicide into darkness.

The Stigma of Suicide

As long as the mystique, myths, and stigma remain the quick “answers” applied to the complexities and unknown variables about suicide, the less compassion and truth can be offered to grieving parents who lose a child to suicide. The stigma of suicide predisposes that knowledge is lacked in this area by the advances made in science and medicine. This is simply not true. I have found some of my understanding about suicide by researching professional medical sites.

Light has been cast on understanding suicide in medical research both nationwide and globally. The World Health Organization (WHO) publishes medical research and its findings as does The National Institute of Health. For those reaching for answers based in scientific research, these sites are widely available.

Those who professionally study suicide (“suicide epidemiologists”) frequently include esteemed doctors and medical researchers. Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio is one of the leading research institutes in the nation to study pediatric suicide. Their extensive pediatric blog reflects the depth of their professional work and lends truth about what is factually known and medically researched about suicide amongst young children and teens.

What a Mother’s Grief Carries

Losing my son to suicide was (and is) devastating. Suicide loss is a catastrophic, life-changing traumatic grief. My grief over these past fourteen years since Dylan’s death has not been “healed” by scientific research, though in understanding that there is a deep search amongst the medical and scientific community, I am “comforted” as a mother who lost her only child to suicide.

Losing a child to suicide made me feel completely alone. I had support from my family and friends, though some of what I’ve written about here has been said to me as well. And in researching, reading books, attending professional university conferences presented by suicide epidemiologists, and joining support groups for parents of suicides, I find my world has grown larger.

After these fourteen years of loss, I carry both ache and love, grief and gratitude in my “as is, as now” life. I find hope in the seasons of nature, and I find understanding what I can about suicide research an important part of my long-term grief and “healing”.

Laying Down My Questions

I write My Forever Son for grieving parents of suicide loss to bring understanding and hope (and perhaps ultimately a way to carry on). My poems come from the multitude of emotions that have moved through my grief since losing my son.

I have always written, I just didn’t know fourteen years ago that the crux of my writing would encompass grief, the search for meaning in my life now in the wake of my son’s absence, and the quest for answers to the profound questions the death of a beloved child to suicide leaves behind.

A child’s life is more than how it ended

Remembering all the good memories has taken a long time. Still, so much of my life reflects memories tinged with the bittersweet. I miss my son. But in searching, soul-searching, researching, finding support, and journaling and reflecting, I have found a way back to my son.

The traumatic grief of losing my only child to suicide has been daunting. I entered a darkness and a bleakness I didn’t know could exist. The hopelessness that surrounded me took me down, down, down in a way that must have been where my son found himself.

Glimpses of Hope

Coming back from the depths of what to me has felt an existential crisis, a self exile in the recesses of darkness in my profound loss of my son, has taken as long as it takes. Glimpses of hope came slowly. Daffodils blooming in spring from ground that had been barren all winter. Leaves on the deciduous trees knowing when to cease photosynthesis, coloring themselves with papery leaves now dry and falling. And yet in spring, trees lacking leaves and still bearing their monochromatic winter colors, blossom suddenly in a flush of pink and white, their leaves opening vivid and green.

Remembering the Love

Recognizing, finally, that there were those in my life doing for me what I could not, in my grief, do for myself. Feeling, finally, the love that is still here. Recognizing, finally, that my grief is my love for my son, and that in carrying love, I carry loss. Recognizing, finally, that my ache and his loss are not the whole of my life. That my son lived remarkably through so much. That my son lives on and through my writing, my being present in my own life, in my many beautiful memories of his growing up years.

It’s now been fourteen years since I lost Dylan. Searching for answers to the impossible questions a child’s death by suicide brings has taken more than time. Still I reflect, write, move through the grief of holidays, his birthday, his memorial day, and still I walk to walk towards my son. Yet seeking and searching has brought solace to the relentless cycling of questions lacking complete answers. I have emerged from unbearable darkness to the way back to good memories of my son.

A Path To Self-Forgiveness

I cannot know everything in this life. In nature. In brilliance and beauty. In pain and despair. The world is bigger than I am. And in questioning so deeply and repeatedly “why?”, I have found a way back to what I had with my son. Years of brilliance and beauty, years seeing him struggle as a teenager, years of laughter and sharing life together.

Losing my son to suicide has been vicious in relegating me to questioning everything about myself. Choices I did and did not make. Things I did and did not do. Things I missed. Things I could have done differently. And that in somehow figuring out the answers to these questions, I would find a way back to my son. That I could somehow bring him back. That he might be here still.

Though what I have found in lacking clearly defined answers is a path to self-forgiveness and a way to hold more of Dylan than the shock, trauma, and suddenness of his death. I remember all of my son, the brilliance of his life and his leaving this life. I hear him say “Mom, I had to go.” I don’t know why. I cannot know why. But I do trust that there is more to this life than what I can know.

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. I carry them both.

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 reflects my moving through grief with glimpses of hope along the way. 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 another’s pain deserves to be met with care and compassion rather than stigma and shunning. Because understanding asks us to look beyond judgement of self and stigma to see the humanness of us all.

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. Why Grief After a Child Suicide Feels Different lends insight into what makes this loss unique.

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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