Why Grief After a Child’s Suicide Feels Different

Why Grief After a Child’s Suicide Feels Different

• By Beth Brown
• September 5, 2022

For Parents Living with Suicide Loss

I write for parents newly bereaved and those who have lived with this loss for years. The questions can be overwhelming in the first days, and some may return long afterward. Here I share my words about guilt, self-blame, unanswered questions, and the stigma that follows suicide, alongside the work of writers and researchers whose accounts have helped me understand what I carry.

I lost my only child, my twenty-year-old son Dylan, to suicide on June 25, 2012. I write as his mother, fourteen years after his death, with the love between us and the ache of losing him still part of my life.

The Morning Dylan Died

I received many compassionate words, cards, embraces, and acts of service when my son died. Dylan’s friends and family flocked to our house the morning of his death. They brought pastries from a local bakery, coffee, and huge condolences.

Dylan’s friends gathered in our driveway, sequestered together the way teenagers do, talking about the shock of his death, when they had last texted Dylan, when they had last seen him. Sharing grief. Horrified. Shock. Numbness. Disbelief. Suspended disbelief. Tears and great sadness. And a shared sense of self-blame and guilt:

• What If?
• Should I have?
• Could I have?
• What did I miss?
• What didn’t I see or do?
• What could I have done to have prevented his suicide? If only…

Why? What made him do this? Did he leave a note?

Still teenagers. Knowing their friends don’t die. They are at an age of invincibility. This can’t be happening to them. “Why?” they question. “What made him do this?” “Did he leave a note?” “Why?”

And then the peculiarity of grief after suicide loss: a grief speculating if they could have done something, been somewhere, told someone; a grief blaming themselves, each individually and at the same time, as the same kids who had grown up together with Dylan; a grief questioning their role in his death; a grief that will linger and challenge them beyond the youth of their years; a grief that breaks apart completely their truth of the inherent order of life.

Dylan, My Only Child

Dylan was my only child. He was twenty years old, a sophomore in college studying Digital Media at a prestigious university on a full academic scholarship.

Dylan was an incredible young man—always at the top of his class and navigating that challenging transition from high school to college with such promise and potential. He brought joy and purpose to my life, serving as my reason to rise each morning with hope in my heart.

What did we miss? What more could we have done? Dylan’s friends asked those questions that morning. Parents bring them to this loss, too, with the guilt and responsibility that so often accompany grief after suicide.

The Questions That Follow a Child’s Suicide

In self-blame, we return to what we could have, should have, might have done—had we known more, intervened more, been there more. This can seem like a death we might have prevented. Blame and guilt become part of what we carry, and self-forgiveness is hard won.

Suicide [loss] survivors often face unique challenges that differ from those who have been bereaved by other types of death. In addition to the inevitable grief, sadness, and disbelief typical of all grief, overwhelming guilt, confusion, rejection, shame, and anger are also often prominent. These painful experiences may be further complicated by the effects of stigma and trauma.

Suicide Bereavement and Complicated Grief, National Library of Medicine

Unique Challenges of Suicide Loss Grief

Suicide loss brings unique challenges to grief that deepen the complexities of “building a life of love around the loss” (David Kessler, grief.com).

Suicide Grief Is Different

Losing a child to suicide moves parents (as well as family members, classmates, and friends) into a grief where they oftentimes blame themselves, feel responsible for the suicide loss; question themselves– Why Suicide? What more could I have done? What did I miss? Why wasn’t I there for them?; and move through the stigma and trauma of suicide loss.

Why Suicide Grief Feels Different

Losing a child to suicide oftentimes includes challenges that differ from other means of death:

Parents of Child Loss to Suicide

1. Blame Themselves for what they did, what they missed, and what they did not do to prevent their loved one’s suicide.
2. Feel Responsible for the suicide of the loved one they lost and thus guilty for their loved one’s suicide.
3. Wonder Why over and over again, even knowing there will never be an answer why their loved one took their life.
4. Move through the Stigma and Trauma attached to a loved one’s death by suicide.
5. Question Everything. Suicide is not a choice, though it seems a preventable death. Suicide awareness and prevention can compound loss survivors’ grief.

What More Could I Have Done?

It is not uncommon for themes of personal blame to arise, as the person questions their role in their loved one’s suicide and what they could have done to prevent their death. Unfortunately, the bereaved may vastly overestimate their role and others’ role[s] (i.e., what family and friends did or didn’t do).

Eleanor Haley, “Grieving After a Suicide Death,” What’s Your Grief?

What Did I Miss?

After losing a child to suicide, I looked back at what I knew then through the lens of what I know now. I returne to what I missed, to what I might have done differently. While hindsight can provide insight, it oftentimes, in the wake of the traumatic grief of suicide loss, deepens a parent’s self-questioning. The questions that come with suicide grief remain unanswered.

Though in a way that has compounded and made my grief difficult, these same unanswered questions still arise at the most unexpected points in my life, even after fourteen years out from my son’s suicide. I know I will never know the reason “why” Dylan felt he had to go. Barely twenty, a sophomore on an academic scholarship at a prestigious university, my son left so much behind. His creativity and musical gifts, his songwriting and guitars, his art and his yearnings. This is the life I will never know of my son.

Living Forward Looking Backwards

And still, even after all this time (which is no time at all if you are a parent who lost a beloved child to suicide), this breaks my heart. But with time out from the acute grief of the early years in the immediacy of my son’s death, I realize now that so much of my grief comes as “secondary grief,” those moments where life goes on for other parents who still have their children with them. Graduations, marriages, birthday celebrations, new jobs, grandchildren, holiday celebrations. And the list goes on. I will never know this of my son.

Missing My Son’s Future Means Missing Significant Parts of My Own

Most significantly, I will never know this part of myself. Long-term grief has made me realize I will forever be the mother of a twenty-year-old son. I am proud of this and still, I mother my son, but I cannot grow as a mother as my son ages into adulthood. The deep reflections and conversations that happen between parents and their child do not always happen in their teenaged years.

Learning to live forward has meant moving forward with Dylan. There’s no moving on from the grief of losing my son to suicide. The depth of my grief is the depth of my love, and both this deep grief (ache) and deep love move forward with me in my life, as is, as now.

Remembering the Beautiful Growing Up Years

And so I house all those beautiful memories of his growing up years, seeing still his wide smile, seeing still his 6′ 2″ frame, sensing still the fragrance of Axe Body Spray, and I live forward in my life looking backwards at the good memories.

The Darkness Descends: Broken Memories and Suicide Attempts

But then the dark year came–my son’s depression that I didn’t know how to “fix”; his underage drinking, seemingly a cultural part of his being an eighteen-year-old college freshman and finding his way to his young adulthood, and getting him to the student clinic on campus where he was prescribed anti-depressants that seemed only to make things worse.

A significant drop in his grades, his sudden unwillingness to participate in things he’d always enjoyed, and sulking and lacking his usual zest for life that summer between his freshman and sophomore year. Time felt broken, seasons felt broken, my son’s life was chaotic and broken, and I didn’t know what to do. What to look for. Where to turn. How to fix his “brokenness.”

Tumultous Memories & Feeling Responsible

I inherently felt responsible for my son. Protecting him wasn’t something I had to think about, because subconsciously, I had always felt the need to protect him. But by the time Dylan reached his teenaged years, he was striving to “pull up roots” because this search for identity (which often creates friction between parents and their child) is inherent to us all in our coming of age youth.

My son’s depression started earlier than his descent into a darkness where I couldn’t reach him. Sensitive and a deep thinker, my son took on others’ difficult struggles to help them without letting his insides. outside. I wish I had known more, been there more for him in his pain, and been all-discerning with answers for suicidal ideation. He was seeing a counselor, prescribed medication for depression and eventually, bipolar depression, moving through diagnoses of “cyclothymic,” “mild depression,” “major depression,”and “manic depression,” often referred to in this century as “biploar.”

But manic depression (“bipolar disorder”) takes a long time to diagnose. Doctors don’t typically diagnose teenagers with mood disorders (bipolar includes mood, cognitive, and energy changes in the brain, and bipolar is often genetically linked in families) because teenagers and young adults are moving through significant growth and hormone changes.

Feeling Responsible: Guilt, Self-Blame, & Still the Questions that Haunt

Questioning myself, still, even in long-term grief, is a heavy part of looking backwards. These memories haunt. Five months with a suicide attempt in each month, each attempt worse than the last, my helplessness, interventions that didn’t take and didn’t work, and watching my son spiral downward and out of control.

The ache of this chaotic, broken time lies etched in the deepest parts of me, and while it is a dark ache with memories that haunt, I desperately want to move beyond the heaviness of guilt and self-blame, the sense that I couldn’t protect my son. I write about guilt and self-blame frequently, perhaps in an attempt to release these traumatic memories. Even some of my poems focus on guilt and self-blame, self-forgiveness and release.

For Parents Feeling Regret, Self-Blame, & Guilt

Self-Blame Gets Stuck On Repeat

“Grief is the internal part of loss, how we feel. The internal work of grief is a process, a journey,” writes grief and loss expert David Kessler in Grief.com’s Frequently Asked Questions about Grief & Grieving.

A Desperate Search for Answers

That desperate search for answers to understand “why suicide” can prolong and complicate suicide grief. Self-blame, guilt, deep regret, and intense anger when we feel others are to blame can consume those grieving suicide loss. These heavy feelings return in repeat cycles.

Regret and self-blame, those painful self-reflections about past actions and longing for a different outcome, can lead to ruminating about what we could have done differently, and in the process, blame ourselves. In learning to live forward, letting go of regret, guilt, and self-blame have often surfaced as ruminations in my life.

Here is what Jeffrey Jackson, author of A Handbook for Coping with Suicide Grief, has to say about parents who lose a child to suicide:

Parents face the potential for unique forms of guilt. While they might forgive themselves for being unable to intervene in the suicidal act, they may blame themselves for some perceived mistake made in raising their child. Parents need to understand that children—even young children—are not entirely of their parents’ making. Outside influences from friends, school, culture, and the world at large also shape each child’s psyche. And the emotional condition that made them vulnerable to suicide has neurobiological roots that are far beyond their control.

Jeffrey Jackson, A handbook for coping with suicide grief, American Association of Suicidology

I include Jeffrey Jackson’s words below for parents living with self-blame and guilt.

For Parents Feeling Responsible

The two quotations that follow directly address how parents who lose a child to suicide are affected by this challenge in suicide grief:

We want to think that we could have saved them, we could have protected them

‘As a parent, we want to think that we could have saved them, we could have protected them, it could have turned out different. And there’s no answer to that. And I think that’s part of the torture of when you have a child die by suicide is you just don’t know.’

Caren Chesler, After child’s suicide, parents can be engulfed in self-blame and guilt, Washington Post, July 15, 2023

Parents who have lost a child to suicide report more guilt, shame, and shock.

Parents who have lost a child to suicide report more guilt, shame, and shock than spouses and children. They often think “If only I had not lost my temper” or “If only I had been around more.” […] Indeed, age of the suicide deceased has been found to be one of the most important factors predicting intensity of grief.

Suicide Bereavement and Complicated Grief, National Library of Medicine, National Center for Biotechnology Information

The Need for Compassion

The author-researchers of Feelings of Blameworthiness and Their Associations With the Grieving Process in Suicide Mourning conclude “mothers are socialized to feel completely responsible for the welfare and well-being of their children. . . .If one dies or falls sick, they feel they have failed abysmally from performing their time honored role as mother, keeping their child alive at all costs.”

‘the tiniest lack of support or compassion expressed by intimate family members goes a long way toward engendering greater guilt and blame in the fragile mind of a suicide or drug death bereaved parent. (William Feigelman and Julie Cerel, Feelings of Blameworthiness and Their Associations With the Grieving Process in Suicide Mourning, National Library of Medicine, National Center for Biotechnology Information.)

For Parents Feeling Guilt

Questioning “Why Suicide”?

After Suicide: Feelings of shock, denial, guilt, anger, and depression are a normal part of grief. These feelings can be especially heightened when a child has died by suicide. The suicide of a child can raise painful questions, doubts and fears. You may question why your love was not enough to save your child and may fear that others will judge you to be an unfit parent. Both questions may raise strong feelings of failure.

The Compassionate Friends, “Surviving Your Child’s Suicide

The Stigma That Follows Suicide Loss

After Dylan’s death, the words spoken to me—and the silence—became part of my bereavement. Alongside our own questions, there are the judgments other people make about suicide.

The stigma surrounding a child’s death by suicide can cause feelings of shame to linger. Religious and community acceptance—or shunning—can make a difference, especially when addiction, alcohol, or substance abuse disorders are involved.

Losing a loved to suicide is one is one of life’s most painful experiences. The feelings of loss, sadness, and loneliness experienced after any death of a loved one are often magnified in suicide survivors by feelings of quilt, confusion, rejection, shame, anger, and the effects of stigma and trauma. [They] are at higher risk of developing major depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and suicidal behaviors, as well as a prolonged form of grief called complicated grief. Added to the burden is the substantial stigma, which can keep survivors away from much needed support and healing resources.

Ilanit Tal Young and colleagues, Suicide Bereavement and Complicated Grief, Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience, 2012.

The Words Spoken to Bereaved Parents

Words Matter

The passage that follows is from my writing on My Forever Son. While I had good support from close friends and family, I was unprepared for how some “acquaintances” and even my church spoke about Dylan’s death. I was stunned, devastated, had always had hope for my son, and in shock in the first few weeks. I was unfamiliar with suicide grief and bereavement, and in my vulnerable early grief and mourning, felt the impact of the words others’ spoke to me. Here is what was said:

“A parent’s worst nightmare,” “a selfish death,” “a sin in the eyes of the church,” “we don’t talk about suicide,” “this grief group does not welcome those bereaved by suicide. . .”

“Well at least you had him for 19 years,” “God will use your tragedy to make you stronger for others,” “It isn’t right,” “Everything happens for a reason…”

“I can’t be friends with you anymore,” “What happened to make him that way?” (implying, of course, that I somehow could have and should have prevented my son’s death), and worst of all, saying absolutely nothing.

Words that hurt beyond belief. Words that would not have been spoken had his death been by another means.

“It just isn’t right,” say some.

“Maybe it wasn’t suicide,” say others.

“Didn’t that happen a long time ago?” asks your friend.

“He wouldn’t want to see you so sad” says your community.

Beth Brown, Living in the Glare of Grief: A Mother’s Poetic Journey, My Forever Son

The questions about Dylan’s death cannot tell the whole story of the life we shared. He was my only child. My writing comes from that life and the love that will always be between us, even as I return to questions about guilt and stigma.

What to Say to Parents of Child Suicide Loss

Perhaps more than anything, say their child’s name. Offer your condolences, your sympathy. Send a card. And when there are no words, these words can be of comfort too. Simply, “there are no words.”

And in the long-term grief of parents who lose a child to suicide, remember to say their child’s name. Remember how significant and difficult birthdays, memorial dates, even holidays, are to them. Their child’s death is a death out of the natural order.

Be there just to listen to grieving parents, even if they tell their story over and over. They are trying to make sense of a senseless death. They are trying to find a reason to keep living forward when their entire world and sense of time and self have been shattered. This is a grief like no other. Your compassion speaks volumes.

Suicide Is Not a Choice

Suicide is not a desire to end life. It is a need to end pain. This is the single most important thing for you to remember about suicide. People who take their own life have been suffering — through no fault of their own — from a condition that amplifies and sustains emotional pain to a degree that makes life unbearable. Because of this, it’s inaccurate to even think of suicide as a “choice.”

In the words of Adina Wrobleski, in her book, Suicide: Why?, “Choice implies that a suicidal person can reasonably look at alternatives and select among them. If they could rationally choose, it would not be suicide. Suicide happens when… no other choices are seen.”

Jeffrey Jackson, Grief Handbook, American Association of Suicidology

The following excerpt is from “Don’t Say It’s Selfish: Suicide Is Not a Choice” at Nationwide Children’s Hospital.

Viewing suicide as a choice promotes the misunderstanding that people who engage in suicidal behavior are selfish. Selfishness has been defined by Merriam-Webster as “seeking or concentrating on one’s own advantage, pleasure, or well-being without regard for others.” Suicide does not generate pleasure, advantage or well-being. People who take their own lives commonly feel like a burden to others or experience intense emotional pain that overwhelms their capacity to continue with life. Making others feel guilty is typically the furthest thing from their mind.

John Ackerman, Don’t Say It’s Selfish: Suicide is Not a Choice, Nationwide Children’s Hospital

What I Carry After My Son’s Suicide

When I wrote eleven years after losing Dylan, I reflected on how much time had passed and how drastically my perspective had shifted since the early days of grief. Each year has brought its own challenges and changed the way I experience my loss. In “What Has Changed in 4 Years of Grieving the Loss of My Son to Suicide,” I wrote about how the shape of my grief had evolved. I continue to share these reflections with parents newly bereaved and those living with this loss years later.

Fourteen years after Dylan’s death, I can say that healing doesn’t mean grief ends. For me, healing means finding gratitude (again), hope that I will see my son again some day, and realizing the ache of my grief and the depth of my love are now what I carry.

Love and Ache

Dylan brought joy and purpose to my life. He was my only child. I carry the love that will always be between us alongside the ache of losing him to a sudden traumatic death. When I write about healing, I am writing about this life as Dylan’s mother.

In 2019, I began writing poems about the anguish of child loss, some of which are featured in My Forever Son. I write as a means to heal from the profound grief of losing Dylan. The poems express my experience of that grief.

Alongside writing poems, by 2022 I had begun composing songs. They reflect my sorrow and the healing power of music in my life after losing Dylan. More than a decade after his suicide, I carry both heartache and love; poetry and music are part of how I live with that grief.

Support and Resources

For parents who want someone to hear their questions, individual counseling or a suicide-loss support group may be places to begin. I have received compassion alongside some of the hardest words from people who do not understand this grief. The resources below are here whenever you want to read further.

• The Compassionate Friends: Surviving Your Child’s Suicide
• Alliance of Hope: To a Mom Who Blames Herself
• My Forever Son: Support, Resources, and Self-Care for Bereaved Parents

Companion Reads from My Forever Son

• After My Son’s Suicide: Living With Guilt and Questions
• Carrying Ache and Love: Healing Longterm Grief After Suicide Loss
• A Letter to Grieving Parents After the Suicide Loss of a Child
• After My Son’s Suicide: Notes From the Long Wilderness of Grief

About My Forever Son

My Forever Son began with grief journal entries I shared online in 2015, three years after Dylan’s death. My early blog posts capture the intense rawness of my sorrow. I have continued writing poems, blog posts, books, and songs as Dylan’s mother.

The photographs of flowers, shrubs, and trees in bloom throughout the seasons come from my gardens. Gardening, taking photographs, and writing poems, blog posts, books, and songs bring serenity to my now upside-down world after losing my son to suicide.

About the Author

I’m Beth Brown—Dylan’s mother, musician, and writer. My only child died by suicide in 2012. Since 2015, I’ve shared my writing on My Forever Son. Fourteen years after his death, I write about the love between us and the ache of losing him.

I am the author of Where a Mother’s Grief Resides: Poems of Child Loss and the Work of Living On, available on Amazon Kindle.