The Slow Onward March of “Why Suicide, Why? ”: A Mother’s Reflections on Losing Her Son

The Slow Onward March of “Why Suicide, Why? ”: A Mother’s Reflections on Losing Her Son

Seasonal Grief After Suicide Loss: Spring & Summer Risk, Longing, and Understanding

Introduction

Note: The Slow Onward March of “Why Suicide,Why?”: A Mother’s Reflections on Losing Her Son was written from early grief, and I’m revisiting it now as part of My Forever Son—a place for parents (and those who love them) who are trying to understand suicide with compassion, clarity, and no blame.

Seasonal grief after suicide loss can feel like walking through spring light with a winter heart. In this reflective piece, I look back on losing my son and the way certain months—especially spring and summer—can collide with longing, memory, and questions that won’t let go. You’ll also find gentle, practical pathways here: myths we need to release, support for grieving parents and those who love them, and poems for the days when prose is too heavy.

Seasonal Grief: Understanding Suicide

This page is my Seasonal Grief hub within Understanding Suicide on My Forever Son. It’s for the collision of two truths: (1) many studies show suicide can rise in spring and early summer, and (2) after you lose a child, seasons don’t behave like they used to. Here, I hold both the research and the lived ache—without blame, without simplification.

• Why suicides can spike in spring and summer: what the research suggests (and what it doesn’t)
• Navigating Grief on Memorial Dates: A Personal Journey: anniversaries, birthdays, spring blossoms, summer sun, and the body’s remembering
• Breaking the Stigma: Facts About Suicide and Compassion: Myths to let go of: stigma, oversimplified narratives, and the harm of blame
• Understanding Suicide: Why the Pain Matters (bigger picture): pain, illness, overwhelm—and the compassionate truths
• What to Say to Parents Who Lose a Child to Suicide: what helps grieving parents, and what to say when you don’t know what to say

Understanding Suicide

• Understanding Suicide: Grief and Healing Insights
• Is Suicide Really a Choice? Breaking the Stigma
• Understanding Suicide: It’s Not a Choice
• Understanding the Unique Aspects of Suicide Grief
• Understanding the Pain of Suicide Loss

The Slow Onward March of “Why Suicide, Why?”

A mother’s reflections on losing her son to suicide

A mother’s lyrical essay on suicide loss—how seasons and anniversaries return with force, and how love keeps reaching for a son who is gone, still asking why.

“Why Suicide — Why? A Mother’s Reflections on Losing Her Son”

Note from the author, Beth Brown:

I wrote the post you’re about to read in 2017, in the early raw season after my son died—when time still felt unfamiliar, and I could only describe what was happening to me from the inside of it. If you’ve found your way here because you’re newly bereaved, I want you to know I remember that terrain. I remember how a single hour could stretch and splinter, how ordinary tasks could feel impossible, how support—well-meant and sincere—could still leave me alone with what I carried.

As I write this note now, I’m approaching fourteen years since I lost Dylan (June 2026). My grief has not “resolved,” but it has changed shape. It has widened—making room for tenderness, for steadier breath, for meaning that doesn’t erase what happened. Over time, My Forever Son has become a record of that longer journey: the ache, the love, the questions that don’t tidy up, and the ways a parent can keep living while still missing a child.

If you’d like to read where my writing (and my heart) has traveled since that earlier post, I invite you to continue with Echoes of Joy & Shadows of Loss: A Grief Journey” and the “White Peonies in Bloom: A Devotional for Grieving Parents.” Those pieces hold more of what I have learned—slowly, honestly—about carrying a forever love. Thank you for being here.

Why Suicide — Why? A Mother’s Reflections on Losing Her Son

Dylan Andrew Brown, age 18
Forever my beloved son
March 19, 1992 – June 25, 2012

The beat of my heart shaped by you.
The song of you which still now I sing.
And yet perhaps you could not hear—
above the deafening roar of your heart’s ache.

I drove home last night past the high school. Dylan’s high school.

Ghost memories swirl everywhere.

Playing alto sax and marching proudly with the high school band—countless football games—me waiting, watching for him at halftime as the band criss-crossed the field and formed a striking image.

Watching him come of age—shy away from girls, then, tentatively, furtively, steal glances.

Ghost visions of my car being parked outside the high school every afternoon for two solid years of high school—my waiting, listening for the bell, watching students stream from all the main doors and flow out into their worlds.

My world was waiting for Dylan to see me, then pretend and feign coolness in an effort not to let me know he was acknowledging seeing me (how embarrassing to be a high school junior and still be having your mom drive you home from school).

I loved watching him swing up and off his shoulder his heavy backpack, sling it into the backseat, then slide into the comfortable familiarity of the Toyota Solara he’d grown up in.

Shadow memories.

Registering him for classes freshman year. Pain in the waking of memories. How confident and happy he was in 8th grade, and so sadly, how dark and miserable he became his freshman year of high school.

Haunting memories.

His high school had been my high school too. I had moved from Los Angeles back to Ohio, my stomping grounds, all to be close to family who, in the end, all moved away. A choice—my choice—to bring my child of age all against the back-brush of my hometown community, never knowing that this community would swallow him whole.

My life now. Painful if I stay here—travel into what used to be such beautiful and rich and “normal” memories. Now it all haunts: my hometown. Schools. Restaurants. Movie theaters. Main Street.

Half the time, I’m not even sure my life is real. I swirl in a surreal haze—swipe of wash across my line of vision—blurred, disconnected, so long ago and yet so much here that I am both consumed and confused.

I continue to wake up surprised that I am still here and live much of my day pretending around the fact that my child—my son, my heart, my soul, my joy, my love, myself—all of who I am, died by suicide on June 25, 2012.

I have my B.S. life: Before Suicide.
I have my P.S. life: Post Suicide.

And I inherently inhabit neither the past nor the present. I live in the interim.

It is enough to breathe. To catch my breath. To exhale this pain.

My post-apocalyptic world—shattered, barren, smoking, dead—devoid of any significant meaning.

I wander still, three years, eight months after Dylan’s death—so much more capable in so many ways of faking it, of masking—typically, so much pain, so many-folded layers of grappling with suicide and death and losing my child.

And yet still, inside—in my heart, in my Dylan-sized hole which is, in truth, all of me—I falter, lose my way; fall, shatter, and break all over again—sometimes predictably, but so oftentimes, not predictably at all.

It is enough to breathe. To catch my breath. To exhale this pain.

The slow onward march

Next month is Dylan’s birthday. March 19, 1992. I’ve known about this for awhile because my insides won’t let me rest.

I can feel it in my gut. The slow onward march. Relentless. Pursuing. Steady on into this season of his death.

March 19, 2012, Dylan turned 20 years old. Promise. Hope. Difficulties, but always hope. Fear. Two previous suicide attempts. Staying with my sister and her family. Trying to get his life on the right track. A job at a local electronics store.

But elusive—his will to live, his wanting to stay, his wishing for stars and galaxies and peace and silence, and on a Facebook post: “just waiting to be struck by lightning.”

Failed attempts at relationships, pulling away from his childhood friends, his running buddies—those who really knew him.

A hellish suicide attempt after getting paid for his first week of work at the electronics store, all because why?

Why?

—to where screaming only shatters and only deafness makes sense.

Why?

—to which an ocean’s deafening roar silences.

Again, only deafness makes sense. And yet still the why haunts my all.

Why, oh dear child, why?

At what moment did you stop believing things could change, get better, cycle beyond the ache of what is into the promise of what will be?

And why, dear child, did you not hear my love?

The beat of my heart shaped by you.
The song of you which still now I sing.
And yet perhaps you could not hear—
above the deafening roar of your heart’s ache.

Fourteen Years Later (2026)

Reading these words again, I can feel how close the pain was to the surface when I wrote them. That version of me was living moment to moment, trying to name the un-namable. As I write now—nearing fourteen years since Dylan died (June 2026)—I’m no longer in that same acute storm, but I am still his mother. The love remains; the absence remains. What has changed is my capacity to carry both without disappearing inside the question.

I still have “why” days. But over the years, the question has become less of a locked door and more of a room I can enter without being leveled. I can hold what I’ll never fully understand alongside what I do know: depression is an illness, suicide is complicated, and love is not made small by what we could not prevent.

If you’re here in early grief, please move gently with yourself. And if you’d like to read where my writing and understanding have grown since 2017, you can continue with “Echoes of Joy & Shadows of Loss: A Grief Journey” and “White Peonies in Bloom: A Devotional for Grieving Parents.” Those later reflections are quieter, steadier—made from the same love, lived longer.

Find This Post Also Published On Medium.com: “Why Suicide—Why? A Mother’s Reflections on Losing Her Son*

That Peace Might Find Us All–

Beth

If you or someone you love is in immediate danger or thinking about self-harm, please contact local emergency services. In the U.S., you can call or text 988 (Suicide & Crisis Lifeline) or visit 988lifeline.org.

Dylan Andrew Brown, 3/19/92–6/25/12. My Forever Son

The beat of my heart shaped by you.
The song of you which still now I sing.
And yet perhaps you could not hear Above the deafening roar of your heart’s ache.

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About the Author

Beth Brown is Dylan’s mom, writing from the after—where love keeps breathing even when a child is gone. On My Forever Son, she writes the truth of suicide loss: the seasons that ambush, the ordinary places that turn haunted, and the fierce, enduring bond between mother and son.

She writes to remember Dylan, and to offer companionship to other parents living inside the unanswerable.

Here, she writes grief as it actually lives—shadowed and luminous—through suicide loss, seasonal returning, and the tender, relentless work of remembering.

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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 Hope, Healing, and Resilience in Nature
• Understanding Grief: 3 Years After Losing a Child to Suicide
• My Forever Son, My Beloved Dylan: Summer, Forever Summer
• Why Suicides Spike in Spring and Summer
• Finding Hope in Nature’s Resilience Through Spring Flowers

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