Grief After the Suicide Loss of a Child: Honest Help for Bereaved Parents

Grief After the Suicide Loss of a Child: Honest Help for Bereaved Parents

Some losses are not meant to be mastered. They are carried, day by day, with love, truth, and the courage to keep living.

My Forever Son

Table of Contents

Introduction: Grief After the Suicide Loss of a Child

“What if we never ‘get over’ certain deaths, or our childhoods? What if the idea that we should have by now, or will, is a great palace lie? What if we’re not supposed to? What if it takes a life time…?”

Anne Lamott

This piece began years ago as a simple overview of grief. I return to it now knowing that grief, especially after the suicide loss of a child, refuses tidy instruction. It changes shape. It deepens and widens. It teaches us, against our will, what it means to keep loving someone we can no longer hold. If you are a bereaved parent, I hope these words meet you with honesty, companionship, and a few steadying truths. If you love a grieving parent, I hope they help you understand that this sorrow is not something to fix, but something to witness with tenderness, humility, and staying power.

“It isn’t true that you have to get over it. It isn’t even true that you have to want to. No one else can understand what you have lost. No one else can bear the burden of your tribute to a love, to a life, to an identity now gone….Something happens when you entwine your fate with someone else’s. If they go somewhere you cannot follow, part of you goes with them….

Mandy Stewards

Ways Grief May Find Expression

“Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak knits up the o-er wrought heart and bids it break.”

William Shakespeare

People often search for ways to express grief as if there might be a correct method, a proven sequence, a map that will lead them out. But grief after the suicide loss of a child is not a problem to solve. It is a life to be lived in altered form. Expression matters not because it cures grief, but because it gives sorrow somewhere to go. Words, music, prayer, movement, tears, silence, ritual, memory—each can become a vessel for love when the heart is carrying more than it knows how to bear.

Grief does not ask us to perform healing on command. It asks us to tell the truth.

Writing and Creative Expression

Write what hurts, remember what was beautiful. Keep a journal, write letters to your child, record fragments of memory, or simply write one honest sentence at a time. Language can hold what the body cannot always carry alone.

Make something with your hands. Draw, paint, scribble, sculpt, sketch, or color if words fail you. Creative work does not have to be good to be true; it only has to give grief a place to land.

Sometimes the body speaks the grief the mouth cannot name.

Music, Movement, and Sound

Let music and movement carry what words cannot. Play music, listen to a song that reaches your sorrow, write lyrics, move your body, or sit still and let a melody accompany you. Some days grief needs language; other days it needs rhythm, breath, and sound.

When the inner world is shattered, borrowed wisdom can be a shelter.

Books, Poetry, and Companionship for the Road

Faith does not erase grief; at its best, it gives us somewhere to lay it down.

No book can remove this pain, but the right words can make a grieving parent feel less alone. Reading the testimony of others, whether in poetry, memoir, prayer, or practical guidance, can offer language, recognition, and sometimes a little light.

Read

Books on Grieving, Healing, and Hope

Poetry

Search for Support Groups

Prayer, Silence, and Spiritual Practice

Pray if you can. Sit in silence if you cannot. Prayer, meditation, scripture, devotions, and quiet presence can all become forms of grief work. Faith may feel steady, shattered, or somewhere in between. All of it belongs.

Tears, anger, exhaustion, numbness, and even brief laughter all belong to grief’s weather.

Emotional Expression and Human Connection

Let grief be witnessed. Talk out loud. Speak to a trusted friend, a therapist, your spouse, your journal, your child, or God. Walk. Cry. Sit in the car and say the unsayable. Expression is not weakness; it is one way love continues.

Let the tears fall

Alongside the work of expression, grieving parents must also contend with the unkind and untrue messages the world repeats about sorrow. Some are spoken aloud. Others arrive as pressure, silence, or judgment. Naming these myths matters, because false expectations can deepen suffering that is already hard enough to bear.

This is also part of a larger task many bereaved parents know too well: resisting the stigma and false narratives that often surround suicide loss. Grief after suicide is complicated not only by sorrow, but by silence, misunderstanding, and the pressure to explain what can never be fully explained. That is why breaking the myths of grief and the stigma of suicide matters. It makes room for truth, compassion, and a more honest language for the lives we continue to love.

What Grief Is Not: Common Myths That Wound the Bereaved

• MYTH: Crying is a sign of weakness.
• MYTH: When your faith is strong, you don’t grieve.
• MYTH: If you are strong, you should be able to get through a devastating loss without showing emotion.
• MYTH: You will be able to get pretty much back to normal after 2 or 3 months.
• MYTH: Expressing intense feelings means you are losing control of yourself.
• MYTH: Grief gets easier as you get older.
• MYTH: Getting angry at God or asking God difficult questions means you have a weak faith.
• MYTH: You can tell how much a person loved the one who died by how deeply and long the person grieves the loss.
• MYTH: Losing an infant doesn’t hurt because parents didn’t have time to know the child.
• MYTH: Resolving your grief means putting your loved one out of your mind and moving on with your life.
• MYTH: A strong person should be able to deal with grief alone.
• MYTH: Christians shouldn’t grieve if they know their loved one is in heaven. They should feel only joy.
• MYTH: It’s better to deal with grief intellectually than emotionally.
• MYTH: Only immediate family members will experience significant grief.
• MYTH: Continuing to talk about the person who died only makes the pain last longer.
• MYTH: Grief proceeds through predictable and orderly stages.
• MYTH: After a loved one has died, you can never be happy again.

“Grief is difficult enough without letting yourself be pressured by unrealistic expectation or by guilt-producing misconceptions. So if you hear any of these myths, don’t believe them. They simply aren’t true.”

Kenneth C. Haugk, A Time to Grieve: Journeying through Grief

Excerpts from “5 Lies You Were Told About Grief”

The Lie: You should be over it/him/her by now.
The Truth: No one has the authority to tell you how you should feel, when you should feel it or for how long.

Do you hear me? There is no normal when it comes to grief. There is no quantifiable estimate of how much value who and what you have lost has added to your life or for how long you should be sad about that loss. You are not a machine. Numbers: days, weeks, months, years are meaningless.

The Lie: You should stop talking about him or her / Stop living in the past.
The Truth: The only people who cannot bear to hear you speak of your beloved are those who cannot accept their own mortality.

They are people who have never grieved. They either don’t know loss, or they buried themselves with their loved ones. Trust me when I tell you, they have their own mountains yet to climb.
Those who would have you silence yourself, choke on the words that you must speak, are people who do not know their own souls.

The Lie: You have to move on with your life (right now).
The Truth: This advice is an act of violence against a grieving heart.

It is a kick in the ribs while you lie hopelessly seized by despair. Whatever it is your loved one would want, it is unlikely that he or she would want an avalanche of guilt entombing you with your grief. You have enough to climb out of, enough rebuilding to do.

The Lie: You could have prevented this tragedy.
The Truth: If your loved one passed in a sudden or unexpected way, somewhere inside you is a voice asking what you might have done differently that would have changed the course of events that led to the death of your beloved lost.

The truth is that the factors that influence the course of our lives are bigger and more mysterious than what we did and did not do. To hold yourself accountable for any reason is to deny the greater context in which life happens, and that is a dangerous choice to make, because it will eat a hole in your spirit that you can never fill….

The Lie: Time heals all wounds.
The Truth: The truth is there are losses you never get over.

They break you to pieces and you can never go back to the original shape you once were, and so you will grieve your own death with that of your beloved lost.

Your grief is your love, turned inside-out. That is why it is so deep. That is why it is so consuming. When your sadness seems bottomless, it is because your love knows no bounds.

Mandy Steward, 5 Lies You Were Told about Grief

Living Forward Without Leaving Love Behind

If you are grieving the suicide loss of your child, you do not need to become someone untouched by sorrow in order to live meaningfully again. Over time, many bereaved parents discover that healing is not the same as leaving their child behind. It is learning, slowly and imperfectly, to build a life spacious enough for both love and loss. Hope, when it comes, may not arrive as brightness. It may arrive as endurance, tenderness, or the quiet strength to keep speaking your child’s name, to keep loving deeply, and to keep making a life around an absence that still matters every day.

Journaling Prompts for Grieving Parents

If writing helps you make room for grief, you might begin here. These prompts are not homework and they are not meant to push you where you are not ready to go. They are simply invitations for honesty, remembrance, and gentleness.

• What do I miss most about my child today?
• What is one memory I want to keep close, even when it hurts?
• What am I carrying right now that feels too heavy to say out loud?
• Where have I felt tenderness, steadiness, or help in the middle of this grief?
• What do I wish others understood about grieving the suicide loss of a child?

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Related Reads from My Forever Son

If you would like companion reading after this essay, begin with the two pillar resources below. From there, move into support for the earliest days, practical guidance for family and friends, and additional hope-and-healing resources from My Forever Son.

• If You Just Lost Your Child
• Compassionate Resources for Grieving Parents
• Healing After Losing a Child to Suicide: Support, Resources, and Self-Care for Bereaved Parents
• Healing from Child Loss: Support for Suicide Grief
• Finding Solace After Losing a Child to Suicide: Build a Life of Love Around the Loss
• What to Say to Parents Who Lose a Child to Suicide
• Breaking the Stigma: Facts About Suicide and Compassion

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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.

Beth Brown is the writer behind My Forever Son, where she writes about grief and healing, hope and resilience after the suicide loss of her son. Writing from the long landscape of lived bereavement and enduring love, she offers compassionate resources for grieving parents and for those who want to support them with greater tenderness and understanding.

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Related Reads

• Understanding Suicide: Why the Pain Matters
• Breaking the Stigma: Facts About Suicide and Compassion
• How to Survive the First Year of Grief After Losing a Child to Suicide
• What to Say to Parents Who Lose a Child to Suicide
• Understanding Grief: 3 Years After Losing a Child to Suicide

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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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