Closing the Gap...

Fear. That was probably my over-riding emotion after Dom took his life.

Fear that I wouldn’t be able to survive this. Fear that if I did, I would be so scarred that I would never be able to be happy again. Fear that our family would fall apart under the weight of our collective trauma.

Fear coursed through me, every minute of every waking hour (and there were plenty of those, because, unsurprisingly given my adrenaline levels, sleeping for any length of time proved impossible.)

But what I hadn’t reckoned on was that what had happened, to me and to our family, was most likely creating a lot of anxiety for those surrounding us.

Because, whilst those other people weren’t living the nightmare, they were witnesses to me doing just that. And however much they wanted to support me, this was also new territory for them. The stakes were high, so I imagine that they feared getting it wrong. And making things even worse.

Two years ago, I started writing a book about this which I called ‘Closing the Gap.’ It’s still on the backburner. My intention, then, was to create a resource for those who wanted to know how best to support a parent who had lost their child to suicide. My idea was that the onus wouldn’t need to be on the survivor to explain what they needed, and their friend would feel more confident in knowing how they could help.

Why ‘Closing the Gap?’ Well, this is an extract lifted from the introduction to my book which best explains the title.

Not so long ago, huge stigma existed around suicide, and this must have led to a great divide. Suicide loss survivors, feeling they must hide the nature of the death for fear of judgement, were unable to speak of their pain, their ‘shame’ leaving them feeling excluded from society. Meanwhile, onlookers remained on the ‘other’ side, encouraged to view the suicide as ‘sinful’ rather than the consequence of mental unwellness. This was brutal for the isolated families. Neither did the veil of silence around mental health challenges promote understanding or compassion for sufferers.

Fortunately, in the main, we have become a kinder and more educated society. We have learnt that psychological desperation lies behind someone reaching the point of taking their lives and feel enormous pity for the family members struggling to pick up their lives again after such profound loss.

But I maintain that the divide still exists because, extroverted though I am in social settings, since losing Dom I have experienced the deep unease of others when I reference him and been left feeling terribly alone. The room can go quiet and the fear behind this silence is tangible. Clearly other people are scared, unsure of how to react and so choose not to speak in case they say the ‘wrong’ thing.

This is a huge secondary loss, all-too familiar to parents whose child has died by suicide. And this reaction from friends and family causes us to feel ‘othered.’ On top of the terrible grief of losing our child, we can end up believing we no longer have a place in ‘normal’ society.

And what of the onlookers, those on the other side of this divide, those who care (and my experience is that so many do) and yet who have no idea how to help?

Many can see, first-hand, how impacted we are, and, especially in the early days, may worry that this loss will change us forever. They may well feel distressed that they have ‘lost’ us now and don’t know how to reach out to bring us back. And so, tragically, this discomfort causes varying degrees of unhappiness for us all.

‘Closing the Gap’ was really a self-help book, and I concluded the introduction by stating my aim:

To lessen the divide between grievers and their family and friends and so maintain vital and long-standing connections, proving that, despite this horrific experience, we really do all still ‘belong’ to each other… so that together, we can do the work of ‘Closing the Gap.’

In the 3^rd year after losing Dom, I decided to change tack and work on a memoir and so ‘Walking with My Son’ was born. But ‘Closing the Gap’ is very pertinent to this post and so I’d like to lift some more extracts from it, this time when I spoke directly to those who would like to know how best to support someone who has lost a child to suicide.

I know it’s a horrific thing to contemplate losing a child (whatever the circumstances, and these ones are truly awful.) A child dying is every parent’s nightmare, but, for your friend it’s their reality, and one with which they’re living every minute, and every hour of every day.

And they’re nowhere near being ‘used’ to it yet. They’re a long way from reaching a state of ‘normal’ mourning, in fact that could be many years down the line. What they have reached is a state of CRISIS.

Crisis is the point at which it feels as if everything has fallen apart, because losing their child has up-ended their world. The equivalent of an emotional earthquake has just erupted, and even if they’ve managed to avoid being totally engulfed by it, they are still sitting in the wreckage only just a few feet away from burning embers.

If this sounds dramatic, that’s intentional. None of this is normal, which means that so many of the ‘usual’ responses to a death won’t work.

Elaborating on this metaphor, I continued.

Imagine instead of aid workers bringing food and shelter to the victims of the earthquake I just mentioned, they brought them large bouquets of flowers. And that while those traumatized people sat gazing into space, instead of letting them recount and process the shock of what had just happened, the aid workers advised them that everything would get easier if they just tried to remember the good times in their lives.

I know, it’s laughable. But I wanted to depict the ridiculousness of this response.

The reality is that losing a child, and to suicide, is not normal and so the ‘normal’ things usually done for the griever don’t really help. Yes, the flowers tell your friend they are loved and sympathy cards that they are being thought about, but it does nothing to help them process this terrible loss.

I went on to give advice on the best things to say in the condolence cards (because there’s nothing like the death of a child to bring a daily deluge of these coming through the letter box.)

The conventional ‘hold onto your memories’ doesn’t really work for the grieving parent I’m afraid. It just reinforces that their living, breathing child is now in the past, something they know all too well. And the nature of having lost their child to suicide means that they’re most likely haunted by memories right now, because looking back to the past means further subjecting themselves to the torture of wondering what went wrong and what they missed.

But you telling your friend about all the wonderful memories you have of their child, what they meant to you, how they positively contributed to your life, that does mean a lot. That their child lived fully, that they mattered, that you are so very sad that they have gone from your world too. This helps more than you can possibly know. Even if it's just a small memory, or something good that you’ve heard second hand, it will be meaningful to the parent.

I went on to detail what is particularly unhelpful, namely comparing this grief with anything that they (or anyone else) have gone through.

Remember that there are two difficult and intertwined aspects to this grief, because it’s both TRAUMATIC and COMPLICATED. Your attempting to ‘normalise’ it, will have the effect of making the parent feel less (rather than more) understood. Better to say that, although you cannot know how this feels, you do recognize that this is really tough for them, and that you want to help in any way you can.

I followed with detailing two other things to avoid saying, firstly:

‘You’re strong, I know you’ll cope’ is just what you’re hoping, and you don’t know this at all. Expressions like this actually serve to diminish the enormity of what they’re facing. Similarly, try to avoid implying this is something to be overcome; they did not ask for a challenge, they just want their child not to be dead.

And secondly:

In your efforts to comfort your friend you may find yourself suggesting their child is ‘at peace’ or ‘in a better place,’ but, even if they have religious belief, this is unlikely to be welcomed. The bottom line is that the only place they want them to be is here, and parents will probably feel these words just serve to sanitise their loss. In all you say, remember that you would not want your child to be dead, because this will be your best guide.

I then gave advice on what practical things friends could do, but for the purpose of this post I’m going to skip these and go into the more gritty ‘difficult conversations’ that a friend may find themselves having, explaining that what I most wanted after Dom took his life was the opportunity to talk about my loss.

And this is where it gets really scary, because if you truly want to be there for your friend you will need to make yourself one hundred percent available to hearing the difficult stuff. It won’t be pretty and seeing them in such pain as they begin to process the enormity of their loss, knowing that you can do nothing to ease it, will be incredibly tough for you too.

Parents who have lost their child to suicide are struggling with the most complex emotions. Loss is of course central to them but, I cannot stress this enough, this is no ordinary loss.

It doesn’t matter if they knew their child had suicidal thoughts or not, they will now be in a state of massive shock, trying to process what has just happened. This is likely to involve them going over (and over, and over) the details of how their child died. It’s no use telling them to stop putting themselves through this torment, to stop talking about it. That’s literally ALL they can think about and this will be the case until they’ve processed it and guess what, the way they process it is by talking about it.

I included a trigger warning too:

Try to manage your own reactions to suicide privately so you can treat this for what it is (that their child died from an illness.) Yes, it’s horrific to contemplate how they died but try to remain focused on imagining how it feels to LOSE a child, rather than the manner of their death.

Knowing first-hand how much a parent can be hi-jacked by guilt after their child dies, I attempted to describe how this looks:

You need to be aware that your friend will be struggling with massive guilt that they didn’t see or stop the suicide happening. You will probably not understand why this is, and it will be very painful watching your friend blaming themselves in this way. Your job is to carefully judge when the time is right to gently remind them that they have always been a good parent and that, from where you are standing, they are not responsible for their child dying.

I know it’s hard but please wait until they have told their story and detailed all the ways in which they believe they are culpable, before you offer your ‘alternative’ perspective. It’s going to take a lot of time and work on their behalf before they can put down this stick, and thinking you have the power right now to instantly dissuade them is massively under-estimating how wired a parent is in believing it is their job to protect their child, whatever the circumstances.

And, most importantly, I stressed the importance of not downplaying this loss:

Don’t in any way imply that they will eventually get over losing their child; unless you have lost a child yourself (and no longer miss them, which I very much doubt) you are simply not in a position to suggest this. I know that you will mean well, you are trying to tell your friend that it will get easier as time goes on, that they won’t be in this sort of pain for ever. But the truth is that thinking of how their child died will ALWAYS be painful, and if you appear to be suggesting otherwise, your friend will conclude that you don’t get the depths of their despair.

I ended by speaking directly to the complexity of supporting the parent:

It’s both simple, and terribly difficult. Simple, because you don’t have to ‘fix’ anything, terribly difficult, because you can’t. All you can do is listen, and ask questions designed to help your friend have greater clarity if they are struggling to express their feelings. Your job isn’t to cheer them up, to jolly them along. Like the women in countries where there is collective wailing after child-loss, what the grieving parent needs is to feel that THEY ARE NOT ALONE.

And that is the whole point. Your job is to help your friend feel less isolated. It is one thing choosing to spend time alone, and, in time, your friend will discover that finding private time for reflection is an important grieving tool. But in my experience, at the start, too much time alone allowed my hi-jacked brain to turn on me, encouraging me to blame myself for failing to stop, and thereby causing, Dom’s death.

What we need our friends to do is to step up to the plate, to be witness to the terrible pain we feel, to remind us that we are loved and most importantly, that we are good. In doing this they perform the ultimate act of friendship, surrounding us with non-judgmental kindness when we most need it, hoping, eventually, that we can give this to ourselves.

This has turned out to be a long post so thank you if you’ve made it to the end. It’s been interesting for me, revisiting that book, and witnessing how passionately I felt about other people understanding what parents losing a child to suicide are going through. And yet, now, I do find myself wondering if I was being unrealistic back then, expecting others to really get it?

And that will be the subject of my next post…

.