Omens and Regrets

Dealing with the Survivor's Guilt

Joan Didion wrote:

“Survivors look back and see omens, messages they missed.

They remember the tree that died, the gull that splattered onto the hood of the car.

They live by symbols…”

I think many of us do this after the death of a loved one, looking back, wondering if there were signs, if we could have or should have known. Did we miss something? Was there obvious foretelling?

With suicides, there is extra compounded regret and inevitable guilt.

In my experience, some of it is survivors’ guilt. Why am I still here? If I were to die, I would not leave behind a devastated three year old daughter.

At the end, my brother vacillated between uncontrollable, volatile anger in his depressive final stage, and inconsolable anguish, prone to burst out in tears. And, at other points, almost manic highs with laughter and obnoxious jokes and inappropriate stories and oversharing. He was clearly very mentally unstable.

Though he was deeply angry, I think now it was a cover up; he was more so in unbearable pain and anguish, and he didn’t know how to address it, or couldn’t deal with it. So, instead, he would lash out, to my mother, to me.

After my mother passed in January of 2020, but a few weeks before he completed suicide on February 16, 2020, he—once again, he did this to me a lot—cut me off. It was after a misunderstanding/miscommunication between us (which was common, we never got along well at all. We were so different and often times were like oil and water).

I got frustrated with his impatience, the awkwardness, the miscommunication of what we were discussing. My phone battery was low. I sighed. I put the phone away.

Later, I came back to expletives, swearing at me, insults riff with typos. All the while outpouring his pain.

My thought was, what. the. hell. just. happened? And then, oh. my. God. This is crazy overreactive. He is not okay. He is explosive. I couldn’t believe that it took that little for him to go off the handle?

After that he sent me a long dramatic farewell e-mail—again, not something he hadn’t done before, cutting me off and out of his life. I responded.

I had to reread this e-mail, after his death, worried that I may have been unkind. But I was not. In it I voiced a deep concern for him and his mental state. I urged him to get some help, because with our mother’s life insurance money, he had some resources now to do so. I said though that I did not deserve to be abused and maybe not talking was for the best. But I urged him to get help. Several times in the e-mail.

That was the last correspondence we ever exchanged.

So, when I think about this now, and I wonder about the signs now, if there was any foreshadowing. I think about Jeremie’s final days….his last meal. His last thoughts.

Of course, an inevitable part of this journey of grief and trying to heal, or at least to learn to cope, is to handle the guilt. The survivor’s guilt. That feeling that I ought to have checked in on him more. I knew he was weak(er).

The truth is I intentionally retreated from Jeremie after my mom died to protect my own mental health and heart. He was fragile, desperate for help and support, but often times, the next moment, he would shift entirely to be incredibly abusive and volatile. I wasn’t in a good place myself. My mother and I were very close and I had experienced other losses recently. I was trying to self-protect.

Part of my guilt—of course—is wondering if I had done just one thing differently, if I had reached out, invited him to visit me in Charlotte, if he would have…if he would still be around today.

I know such mind circles are fruitless and never-ending. They won’t bring him back. They’ll only drive me crazy and make me feel terribly.

And, then I think, as I learned through my mother’s situation, you really can’t force someone to get help and to change. Ultimately, we are all responsible for ourselves and our own actions, to reach out for help when we need it. And often times, when people want to, when they make up their mind to do the act of completing suicide, they will. They will find a way.

Or, maybe not. Not always. Maybe this is just the story I tell myself to feel better.

But I do know this—I refuse to carry that baggage. I cannot.

Like Joan Didion, I too look back, consider the signs of foreshadowing, but eventually, we have got to let them go.

Eventually—

“I also know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us.

I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead.

Let them become the photograph on the table. Let them become the name on the… accounts.

Let go of them in the water.”

~Jan Didion