The Ripple Effect: When you hear someone else

has died after a battle with depression and mental illness

I have written before about the unique solidarity, and special empathy, that happens when you hear of a death by suicide, when you sit with the heavy reality, knowing that another person has been welcomed to this unfortunate sucky club of suicide survivorship.

It can be after someone famous, like Naomi Judd, dies. Or, it can be an acquaintance whose friend—that you don’t know and will never meet—has lost someone to suicide. Or, it can be a random person, a young college athlete who takes his/her/their own life, as we’ve seen in the news so much lately.

Any time this happens, however, I feel a tightening in my stomach, almost like I’ve been sucker-punched.

Because I know that they’re in an intense amount of pain and are in for a long road of grief and healing ahead of them. I know that the survivors are irrevocably changed, down to their soul. The rest of their lives are going to be different.

I cannot quite put into words just how much I ache for the survivors—the friends and family members, the colleagues and neighbors, who have started down this path of pain.

And lately, I have been thinking even more about the ripple effect of suicide pain.

The ripple or domino effect of everyone else, of who else is harmed and affected by suicide—those who are the partners of the survivors, those who enter into a new workplace or team or environment where others are grieving the loss of someone who completed suicide.

And I’m not just talking about the pain or shock or grief of the immediate news, but the long process, entering a new journey of phase which is “life after suicide.”

The statistics of the number of people who complete suicide each year, and how it is rising, is jarring. And those are just the ones who died at their own hand.

After this happens, we may think of their family members, if we’re compassionate, maybe their friends.

But do we ever think about ALL. THE. OTHER. FUCKING. PEOPLE. AFFECTED?

I don’t even think we can grasp just how many there are.

Because they are there. They are hurting too. They are left with many unanswered questions, pain, disbelief, grief and mourning, and quite honestly, existential questions as to how she/he/they could do that?

After my brother passed, I had a conversation with a man, someone from his congregation, who wanted to confirm his death and the reason why. But he also obviously needed to process it. At the time, I was in my own pain, and having an incredulous moment of—“Really, guy? You’re using ME to process this,” rather than being considerate of my own familial grief.

But now, after time and therapy and healing, I can think about his pain too. I sit with the other part of the story here, and it is this—

Suicide deeply impacts anyone who knew the one deceased, dead at their own hand.

We have such a hard time—no pun intended—getting our minds around the fact that anyone could choose to die, to complete suicide, to opt out and exit this life.

Perhaps this is because they don’t *really* know where they’re going. Despite faith and religious convictions, what is next could be just…nothingness. A complete cessation of existence. This obviously begs the question, then—

So, the person was in such an amount of pain that they chose THAT? Nothing? A complete erasure of themselves from existence?

That person must have been in a hell of a lot of pain. Or, completely out of their mind, not thinking straight at all. Or both.

And perhaps, most terrifying is this—if he/she/they could do it, could get to that darkest of dark points in life and mentally, could I?

That’s haunting. Some very dark, scary shit, indeed.

But one of the most important lessons that I have learned from mourning from complex grief is this—

It’s a messy, non-linear, recursive process. You don’t get over it. You move forward. with it. It takes time.

With suicide, it’s even more so. To me, you can’t even classify grief and grieving from suicide in the same way, it doesn’t belong in the same category of “normal grief” (whatever the fuck that is, the myth of it) over the loss of a loved one.

It’s so absurd that you could ‘get over’ a suicide that it’s downright laughable, regardless of who the person was that you knew. To think you could ever possibly move on from that. You don’t. Or you stop thinking about them. But if you think about it, it is still puzzling and painful for many, even mere acquaintances or strangers.

Myself—I have not even fully processed/recovered from my high school classmate’s dad’s suicide. It was the first one that I ever came to experience in a somewhat personal, though second-hand way. I was sixteen. I still think about it, and his shock and the way he looked, the way he carried that pain during the hours and funeral.

I sat with trying to understand how someone could do that to themselves, perhaps vaguely thinking about my aunt who had completed suicide, but whom I had never met…now, I think about it mostly in correspondence as my first experience, foreshadowing own suicide survival experience stories which would come much later. But the point is—that memory is poised in my mind, sharp. That memory. And I wasn’t even good friends with this boy. I had never met his father. That’s how sharp suicide sits with you in your brain and memory.

Suicides change us all, anyone even minorly touched by it.

And the ripples reach outward, affecting us all.

If you’re reading this, you probably know of someone(s) who have completed suicide. Or, you know me. Or you know many.

So, I too hold space here, and honor and recognize your pain, your grief from it as well. From the intense ripple effect.

Solidarity, friends.

<3