Five things I learnt from my Dad's suicide

September 10th, every year, is World Suicide Prevention Day. An awareness day to encourage people globally to commit to action to help prevent suicides.

In my world, it’s suicide awareness day, every day.

My maternal Grandad took his own life on July 11th, 1966. I sadly never knew him.

My Dad took his life on July 18th, 2016. I miss him every day.

And I am truly grateful that the accessibility to guns in the UK isn’t as easy as it is in other countries. As I know, in the impulsivity of my error-riddled youth and during periods of my own desperate and dizzying depression, I would have taken my own life. I once wrote my suicide note, but when it came to the act – I couldn’t do it. Despite the horror, I felt I was living and the fear hanging over me; I couldn’t. I feared failing. I didn't want to get it wrong. Had there been a gun in the house, then I would have chosen its ease and speed to commit the act without fail.

Exactly fifty years separate my Mother losing her father and then her husband to the same fate, and deep in my heart, I think she knows how close she has come to losing her son in the same way. She read my letter, after all.

In the five years since we lost my Dad, my Mum and I have learnt a lot about suicide. Yes, like most people, we now know all the facts: the gender and social demographics of the people most likely to take their own lives, the times of the year it is most common, and the frequently cited reasons for the act. I think a lot of people are aware of such statistics nowadays.

Nevertheless, what we also have, is the lived experience of being bereaved by suicide. The reality that exists from having to live under suicide’s shadow, so to speak. We’ve learnt a lot about ourselves, about others, and the two men lost.

These are the five lessons I have learnt from the suicide of my Dad, and I hope that they can help others as they have me.

Lesson 1 – Suicide is a tsunami of Emotion

Suicide is a tsunami that rips through a house, a home, a family, and friendships, seemingly destroying everything in its path. In the same way, there might be warning signs a tsunami is coming; they often arrive too late. Just as you see the ocean tide being pulled back, you are smashed by the full weight and power of the water.

My Dad had been physically ill for over ten years, and his mental health had rapidly deteriorated in the months leading up to his suicide. There were signs, perhaps, but we still never saw it coming.

When it did flood us, we could never have been prepared for the wave of emotion that came. Suicide shocks people. People don’t know what to say or what to do. Like, they really don’t know what to say or do. Offering condolences is difficult for any death, but with suicide, people often find themselves truly lost for the words. The usual pleasantries can at best sound hollow and, at worst, truly cruel and insensitive.

Suicide is the black swan of deaths. As the bereaved, you can’t plan for it. It doesn't have the impending inevitability of say long-suffering cancer. And of course, there are other sudden horrible and heinous ways others can die without warning: road accidents, murder, freaks of nature but with each of those their might still be something or someone you, as the bereaved, can blame or point fingers at in the hope that it might provide relief or explanation. Even the most staunch atheist can throw shade on God in death. But with suicide, you simply can not do that. If you start pointing fingers after suicide first, you must point them at the loved one lost, which you can't comprehend, and then you too frequently find yourself jabbing the finger in your own chest.

In the immediate aftermath of my Dad’s death, I didn’t have time to truly take into account and process what had happened. For the four weeks between his death and funeral, I played many roles, but I still feel the most dominant was as councillor.

Every person who came to pay their condolences to my Mum and I released their shock, confusion, and sadness onto us. We watched others’ emotions cascade out of them as they tried to wrestle with the what and the why of the suicide. Thankfully, most didn’t ask about the how. In truth, that isn’t ever important.

It was a constant tidal wave of emotion, an unrelenting tsunami of grief that I feel like I am still drying myself from. Even now, years later, I still feel the ripples from that wave of feeling.

As with any human disaster, and suicide is the ultimate human disaster, there is, of course, the response - the relief. The incredible acts of humanity and kindness that follow a natural disaster were replicated on an individual level to my Mum and I. Those incredible moments when you realise just how good humans can be to one another.

I will never forget the acts of kindness shown to us after my Dad’s death; they were truly remarkable. However, the sad reality is that eventually, the aid workers pack up and leave, and the disaster victims remain behind to pick up the pieces. And just like a village that has to rebuild after a tsunami, my Mum and I were left to rebuild the home that had forever changed.

Lesson 2 – There’s no simplistic explanation for suicide

I wrote the note but never committed the act of suicide. My Grandad and Dad did the opposite. In literature and films, the note is a poetic part of suicide, but in reality, they are actually very rarely left, often because the act of suicide is so impulsive, so immediate, and so imperative to the victim. Yet, without a note, an explanation is never found.

Of course, over the years, I have tried to rationalise an explanation for my Dad’s suicide. Still, the simple fact is there is no simple explanation for suicide. It is rarely the consequence of one factor or event but instead a complex interaction of many.

We live in a world where we like things black and white, good and bad, right or wrong despite the overwhelming day-to-day reality of life being a myriad of shades of grey. Few things in life are actually simple, and suicide is without doubt one of the most complex. At its very root, it asks us to try and be inside the head of another human, which is simply not possible. We can never know what another human is truly feeling. If we could and were aware, then suicide might be more preventable. Still, it’s this very fact we can never know how another truly feels that makes understanding suicide so unimaginably hard.

Have I, over time, developed a story and a narrative for why my Dad did what he did? Perhaps. But does it really matter? I don’t think it does. It’s not a story. It's an unsolvable riddle and one that, if I tried to decipher for too long, would cause me to lose my mind.

Lesson 3 – Talking Helps (especially with others who have also been bereaved by suicide)

It sounds obvious, doesn’t it? Talking helps. But it truly does. With any death comes grief. But with suicide, there is an all-encompassing, almost impassable, grief and rage.

Suicide can often seem contagious. Often people who lose a loved one to suicide not long after will take their own life. In the darkness of the nights after my Dad’s death, my Mum and I talked with all sincerity and seriousness about following him in the same way. In that immediate aftermath, it felt like there would be no escape from the crushing pain that had engulfed us.

Time, however, does pass and, for now, Mum and I survive. There have been many contributing factors to this survival. The support and love of family and friends, religious faith has helped – my Mum perhaps more so than I. The passage of time does provide some healing.

Counselling and therapy certainly helped me. It provided an opportunity to talk to a neutral person in a safe space about all the emotions I was feeling towards my Dad, my Mum and myself in the weeks and months after his death. It played a vital part in my recovery and helped to rekindle my own self-worth.

A new relationship and my fiancé's love have played an integral part in helping me see a purpose and new hope in life.

One significant way of talking that helped both my Mum and I was to attend a local self-help group for those bereaved by suicide. Meeting monthly at the local civic buildings, this group allowed us to share our story, and perhaps more importantly, gave us the chance to listen to other people’s stories, and in doing so, we all helped to exchange support, information and encouragement for how to plan a future without our loved ones.

I discovered that listening to others who have survived the same turmoil was invaluable in the process of healing. It is a while since I have been to a group but with the time that has now passed and as the world begins to open up again after Covid 19, I should perhaps look to attend the group again, in the hope that I could help others in the same way that I was helped.

Lesson 4 – Be creative. Find a way to express your emotion

The very first article I ever wrote on Vocal was about my Dad’s suicide. I entered it into one of the early Vocal Challenges about Game of Thrones, and much to my surprise, it placed second. Of course, I didn’t write it for the recognition. The theme of the challenge just happened to be the perfect conduit through which I could express something deeply personal between my Dad and me.

On other occasions, the subject of suicide has crept into other pieces of writing I have done on Vocal and elsewhere.

I also made a short film, The Box (below), about my Dad’s suicide. While I hate hearing my dulcet northern tones on the film, I am glad I made it and writing it helped me to release some of the emotion I had trapped inside me.

As someone bereaved by suicide, you must find a way to release the intense and suffocating amount of feeling you have within you. I would encourage anyone, even if they don’t feel they are creative, to find an avenue, a method to release some of what they are feeling. It can be created for a world audience or an audience of none, but there is, and there was for me, a catharticism in being creative that helped me express some, but not all of, what I was feeling.

As well as being creative about the subject of suicide, I personally found solace in reading and research on the subject. I understand that this might not be a route everyone would take. But just like talking with others on the subject, I found reading the words and thoughts of others on the subject extremely empowering.

Three books on the subject of suicide I would recommend are The Savage God: A Study of Suicide by Al Alvarez, Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide by Kay Redfield Jamison, and Notes on Suicide by Simon Critchley.

Lesson 5 – A Half-Stitched Scar – The pain never goes away

English Poet Elizabeth Jennings once said, ‘time does not heal, it makes a half-stitched scar that can be broken and again you feel grief as total as in its first hour.’

When you are bereaved by suicide, you are lucky if the scar is even half-stitched.

It's an eternal truth that the sting of death is less painful for the person who dies than it is for those they leave behind. With suicide, this is magnified to another level. The questions of why cut deeper and the sensation of what did we do wrong? Burns to your soul.

On more than one occasion, I have heard the commonly spoken phrase, usually by someone with no true experience of suicide, that it is a selfish act. But this becomes preposterous when the act is committed by someone who personified selflessness like my Dad.

Very simply and tragically, the truth is that a person who commits suicide has not decided that killing themselves will hurt others (and therefore be a selfish act) but, in fact, have decided that they would hurt others and themselves more if they continue to live. It's fundamentally the opposite of a selfish act.

A lot of people talk of having suicidal thoughts. But I think many people mistake wondering what it would be like if they were dead or not here as suicidal thinking. It isn’t. There is no reason and consideration to suicidal thoughts. They can’t be willed away and rationally dismissed. Suicidal thoughts either swell up with pain and anguish, or they are spurred on by impulse and irrationality. A suicidal mind is rarely, I believe, thinking about the future happiness of others, and if it does, it simply imagines that one without them in it is better for all involved. A suicidal mind, in its mind’s eye, is only ever removing a depressed, ill, violent, miserable or psychotic body from the lives of others and the world itself.

The pain of suicide is omnipresent. There are days when the pangs of denial fight equally in my heart with the acid of guilt. Suicide is not a gentle gathering around a deathbed to say your goodbyes. I have experienced that, and it’s hard enough. Suicide is a violent (often literally) and vicious death that rips apart lives and entire belief systems. Persistent questioning of oneself is destructive. Persistent questioning of others is equally destructive.

Every day, I learn to live on knowing my Dad took his own life. I don’t like saying he “committed suicide” as it’s no longer a crime – and in truth it never was. He did take his life, and in doing so, he took something from Mum and I that we cherished and loved beyond words, something that we weren’t ready to say goodbye to or give up on. Sadly, on a hot Monday in July he just didn’t feel the same.

These are the lessons I have learnt from my Dad’s suicide. I hope to share them to help people to understand suicide a little more this World Suicide Prevention Day.