Ten Years Later: Where Some of My Questions About Suicide Began

Incredibly, ten years have passed, and during that time I haven’t written openly about where my curiosity and need to understand suicide really began. I am still not entirely sure about doing so now either.

I have, however, written extensively about suicide over those years, mostly privately, and more recently in plans as part of my professional work. It has taken me much of that time to work out what some of it means for me, how I have come to understand suicide differently and what I remain uncertain about. It also has an impact on considering  what I might eventually want to do with the knowledge and to appreciate how and where I can bring something to particular areas of suicidology and make meaning of my own experience.

Over the coming months, I plan to write much more about suicide, suicide prevention and bereavement by suicide. I have realised that if I want to convey something of the depth of my interest in this area, and why I feel so strongly about contributing something useful to it, then it probably makes sense to share how that has come to be the case. I was supported enormously following bereavement by suicide, both personally and professionally, and I would like, in whatever ways I can, to use my understanding and insights to contribute something that might support others.

So perhaps this is the place to begin. This month marks ten years since my mum died by suicide and I haven’t written publicly about my mother’s death in any personal way during those ten years. Writing about my own experience means deciding what I want to make public, what belongs to other people as well as me, and what I would rather keep private. I am particularly conscious of that because this is also the space in which I write as a psychotherapist.

This isn’t an attempt or desire to tell the whole story of Mum’s life or her death. There are parts of both that aren’t mine alone to tell. What I do want to write about is something that has stayed with me for ten years and has increasingly found its way into my professional thinking: what we believe we are responsible for when someone we love is suicidal, and how that responsibility can look very different once we know what happened.

10 years later

One of the strange things about ten years having passed is that it is simultaneously a very long time and no time at all. My understanding of suicide now is certainly different from what it was then, although I am wary of presenting that as some neat journey towards understanding. If anything, it has been convoluted, unwanted and a constant struggle with uncertainty. But, I have also become more comfortable with how much I don’t know.

Throughout, what has stayed with me is how profoundly suicide can alter the way we look backwards. Things that happened before a death can acquire a significance afterwards that they did not necessarily have at the time. Conversations are revisited, decisions reconsidered and questions emerge about what was known, what might have been understood differently and whether something else could have happened.

I’m very familiar with that process personally. There were things about Mum’s life and her state of mind that meant suicide was not completely unimaginable to me. And yet her death was still profoundly shocking. I have spent a great deal of time over the years thinking about that apparent contradiction: how we can know that something is possible without remotely knowing that it is going to happen.

That distinction has become increasingly important to me, because hindsight changes what we see. Once we know the ending, it is extraordinarily difficult to put ourselves back into the uncertainty that existed before it. Narratives are created to reduce the interminable self-questioning and distress in the face of endless perceived unknowns.

Responsibility and the people we love

Suicide also raises difficult questions about responsibility. These questions were relevant personally long before they became professional ones.

When somebody we love is struggling, it can be extraordinarily difficult to know where our responsibility begins and ends. We affect one another, sometimes quite profoundly. What we say matters, what we do matters, and there may be times when we look back and wish we had responded differently. But that is not the same as having control over another person’s life.

I have my own experiences behind those questions, some of which I may write about another time. For now, what feels important is simply to acknowledge that I have spent a great deal of the past ten years thinking about what belonged to me and what didn’t – what was my stuff and what was my Mum’s. I don’t believe I was responsible for Mum’s death, but neither do I want that certainty to become a way of protecting myself from every uncomfortable question about my own impact within a relationship and the relationship that we had.

There are things I said, did, knew about or responded to that I have revisited since Mum died. I can wonder whether something I said affected her without believing that I therefore caused what happened. I can wish that some things had been different without knowing that a different response from me would have produced a different ending.

That distinction has become increasingly important to me. There is a difference between being willing to consider our impact on another person and believing that we therefore caused, or could have controlled, what they ultimately did. In the aftermath of suicide, those distinctions can be particularly difficult to hold.

Looking back after a suicide

After Mum died, I spent an enormous amount of time trying to understand what had happened. I went back through conversations, previous events, medical information and the circumstances leading up to her death. I wrote many pages for the coroner. Some of that was necessary. There were questions that genuinely needed answering.

But I can see now that I was also trying to make the pieces fit.

Once we know how a story ends, everything that happened beforehand can begin to look different. An ordinary conversation can acquire a significance it did not have at the time. Something somebody said becomes a warning or a missed red flag. Something somebody didn’t do becomes a missed opportunity. We know something now that none of the people living through those earlier moments could have known in quite the same way.

I think this is one of the most difficult things about looking back after a suicide. Hindsight gives us knowledge, but it can also change the way we understand what was knowable beforehand.

That doesn’t mean there are no warning signs, that opportunities to intervene are never missed, or that we should simply accept suicide as inevitable. I believe strongly that we can reduce suicide. I want us to become better at recognising distress, responding when somebody may be at risk and finding ways of helping people stay alive.

Over the last decade I have become increasingly interested in the psychological territory that comes with that aspiration.

How much can we reasonably expect ourselves to know before we know the ending? What responsibility can one person carry for another person’s safety? How do we think seriously about our influence on other people without imagining that we can ultimately control them? And how do we learn from a suicide without allowing hindsight to convince us that everything should have been obvious?

The questions I am still asking

These questions now form part of my professional life as a psychotherapist and supervisor, and increasingly of the writing I want to do about suicide, prevention and bereavement by suicide. But they didn’t begin there. I have an insight into what it is like to sit on the other side of them, as a daughter trying to work out what she was responsible for after her mother’s death.

Ten years hasn’t given me particularly neat answers. Perhaps what has changed is my need to find them. I can believe that suicide prevention matters enormously while also accepting that not every suicide can be explained retrospectively. I can look honestly at my own part in a relationship without making myself responsible for another person’s choices. And I can be curious about what might have been different without believing that I can ever know for certain.

Perhaps that is also why I feel ready to begin writing about this now. Not because I have finally worked suicide out, but because I have spent enough time with it to know which questions I want to keep asking.

There is much more that could be said about Mum and much that I will continue to keep private. I suspect I will work out some of that boundary as I write. What feels clearer is that I want to contribute something to the conversations around suicide that have mattered so much to me, and to bring together parts of my personal and professional experience that I have, until now, largely kept separate.

Over the coming months I intend to write more about suicide, suicide prevention and bereavement by suicide, including some of the questions about responsibility, hindsight, uncertainty and hope that I have touched on here. I don’t want that writing simply to be about arriving at answers. I am interested in the conversations these subjects open up between therapists, people who have been suicidal, people bereaved by suicide, and anyone who has found themselves wondering what they could, should or might have done differently.

So, while this has been a difficult piece to write, I am interested in what it brings up for others. If something here resonates with your own experience or thinking, you are welcome to share it, respond to it, or join the conversation as I continue writing about these questions.