Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Rena Puccinelli on June 5, 2012 at 8:29am

I will be 7 years in August since my little brother took his own life.....I am still not completely over it.  Take "one second" at a time. It will get easier but it will take time....."lot's of Time"  I still am going the 7 stages of "grief" and once I think I am on the last stage............It starts all over..........I am "Praying" for you.."God Bless"    YOU NEED TO GET THROUGH THE "Feeling Guilty" stage ((that's the toughest))

Permalink Reply by Theresa Sweaney on June 5, 2012 at 3:38pm

Yesterday I read this passage in Kay Redfield Jamison's book, "Night Falls Fast"--

...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.

--Elizabeth Jennings

Dear Bethany,

   Time alone does not make it easier to bear, but it is the grief work done during that time that helps bring a degree of healing.  Though we will never "get over it," we do learn coping skills and strategies to deal with the pain when it emerges.  For one, we take it one day at a time.  We learn that when we feel overwhelmed with grief, we know that it passes, and that gives us hope.

   It was not your fault.  Your mother-in-law is hurting and needs to be able to put the blame someplace, but truly it was not your fault.  Suicide is infinitely more complex than one person can cause to happen.  In time you will understand and believe that.

 

Permalink Reply by Bethany King on June 6, 2012 at 2:25am

I hate that to meliza, even my husbands mum and dad keep saying im only young and in time i will meet someone else that my husband wouldnt want me to be alone. well we may have only been together 2 years married only four months 4 days after he passed away but i do know my husband couldnt stand the thought of me with some one else. im only 30 and my husband was 42 his last wife cheated on him and walked out on him and the 3 children, 2 with autism. it broke his heart.

I was told the stupidest thing the other day by my grief councilor it made me so angry, he said " sometimes when people have had a shitty life and been rejected, treated like crap and abandoned that when they find real love and happiness they just dont know how to handle it, that they dont feel worthy. My husband and i fought about him having his cancer cut out of his neck,it wasnt going to spread it was the best skin cancer to have if your going to get one, he was so worried about a hole in his neck and all i cared about was having my husband around to grow old with. it makes me wonder what cruel things had been said to him in past relationships for him to think a minor thing like a scar or hole would change how i feel about him. his mum rang me again today and was so nice, she said ive always got her so i dont take it to personally as she is grieving to but it dont make it hurt any less. I was a very strong person before my husband took his life, its one of the things my husband always said he loved about me, i can be a bit of a controll freak in the sense that i like to be in controll of my life, i like routine etc etc but since my husband hung himself and despite my efforts to resucitate him and he passed away in icu 3 days later, im out of controll nothing is normal it never will be, i hate doing anything we did together and that was a lot of things. my grief councilor said to me the other day " can you think what you were like before you met peter" NO i cant, all i know is peter, after an extremely abusive almost fatal relationship 11 years ago meeting peter who was so gentle and affectionate and caring, he was my best friend the only person in the world who knew everything about me was the best thing ever. I couldnt believe how lucky i was, i will never be with any one else it took 11 years to find him, a man who in one word was my everthing, he litteraly was my puzzle put together. My husband asked me one day what i meant by that and i told him, have you ever sat down and wrote on a piece of paper all the qualities you would like in a partner, no one person has all the qualities, diffrent people have diffrent ones but you baby have all of them and i showed him my diary from 5 years earlier and said see you are my puzzle put together. I no longer have a life, i have two beautiful girls one will be 18 and moving out in 3 years and the other in 9 years. i will be 39 whats left after that. I think sometimes my husband is watching out for me cause ive tried to end my pain but he just wont let me and when i ask him for something
i get it.seems weird i know but its what happens
Meliza said:

I know just how u feel , it's been 12 weeks since my boyfriend and father of 2 jumped off a bridge and chose to leave me and his kids.. His mom also blamed me because two weeks before he took his life we got in a fight and I called the cops on him and threatened to put a restraining order on him... He went to jail that day because he had a warrant for his arrest .I told his mom to keep an eye on him because I thought that he was going to do this to himself, he's tried it before in the past but I didn't take it serious in a way .. I just can't be around his mom or his family anymore I told his mom ,am I to blame for this or you that has had 33 yrs with him or me that has only had 6yrs of his life ... I do take some blame in this situation but not all.. How could I have stopped him looking back at this situation now I see signs , signs that he just wasn't happy not even when he was with his kids ... I know that he had a fucked up life But I did to , the only difference was that I didn't have a mother bailed me out of every situation, i had to learn how to cope with life and that's one thing his mother never made him do.. She chose to solve his problems an this time she couldn't solve it for him and he didn't know how to make himself better... It's crazy now I look at his picture and I just see his body and it doesn't seem like him at all..I just can't believe he's really gone every morning that I wake up , and I keep thinking how it feels like to be dead... I don't think it's gotten easier for me either , I think now I'm starting to realize that he's really dead and that he's never coming back.. Do you know what I hate the most when people tell you you're young you have your whole life ahead of you and this will make you so much stronger.. I just think to myself I don't want to be more stronger I just want him back in my life....

Permalink Reply by Anna May on June 21, 2012 at 10:50pm

I am so sorry the suffering you are experiencing.  Do you feel that you can lean on God for help?

Permalink Reply by Allison Henry on July 5, 2012 at 10:07pm

Don't blame yourself. My brother died by jumping, but he was a golden boy. He had everything he could want. He left his girlfriend and brother in the middle of a fun  evening where he showed only a few signs, to jump. No one sees this coming.

Permalink Reply by LA-Greg on March 6, 2013 at 5:43pm

Bethany,

Your guilt is normal after losing him. Almost everyone here who cared about someone who killed themselves feels it. Unfortunately, in your case it's compounded by his parents who choose to deal with their loss & guilt by dumping the blame on you. As much as they deserve compassion, too, and may be good people, what they're doing blaming you is WRONG. It's not your fault.

The suicidal person suffers from a sick mindset that twists them into attacking themselves as the enemy, not just their negative mindset. There is something common to this mindset that loses all hope for changing their negativity and depression and such through therapy and the compassion of others, making them believe their only escape is to kill themselves. It's something in their personalities. It's not your fault or anyone else's. And anyone who tries to blame someone else doesn't understand and usually is doing it to assuage their own guilt, grief, etc. Often we can avoid the depth of our sorrow by locking ourselves up in blame or bitterness...or even in guilt. As painful as those are, the sadness that has no answer and can seem bottomless can feel worse. Especially without support.

Which is why it's so good you're here, with people who do understand and support you to allow yourself all that grief without judgment. You must go through it to come out the other side alive. Because right now, and maybe for a while--for some, even years--it feels like being half alive or even dead yourself. Or like you're on the dark side of the moon.

I wrote a poem with that title the other night...when I was trying to support myself in my misery right then, trying to give my experience that felt like dying some validity, some name. I thought that is what it felt like--being on the dark side of the moon. Lost and alone. Cold and scared. Like dead but alive.

You're alive. And right now you can feel like survival is the curse, when the other person you loved chose to leave this life. But it isn't a curse. I think we do, for a time, feel guitly essentially for going on, for not giving up. I believe that is at the core of our heartache. It's a basic existential suffering we aqll carry in us, since life has so much suffering anyway, exacerbated by our loved one's choice to give up on life. There is nothing we can do but suffer this pain, hopefully with the support of others, and to be aware that maybe we're feeling guilty just for surviving, above all else. The film "Ordinary People" dealt with this suffering in a family so powerfully and compassionately, and realistically. Probably the best modern movie made about such loss and psychic suffering in a family after the death of one of them.

Of course, your suffering is complicated by someone, other than just yourself, actively blaming you for the suicide. Do what you can to not take this to heart too much. There are a thousand different actions, or inactions, we can take when we fear someone we care for is in trouble, and NONE of them guarantee success or failure. The police could have been instrumental in getting your husband on a Psychiatric emergency hold, and from there maybe getting him in the hands of good professionals who could nake a difference, but who knows. That's no guarantee...anymore than his parents being the first to be notified is some guarantee to help him and not put him over the edge.

As I responded to Martin on this site (who was racked with guilt at his actions that he's convinced 'caused' his ex-girlfriend's death, it's been studied how the suicidal person's disturbed mindset seeks out reasons to give up, and, as such, they often seek out people to blame, more likely than not from the people around them who care the most. And they may not even be aware of it. But many are. They also, in this sick place, avoid like the plague any sources that may offer hope, because they associate it with survival, and survival to them--in that mindset--equals more unbearable suffering. No escape.

Permalink Reply by LA-Greg on March 6, 2013 at 6:04pm

So, Bethany, something in you makes you different than that suicidal mindset. Something in all of us here make us different, or else we wouldn't be here. Or else we'd become self-isolating and bitter and negative and numb and self-destructive in our attitudes & behavior. That something must be some innate faith in life and (in time) healing. It brought you here, like it brought me here. And that's a good thing.

So, even if & when you do stumble and become locked up in bitterness or guilt or become numb or punish yourself somehow, know that your faith is in there, and that, with support and reaching out at your worst times it will rise up in you again, and make you do the right thing for yourself.

Sometimes the right thing is going somewhere alone to cry or scream; other times it's leaning on someone else in your misery; and other times it's giving yourself a break from the nonstop suffering, take in some nature, find a healthy distraction for a time, or at least give yourself permission to put the hurt aside for a while (because often a great degree of our hurt is self-punishment, not just grief...but, still, there's plenty of plain old grief to be overwhelming, too). All this suffering takes energy out of us, and too much all at once can be unhealthy, even make us sick.

It can be hard to have hope. Our loved ones lost hope. We can all empathize with their misery now, because hoping at times like this hurts like hell. And nobody tells you that. It is HARD. And it can't exist without grieving. It's like bleeding when we're cut. Only the living bleed. It helps me sometimes to think of my ongoing misery (and how it interferes with my day-to-day life) like that. My heart is sliced deep and it must bleed grief. To clean out the wound. Because I'm alive. Because I have hope. And because I grieve, I have hope. Without it, I wouldn't.

That's the hardest lesson I think we'll ever learn in this life.

And each new day, or night, I fall to pieces I have to re-learn it.

Like we each have to here.

Greg

Permalink Reply by Angel Poreda on March 12, 2013 at 5:05pm

My baby sister took her own life 3 weeks ago ... About 8 months ago my uncle passed away from a long illness I loved my uncle he was funny and always had the best advice ..I did struggle with his passing but over time day by day I would feel better ..when I got the phone call the dreaded phone call and rushed to the e.r hoping and praying she would be o.k it was the worst day in my whole life.. It seems like everyday I have more questions it seems like everyday I need desperately to understand more.. When my uncle died everyday I felt better