On Wedneday this week we mark World Suicide Prevention Day. Its focus is rightly on noticing and caring for people who are at risk of taking their lives. But the day also recalls the great pain suffered by many people when their relative or friend takes their own life.
The centre of their experience lies in the way that suicide excludes people from any participation in this decisive act of people's lives, and also prevents them from understanding it. Suicide is always shrouded in silence, and arouses dread at entering the silence. So it imposes further silence. It is a dark mystery, surrounded by a stigma that makes people reluctant to talk about it, ill at ease in speaking to those affected by it, and creates further acts of exclusion. Once people who took their own lives could not be buried in consecrated ground, and were even symbolically executed to show society's abhorrence of the deed. These taboos and exclusions further excluded and silenced relatives and friends of people who had taken their life.
This exclusion intensifies natural feelings of guilt. 'If only my child, parent or friend were still alive' turns easily into 'if only I had noticed, found the right word or silence, refrained from the harsh word, and so on.' Or 'if only they had thought of me'. Then 'if only' easily turns into accusation or resentment. People and their memories are further locked into silence.
A little book launched today, The Cost of Silence, published by Support After Suicide presents the writing of men who lost a relative to suicide. What they write is a testimony to the black hole that suicide digs in the lives of those close to it, and to the power of accompaniment and conversation to dissipate it.
Most striking in their accounts is the power and complexity of memory and the need to attend to it. Their descriptions are concrete and detailed, particularly when describing their relatives when alive. 'She was a whizz at shopping, and stormed the shops in Chapel Street for bargains'. 'Dad had been at the beach for the weekend helping his brother finish his pergola'. 'We all sat down to watch the footy, and he sat with us'. Each dead relative is remembered in their connections to other people and to their world.
The memories of confronting the suicide of their relative are also vivid, but are sometimes disconnected. A backpacker's van