An Invitation
A few years ago, I shared a series of essays on Losing a Loved One to Suicide. It lived on a blog page for a while, quietly, visited by readers from time to time. I then deleted the blog, and my words have lived on paper and in my mind with edits and little notes, moving from a box to a drawer to a cupboard and to a table for more editing. And then back to a cupboard.
We lost my brother to suicide in 2012. He was a beautiful young man, beloved by many, and a well-known actor in the South African Afrikaans film and television industry. All these years later, it feels strange to keep talking about his death. But is has been an important part of my own story that has affected and refined me.
I have a fierce conviction that we need to share our stories and contribute to a deeper understanding of complicated things. But I also wish that, despite the years and years and years of proof of the reality of my brother’s death, it might still not be true. It feels sad to me to know about all of this within my own lived experience. It is such a strange feeling, the struggle with the realness of something terrible. And I think that a person who loses a loved one to suicide is uniquely burdened with both the loss and the complicated emotional anguish of contemplating the mind and inner world of the person who ends his or her life. The ‘why’ and the 'how' of their death.
I reshare this series of essays that I think of as letters to my brother and to my children, letters to the past and to the future, to share how it has felt for me to have had this experience. Initially, the impact of his death felt incredibly unique and personal. And over time I have come to realise that there are universal themes in the things that all of us experience and we grow by knowing the stories of others as a way of also knowing and growing ourselves.
This is my invitation: I invite you to read with me, again or for the first time, and think with me about loss and life’s many invitations to explore, know, and keep exploring. And if you want to, please share your thoughts and let’s grow together.
LOSING A LOVED ONE TO SUICIDE
When Saturday Lost Its Innocence
After my beautiful brother died, I spent Saturdays wondering why nobody had seemed to notice that Saturday had lost its innocence.
Because one Saturday, in a flat within walking distance from a busy shopping centre where people were busy with life, my brother ended his.
*
On that Saturday, I felt a sense of ominous worry. I was sitting on my bed with my one-year-old son, in one of those slow moments when a child is playing peacefully, and the mother finds herself wondering if there is something she should be doing.
And I thought about my brother.
There had been a heavy silence between us in the weeks before he died. Our last conversation was wordless and painful. He was sitting on the floor of our parents’ lounge, my son playing happily next to him. And he looked at me with resigned determination. I imagine I gave him a questioning look which he would have interpreted as “can you see your way through this?”. He shook his head, ever so slightly, a mute but adamant “no”. In response, I nodded, almost invisibly. And in that response, I imagine he heard me saying: “I get it”. I gave him what I had in that moment, at that time. My unconditional love and acceptance.
As I returned my mind to being home with my son, I shook off my sombre reverie and decided to focus on the plans we had made for our day: we were getting a puppy for our son.
*
We named the puppy we would only have for a day, Fred.
I was in the car, puppysitting Fred, while my husband and son were in the grocery store. I was replying to a message when my phone rang.
It was my brother’s friend. He never phoned me. But I could devise a few benign reasons for his call in the split-second before I answered.
That split-second was a strange place, an experience of slow motion, a heavy pause. A moment between two worlds. The one world is the one you know before you answer the phone, where everything is okay. The other world is the one in which your loved one has died. It is a kind of ignorance is bliss moment, tarnished and horrifying when you think back on it, potentially spoiling ignorance forever.
Even now, years later, thinking about that second leaves me nauseous with horror and disbelief. In my mind, I see a thick black line signifying the moment that life was divided in life before. And life after.
There I was, in a car, with a tiny and feeble puppy on my lap, thinking that this was the day we got a dog.
And then I discovered that it was, in fact, the day we had lost one of my favourite people.
We don’t know when a day will become a defining moment.
*
My body registered the news before my mind could process it. And my mind tried its best to deny what it was hearing.
I lost my awareness of other people and my surroundings. I don’t remember getting out of the car. Fred was in my arms, dangling in my shaky grip. My legs were unsteady. I ran, stumbling, into the grocery store. I ended the call with my brother’s friend. He called me again and asked if he could speak to my husband. I shouted my husband’s name. Were there other people in the shop? I don’t know. It did not matter.
I handed my phone to my husband. In the expression on his face and the collapse in his posture I could see the truth my mind was fighting. My husband picked up our son, abandoned the shopping trolley right there, and rushed us home to where we knew my parents were waiting for us. To meet Fred and then go to the movies. And while a moment ago I could not even comprehend the news, I was now preparing to break the horrifying news to my parents.
My mother sent a message to ask me where we were. We were running late.
Saturdays still felt innocent to them.
*
The police phoned my mother. As we arrived home, I rushed over to my parents. I saw my mother, talking on the phone, with a quizzical expression on her face. Surely, this could not be true. My father, inferring the meaning of the phone call, looked at me and I confirmed his fear when I said, “he is gone”. For him, the truth reached his mind immediately. Consider yourself lucky that you did not hear his devastated wail.
My mother was adamant as I drove us to my brother’s flat, saying repeatedly but faintly, “I don’t believe it, it’s not true”.
Outside his flat, in the harshness of police presence and opportunistic photographers at what was now a crime scene involving a well-known person, we watched as feathers fell in front of us, out of nowhere.
*
I naively thought that I would sleep that night. But I was awake, wandering through my house, wondering how I would ever sleep again. Images were flashing through my mind, imagined images of his final moments. Horrifying.
My immediate impulse was to try to make sense of things, to try to find a way to frame it all and maybe even beautify what happened. Make it poetic. There was fragile comfort in holding on to some spiritual possibility.
But I paced up and down in the darkness, slept fitfully and listened as Fred howled unconsolably all night.
*
Saturdays would not be the same again.
The mundane had become blatantly offensive.
Saturday had lost its innocence.
If Someone You Love Chooses Death
Suicide is unthinkable for the lucky ones. For those who have no experience with a longing for relief from pain that seems only attainable in death, suicide may be irrational, ludicrous. Sinful. But it is a thought that crosses minds more often than we want to admit.
Maybe you don’t get it.
I certainly didn’t.
*
For those who are well acquainted with the darkness or depression, for those battling the trauma of being hurt intolerably, for those who find themselves in a world that feels bad, unsafe, unreciprocating, or unsettling in every possible way, death is a very reasonable option. And that is a very uncomfortable thought.
There are many reasons people go down this path. Deep emotional struggles, a history of unrelenting trauma, heavy regret and a torturing conscience, a sense of feeling like a burden or feeling like a sick person who will never get better – many things may lead to a longing for weightlessness that may seem only attainable in death.
A specialist researcher on the topic of suicide concludes, “Irrespective of its complex causes, suicide is about ending unbearable pain, albeit in a permanent way” (Rory O’Connor).
To feel empathy in considering that someone may want to die is a threatening suggestion. Can you take a moment to feel with someone, to feel with them how their mind takes them to only one conclusion, dying? It is easier to place it at a safe distance, try to sanitise our hands if we come too close to touch it - we don’t want to ponder it, feel the horror of it, or try to understand it. By distancing ourselves from it, we may imagine that we can all get better. We can make rash generalised statements about something we have no intention of understanding. Maybe we feel that we can inoculate ourselves against the risk of being contaminated by the darkness we perceive in others and thereby avoid confronting the difficult parts of life and the complexity of the patches of darkness that also exist within our own internal worlds.
It seems easy for people to say, “why didn’t he or she just ask for help?”, “people who do that are selfish”, “didn’t the family know?”. As if we can all prevent terrible things from happening if we just know.
We prefer to hope for the best.
But when suicide is a word that now lives in the reality of your own life, it is exceptionally real and very personal. The questions change and there are no simple answers. If someone you love chooses death, everything you thought you knew, the things you were certain of, now feel unstable and you face the appalling realisation that not everyone will be okay.
One of the hardest things about losing a loved one to suicide is the debates you have with them in your mind, the conversations in which you try to convince them that they shouldn’t have died. Fighting with reality, I concocted conversations with my brother that would have brought him to a different outcome.
And then there is the sense of guilt, the gut-wrenching regret, the shame of not being able to help. The silences that ‘should’ have been words?
In response to traumatic loss, we get angry at people, situations, institutions. Ourselves. We do many hopeless things because it gives us a sense of agency, some sense of power - defensive manoeuvres to help us avoid the fullness of experiencing our devastation and our powerlessness – to avoid the fullness of experiencing our loved one’s desperation. The things we do either conceal or highlight something about how we feel at a deep level.
You can see how all of this is pretty much as complicated as it can get: we find ourselves acting in particular ways, feeling the loss, but also responding to the hopelessness of our loved one who chose death, the terror of the way they died. And that they chose it.
I would have liked for my brother to rest. And then reappear. All better. I respected his choice, but I was very angry that he left us to deal with this most difficult thing, an impossible thing – losing him.
Maybe that was how he felt too, that he had lost himself.
*
On that first Sunday, we woke up to a new, upside-down world, a world that felt hostile, unsafe and far more threatening than ever before. Things felt crazy, bizarre, wacky in the worst possible way.
Suddenly, we were not a family ready for a puppy. Fortunately, Fred could go back to his original family and pug mother. We were now a system trying to deal with a traumatic loss.
My brother’s death was announced on the news and printed on newspaper headlines. Social media buzzed with people’s reactions, expressions of sympathy, sadness and admiration for a well-known and well-loved young man.
A close friend phoned me after reading the news. As I answered, she simply said my name and we both started crying. Other friends arrived, quietly stocking up my fridge and sitting with me. I visited my parents. What does one even say in these moments? I call it ‘the awkward togetherness of life after loss’.
My son was there, still needing time to play, nap, eat, connect.
Life was now a picture of contrasts. The heaviness and demands of loss; and the joy, vitality and demands of parenting a young child.
Life and death in juxtaposition.
*
A few days later, I walked the flight of stairs to my brother’s flat, wondering how it was even possible to walk under the weight of so much sadness, one slow step at a time. I whispered prayers with no words and faced the space where his life ended. The ash tray, full of cigarette butts. An unmade bed. Dirty clothes in a laundry basket. In the kitchen, a pan used to make scrambled eggs. His last meal? Coffee mugs with dried stains of cold coffee. That doorway.
“Boet, my brother, please phone me if you need to talk, any time, please phone me”.
He didn’t phone me.
He switched off his phone.
And he left.
Stumbling In The Dark
I am sure everyone knows that feeling when you wake up and it’s dark and you turn on a bright light. And then you cannot see, and your eyes hurt.
Or maybe you have been with a child who is playing with a flashlight in the dark. They don’t know what they are doing. They wave the flashlight around, often and repeatedly aiming it at your face. Not a nice feeling, that light burning into your eyes.
That’s almost what it feels like to mourn. You feel surrounded by darkness and whilst you may reach for and need light, even normal day to day things can feel like bright lights hurting your eyes.
I have noticed how people who are going through difficult times often look down and try to shield their faces. They walk differently, hunched over and off balance, ducking and diving, as they try to hide from life, from light. Even eye contact can make them squint.
And, if we are honest, nobody really knows how to grieve. It’s painful, awkward, private, silent, loud, noisy. And worst of all: unpredictable – one moment you can be fine and in the next moment something can leave you feeling overwhelmed with emotion.
Looking back, I can only wonder how we got through those early days of grief. How did we cope and carry on? It’s a mixed bag of clear moments, collapse and powerful defence mechanisms. A precarious juggling act of dealing with practical matters and then being hit by another onslaught of emotion.
Grief’s intensity took me by surprise. I made a note in a journal: “My heart is broken but my life cannot stop”.
*
After my brother’s death, it felt as if a shadow had been cast over everything. So many things simply collapsed in the aftermath of our loss. It shook us, rattled us, affected us to the core. It is so difficult to sit with the experience of being affected, of knowing the fullness of your affective, emotional reaction to life experiences. But mourning was a journey that would offer me a painful opportunity to grasp the complexity of life a little bit better.
It's like a gift. The kind that you open and then wish you could return.
*
A few months before that sad Saturday, my brother and I had a long conversation. I listened well, I thought. But he got frustrated with me. He could read my agenda. I was going to try to convince him that he needed help. Not entirely a bad thing. I was not wrong for wanting to convince him that we needed to find a way to help him. But I would approach it differently now.
It may have sounded patronising to him, so emotionally far from him, when I said, “Boet (brother), my heart is in the right place”. He didn’t miss a beat in replying in his unique and witty manner: “Yes, but sometimes your heart is in your head and then you are heart-headed”. Soms is jou hart in jou kop en dan is jy hart-koppig.
How much is lost in life when the message of our heart is verbalised via our heads? How much do we lose when we offer an intellectualised response because we cannot sit with pain and discomfort in our hearts?
His words stayed with me, and I wonder what I would say to him today if we could have that conversation all over again?
He was not well. And there is no getting around how difficult it is to know what the right thing is to say and do in these kinds of situations. But maybe I would listen a little bit longer without trying to respond. I would try to just be with him. Maybe I would let him know that I was noticing a battle raging within him, that I noticed his intensity and wondered if I could be useful in collaborating with him to navigate a way through his difficult time. I wonder if I could help him find a grey area, a part of his mind where things were not black and white, where darkness and eternal struggle may not have been the only way life would turn out for him, maybe there was a little sliver of uncertainty, something that would keep him curious about life rather than certain that it would be a dark, intolerably hellish thing.
This is what I have realised: We can approach people with a mind full of certainty and answers. Or you can offer your mind as an imperfect but safe container, a mind with space and flexibility, a mind that is ready to contemplate the existence of black and white but also holding a great gift – a capacity for thinking together, for wondering even if there is certainty, for bringing question marks rather than exclamations and full stops, a mind in which there is colour and grey. A mind with a heart.
In the sad and bizarre process of grieving, stumbling in the dark, and squinting in the light, there were lessons that I could only learn because we lost him. And I can offer a wholehearted response to his suffering only in my imagination, only in retrospect, and only in this moment as I now need to practice compassion with myself and work every day to encounter myself and others with curiosity, care and respect.
*
I imagine that we approach people who are struggling as if we are children who don’t know how to use a flashlight. We get clumsy, stuck in our heads, so desperate to save a situation or be the bright spark who ignites an a-ha moment. Kids don’t like darkness – playing with a light distracts them. We, like children, don’t know what to do when we are in the darkness with someone. It’s uncomfortable, unpleasant. And we escape the discomfort by acting without thinking. I assume that children aim the light at our faces because they want to feel better, reassured. And I think we also look at those who are struggling and we often expect them to reassure us that they are okay in the dark, in the darkness of their pain, leaving them even more isolated, alone.
We can do better.
None of us knows how we will feel when really bad things happen. And, inevitably, all of us come face to face with the harsher side of life. Gosh, some people never know anything else. Having a life before and after severe harshness is a privilege, if I think about it.
We don’t need people who act perfectly. There is no way of defining how that would even look. But I think we need people who act with intention. People who will be okay to switch off their super fancy flashlights and just keep us company in the darkness. People who will offer to, when we’re ready, light a candle with us and let us watch the flame move and flicker together. Maybe, probably much later, we can switch the flashlight on together and look around at what life looks like now, in the light.
The head says, “you need help”, “we need a plan”. But the heart says: “I see you, I’ll sit here with you, I will hold your hand, I will not-know with you, and if you want me to, we can try to figure this out together”.
We rely on the possibility that we can find each other in the darkness, that we can build our resilience for stumbling in the dark, together, and that we can move closer and closer to the light again.
A Single Candle
If you have lost a loved one to suicide, you may struggle deeply with the persistent questions: could I have done better, could we have done more, what did I miss? It is so difficult, and I keep wondering – if you want to die but I want you to live, then how do I access the essential radical empathy that may be the only real way to light a faint candle for a person who is in utter darkness? How do we love each other without control? How do we care without expectation?
For everyone’s sanity, we need to realise that reality is reality – we did what we could do at the time, people make their own decisions, and we fool ourselves when we think that we can be the authors of someone else’s story. You must respect and accept that you don’t understand everything.
When my brother died, an awesome person died. A gifted, kind, intense, funny person died. He was creative but he could not imagine a way through his pain. He could only see a losing struggle for which he had neither patience nor strength.
*
The most we can ask for when we confront difficult things is that it will humanise us, make us more capable of connecting to ourselves and to others, more real. It’s a journey. But if we open ourselves to it, it will touch every corner of our lives, change us and make us more compassionate. You will notice those who are struggling. And because you know about struggling, you will be more able to offer support.
As Maya Angelou said: “Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better”.
*
In big and small ways, significant and subtle, all of us choose for or against life every day. In the way we live, the way we speak to each other, how we look after our relationships with the people we care about, in the ways we choose love or fear, promise or despair, trust or trepidation.
There is something about knowing the complexity of life, knowing the reality of death, attempting to understand the depths of struggles that some people face, that will make you look at life differently. When you are ready to look up again.
And you are allowed to reach for it, reach for life in all its maddening complexity and devastating cruelty and incredible beauty. You do not have to suffer forever.
*
In my mind, I have had many conversations with my brother. I have shared with him all the emotions and experiences relating to his death. I directed anger at him. I have done the older sister speech of ‘what-the-hell-were-you-thinking?’ I let him know of things that are happening in my daily life. When something is beautiful, I hold knowing both the sadness that he couldn’t experience it while allowing myself to deeply see and feel all that is good. I even understand his relief to not be in this life, I imagine he is unburdened now from life’s complicatedness.
It may be that I have an eccentric imagination or some internal psychological landscape that allows me space to be in a type of conversation between parts of myself representing me and my sibling. Or maybe he is close in some spiritually meaningful way and both of us continue to grow in and because of our relationship as brother and sister. Yes, what a lovely idea, the feeling of connection and parallel growth.
I wonder what we would talk about if he could make a short trip from where he is now to visit me. What would we say if he could sit in my garden, drink a beer, smoke a cigarette.
I would ask him about the mystery of what happens after we die. And is he as close to us as we imagine he is?
Sitting here, I can see him so clearly in front of me.
I would share with him how much I had to learn because of him. He would recognise me as me, but also vastly different in a fundamental, necessary way.
I would ask him if he didn’t realise how much he would be missed?
I would share with him how Saturdays, life in general, had lost its innocence for quite a long time. I would share with him how horrible it is when someone you love chooses death. How difficult it is to mourn. Not because I want him to feel guilty. I understand better now, Boet.
We would probably spend most of our time in silence. Comforting silence, not awkward. The silence you only experience with people who you know well and lovingly. With music playing in the background.
At sunset, I would ask him if I could light a candle. And, if he said yes, I would light it, and we would watch the sun setting. The colour. The grey.
And then darkness.
Two people.
And a single candle.
