If someone has died by suicide

Why this grief is its own thing

Bereavement by suicide is not simply grief with an extra detail. It carries a specific set of things that general bereavement support often cannot reach:

• The question that has no answer. Why. You may spend a very long time in it. Most people eventually arrive not at an answer but at being able to hold the absence of one.
• Guilt, and the endless replaying. The conversation you did or did not have. The call you missed. Almost everyone bereaved this way has a list, and almost every list is unfair.
• Anger, which arrives uninvited and then makes you feel like a monster for having it. It is normal and it is not disloyal.
• Other people's awkwardness. Friends who cross the street. Relatives who will not say the word. The isolation is often the hardest part, and it is not your job to manage anyone else's discomfort.
• Practical intrusions. A coroner, an inquest, a medical examiner, police, a newspaper. Processes that arrive at the worst possible time and treat a person as a case.

What tends to help

• Other people bereaved by suicide. Almost universally, this is what people say made the difference — not being explained to, and not having to explain.
• Not deciding anything big for a while. The house, the job, the relationship. There is no deadline.
• Letting the anniversary be hard. It will be. Planning for it beats being ambushed by it.
• Saying their name. You are allowed to talk about them, and to remember them as more than how they died.

If you are supporting someone bereaved

Say the person's name. Do not ask how they died. Do not say "at least" anything. Turn up, keep turning up, and keep turning up in three months when everyone else has gone back to normal — that is when it is often worst and when almost nobody is left.