Why Suicide?: Questions and Answers About Suicide, Suicide Prevention, and Coping with the Suicide of Someone You Know by Eric Marcus

Author:Eric Marcus
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

What is a suicide survivor or survivor of suicide?

Before I started work on this book, I thought a suicide survivor was someone who had survived a suicide attempt. But in fact it’s the phrase I hear—and read—most often to describe someone who has lived through the suicide of a loved one.

That’s only the first paragraph of the two-paragraph response I wrote to this question in the first edition of this book. After rereading the original second paragraph, which seemed very angry to my eyes fourteen years after first writing it, my instinct was to cut it because I felt like I was reading someone else’s words. Here’s what I wrote:

I’ve never thought of myself as someone who “survived” a suicide. I feel I’ve coped with and learned to live with the reality of what my father did and how it affected my family and my life. And, of course, I did survive the experience. I’m still here all these years later, still wrestling with and talking about it. But to me being called a suicide survivor feels like I’m being condescended to, like a happy face is being pasted on a reality that isn’t nearly so heroic or hopeful as the term survivor might suggest. I feel more like a victim of my father’s suicide.

Maybe it’s the passage of time, in combination with many more years of counseling, that’s helped change my perspective, because now I feel perfectly comfortable with thinking of myself as a suicide survivor. I no longer feel “more like a victim of my father’s suicide.” And while I continue to think about, talk about, and write about my experience, I don’t feel like I’m still “wrestling” with my memories and feelings about my father’s suicide. To me that suggests I’m farther along the path of integrating the experience of being a suicide survivor than I was when I first wrote those words. Now I can look back at my experience with a sense of sadness about what happened, as well as with compassion for my father, rather than simply with anger, hurt, and confusion. That to me feels like progress.

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