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Bereavement

Find bereavement help and support from other Mumsnetters. See also your choices after baby loss.

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Original poster

suicide- i dont understand

9 replies

Booyhoo · 10/02/2010 13:35

a friend committed suicide a few days ago. we werent close and i hadn't seen her for a while. she was 22. a beautiful person, always smiling and so outwardly happy. anyone would tell you she was always smiling and would do anything for you.
she had been on antidepressants for a few months although only a few people knew this.

i dont understand it. i think she must have been very brave to have done this, or was she just desperate? how does someone actually take that leap and do it? i have never felt like that so i cant possibly know how she was feeling or what she was thinking. i just dont understand. she was so young.

OP posts:

TiggieWiggle · 10/02/2010 15:04

I'm sorry. That is so

Mongolia · 10/02/2010 15:08

I had a friend who had suicidal tendencies, who once said something that made me understand that getting to that point may not necessarily be related to whatever is going on at that precise time, he said:

"I know my life is good, I love my life, my main fear is for those feelings to get at me at some point when I don't have my ADs near me. I could kill myself during that short moment, and while being perfectly aware that everything else in my life is OK"

For some, is a chemical imbalance in the brain.

cyteen · 10/02/2010 15:13

This will sound brutal and I'm sorry because I don't mean it to, but you never will because there can be no understanding. Suicide automatically creates a huge void in the minds of people affected, that they fill with endless questions that have no answer. It's one of the special tortures of this form of bereavement. There are so many different mental states that a suicidal person can be in, no one can ever say for sure why they did it, whether someone could have helped them, why it happened...

As a wise someone put it, it's not about finding the answers, it's about learning to live with the questions.

FluffyDonkey · 10/02/2010 15:29

Agree with Cyteen. 9 1/2 years since a close friend committed suicide. No one knows why but I have learnt to stop blaming myself (how could I call myself a friend if he couldn't even tell me something was wrong?) and also to stop blaming my friend (for a long time I was furious with him).

It's terribly sad but ultimately it was his choice to make. No matter how much we all hate it.

Be kind to yourself over the next few months. Don't blame yourself, just remember the good times as much as possible.

thehairybabysmum · 10/02/2010 15:42

One of DH's friends died thsi way, a few years ago now but it is awful.

I eventually decided, to myself, (as you do) that for whatever reason (chemical imbalance, depression) that people who do this totally and absolutely believe that the people around them are honestly better off without them.

So sorry for you loss .

Original poster

Booyhoo · 10/02/2010 16:23

i'm not angry with her. i know that she must have had, in her own mind, justification for it. i have had times where i just want to run away from life and i suppose in a way this could be how she felt only she needed to end it rather than run away.

i just think she must have been so brave to do it. i wouldnt ever contemplate it because death scares me and doing it to myself would be such a contradiction IYSWIM.

i dont understand it and right now its just so hard to believe it. no-one ever in the world will ever see her or talk to her again and that is unreal to me. even if i didnt see or talk to her but i knew she was alive i could cope with that but the fact that she isnt here anymore. it is too much to understand.

OP posts:

Northumberlandlass · 11/02/2010 12:52

A school friend of mine committed suicide when we were 14. We were so young, we thought we knew it all when in fact we knew very little.

I don't think he thought there was another option.

He was bright, funny, straight A student (not that it would make a difference) popular etc etc

No sense in it at all.

[hugs]]]

mumof2teenboys · 15/02/2010 10:15

When my BIL killed himself, I spent so long trying to work out 'why'.

I focussed so much on the 'whys and what-if's' that I kind of forgot to grieve for the man we had lost, it took another incident for me to reassess what was important.

We had lost a lovely man, a lovely uncle to my boys. All the trying to understand just postpones grieving (imo)

We remember him, we recall the good bits, we talk about who he was.

You will never truly 'understand' but you have to accept that they felt that it was the only option for them. Just try to remember the good bits, the love that they gave you. i found that more helpful than trying to work out why.

izzybiz · 15/02/2010 10:26

A friend of mine killed herself when she was 16, she had just finished her GCSEs at school and had been out celebrating with her 2 best friends. I spoke to her on the phone that evening we were arranging to go to a party at the weekend.

She said goodbye to the 2 friends, she had asked one to stay over that night but she couldn't..

Her body was found on the train track early the next morning, a train driver had spotted her on the track

It was horrendous for everyone, it made no sense, for a long time we all believed something suspicious had happened as how could such a wonderful young girl want to take her own life?

Thats where suicide is different, no one to blame, no answers always left wondering.

Sorry for your loss. x

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