There are losses that invite compassion immediately.
And then there are losses that make people hesitate.
Suicide is one of those.
Not because the grief is smaller.
But because it makes people uncomfortable.
Because they don’t know what to say.
Because they’re afraid of saying the wrong thing.
Or because, without realizing it, they begin to judge.
When a child dies by suicide, the loss doesn’t arrive alone.
It arrives carrying silence, questions, assumptions, and a weight the parents never asked to hold.
Why suicide loss feels different
Most people live in self-preservation mode. Even in despair, even in deep grief, their minds never go where a suicidal mind goes. So when suicide happens, they interpret it through their own wiring.
They call it selfish.
They call it giving up.
They call it a choice.
But those words come from a brain that has never experienced that kind of distortion.
A suicidal brain is not operating from logic, strength, or moral reasoning. It is operating from overwhelm, pain, and a narrowed sense of reality. To someone standing outside of that state, it makes no sense. And when something cannot be understood, it is often judged instead.
This is part of why suicide feels more unthinkable than other deaths.
Most people can imagine illness.
Most people have feared accidents.
Most people understand vulnerability and chance.
But most people cannot imagine wanting to stop living. And when imagination fails, judgment often fills the gap.
Shame: the additional weight
Suicide also carries more shame.
Not always spoken.
Not always intentional.
But present.
Parents wonder if they failed.
Others wonder if the child wasn’t strong enough.
Love is quietly questioned.
Effort is examined.
This does not happen the same way with illness or accident. Those losses are tragic, but familiar. Suicide turns grief inward and places it under a microscope.
Shame is not a natural consequence of loss.
It is a social one.
The search for blame
Along with shame comes the search for someone to blame.
Sometimes that blame lands on parents.
Sometimes it lands on partners.
Sometimes it lands on anyone close enough to point at.
There is a story people tell themselves that if they can identify a cause, the loss will make sense. But suicide does not work that way.
People survive war.
People survive abuse.
People survive conditions far worse than what outsiders later point to as an explanation.
There is no single cause.
There is no villain.
There is no equation that, once solved, explains why one person lives and another dies.
Blame does not bring clarity.
It only deepens harm.
The questions that don’t stop asking
There are also the questions.
Sometimes quiet.
Sometimes relentless.
Sometimes spoken out loud.
How could she choose to die when she loved her cat?
Her dog?
Her parents?
Me?
If she loved you, why didn’t that love keep her here?
These questions come from inside the family, and from outside it. They are asked in private, and sometimes spoken openly, without realizing how much weight they carry.
They assume suicide is a decision made against love. As if love and death sit on opposite sides of a scale, and one must outweigh the other.
But a suicidal brain does not experience love as a tether.
It experiences pain as total.
Love does not disappear.
It becomes inaccessible in the moment it is most needed.
Suicide is not the absence of love.
It is the absence of relief.
The language we use
There is also the language around suicide, which many of us learn only after loss.
In the early days after my son died, before I knew better, I used phrases that make me cringe now. Words I hear differently today than I did then.
I didn’t know what I didn’t know.
Later, I learned the language that honors rather than harms.
“Died by suicide” centers the death without assigning blame or intent. It acknowledges what happened without moral weight.
Other phrases often used, even without judgment, carry meanings they were never meant to hold:
- killed himself / killed herself
- committed suicide
- self-inflicted
These words borrow from the language of crime or violence. They reinforce stigma without intending to.
Learning better language does not erase grief.
But it can soften the harm we pass on, to ourselves and to others.
What I wish people understood
Suicide is not a failure of love.
It is not a failure of parenting.
It is not a failure of strength.
It is the result of a brain in a state most people will never experience and therefore struggle to comprehend.
Understanding this does not make the loss easier.
But it does make it more honest.
And honesty is the only thing that allows grief to exist without judgment.
