When a child dies of cancer, you get mad at cancer. When a child is killed by a drunk driver, you want that person to pay for his crime.
When a child commits suicide…Who do you get angry at? Your child?
What can you do with that anger? There’s no place to direct it, nobody and nothing to blame. It’s just another unique piece of the grief puzzle when you are grieving a suicide.
Of course, to varying degrees, many parents blame themselves for their child’s suicide. I would be lying if I said I felt completely blameless. If I had done something differently, and I have a list of those somethings, would he have stayed?
That’s not to say I feel responsible for his choice to end his life, but as a parents, don’t we all feel some accountability for our children’s actions? If our child is rude, we become embarrassed and admonish ourselves for not teaching him better manners. If our child fails a class, we criticize ourselves for not getting a tutor and for not keeping a closer eye on their schoolwork.
It’s difficult to know what to do with the anger and anguish I feel from my child’s suicide. I cant direct my anger at him for leaving. I understand that his pain had become unbearable and he had to go. I thought I knew how much pain he was in, but I guess I was only seeing the tip of the iceberg.
It’s kind of an unsettled feeling, having nobody and nothing to point your grief gun at, having nothing to direct your anger towards, no one to rage against. I do believe it interfere’s with my ability to process my grief.
For a while, I processed that grief by creating a garden at Treehaven and keeping the journal in the woods going. Then, it was this blog. In the last year or so, I’ve too busy, tired or I don’t know what else to write as much as I did in the beginning. I think not having an outlet has made my grief stronger.
Sometimes, I feel trapped in a bell jar, unable to escape the vacuum of my grief. Stuck. Under glass, I appear normal to the outside world, but inside, my grief is slowly suffocating me. Somehow, I keep going. I really don’t know how, but I do.