For children and teenagers bereaved through suicide, a recurring question is, “if they loved me so much, why would they leave”?
Psychologist Trudy Meehan frequently heard it asked when she was working with youngsters attending Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (Camhs). Now, as a parent, she is anticipating it from her daughter, whose father ended his own life when she was two years old.
Books on talking to children about bereavement advise giving them concrete explanations, no euphemisms. “It has to be very clear, and you use the words ‘suicide’ and ‘dead’,” says Meehan. However, she hasn’t found advice on dealing with the “why?” very helpful. The line tends to be that we can never answer that question because we do not know what the person who left was thinking or feeling. But Meehan, now a lecturer at RCSI’s Centre for Positive Health Sciences, knows it’s human nature to be always seeking answers.
She was racking her brains on how to come up with concepts that would be an “emotional scaffold” for her daughter, now aged eight, in trying to make sense of what had happened to her father. You can’t just give the logic, she says, “you have to feel into it, because we learn through stories”.
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One day, after letting her mind wander as she walked on Knocknasillogue beach near their home in Blackwater, Co Wexford, an idea for a story popped into Meehan’s head. She had the vision of an astronaut who becomes stranded during a spacewalk. Communication with mission control is broken so he doesn’t know a rescue rocket is on the way and, becoming overwhelmed and losing hope, he cuts his safety cord and floats off.
“This idea is that sometimes pain can be stronger than our feelings of connection and love,” she says. “We can get overwhelmed and confused and get disconnected from the good things in our lives.” People contemplating suicide often say it’s not that they want to die, but that they want the pain to stop.
While primarily aiming to convey that people do get into such a state that they can love you and leave you at the same time, the narrative also has a subtext with the suicide prevention message: don’t give up, don’t cut the cord, because help is around the corner
Once Meehan had the idea, she knew it was a story she had to write. A seed grant from the Irish Hospice Foundation’s arts programme enabled her to bring Fergal O’Connor on board to illustrate the text. But she was aware finding a publisher would be difficult, as children’s picture books are supposed to be hopeful and happy.
“I would see with my little girl, any story that tries to explain losing a loved one would always talk about continuing the connection and all these happy memories. But that wasn’t our situation and we didn’t have that to lean on.” For example, in The Colour Thief by Andrew Fusek Peters and Polly Peters, on the subject of depression, all the colours drain out of the life of the father. After he goes away for treatment, the rainbows come back.
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“Any time she was looking at books like that, I could almost see her shoulders slump when she saw the happy ending. It was as if she was thinking ‘here’s another happy ending but that’s not my life’. Some young people don’t have their lives reflected back to them and they feel alone, when literature only tells happy stories.”
Meehan wanted her story to be reflective and realistic. While primarily aiming to convey that people do get into such a state that they can love you and leave you at the same time, the narrative also has a subtext with the suicide prevention message: don’t give up, don’t cut the cord, because help is around the corner. The ending of her story, titled The Way Home, is deliberately ambiguous: the rescue ship comes but the astronaut has cut the cord; can they rescue him or is it too late?
Meehan believes the sense that children and adults will make of the ending will depend where they are in processing their grief. “With my little girl, she said they picked him up and they all had pizza and juice on the way home.”
Grief is complicated in children, with questions coming up in cycles as they move through developmental milestones. In the case of suicide, they can take their abandonment by the deceased as a reflection of their own worth and feel they are somehow to blame.
I have this weird, horrible future in sight. I know how hard it’s going to be as she learns to think more about it
“So they are left with a lot of shame and anger and that’s really tough for young people,” she says. “Because suicide is stigmatised anyway, and there is usually shame in the family and people don’t want to talk about it, they pick up on shame. It’s like this double burden of shame that they are left carrying and need help to be relieved of. It’s not their shame to carry.”
Day by day, her daughter is a happy little girl right now, but Meehan continues to worry. “I have this weird, horrible future in sight. I know how hard it’s going to be as she learns to think more about it.”
The Way Home will be made available online, Meehan hopes some publisher will take it on, or that a benefactor might step up to pay for its printing. She believes it needs to be a storybook that families affected by suicide can pick up and use.
- If you have been affected by this topic, support is available 24/7 from The Samaritans (116 123) and Pieta House (1800 247 247), or the Irish Hospice Foundation 1800 807 077 (Mon-Fri, 10am-1pm).
