I have a few friends that call me at Phone My Friend as they struggle to come to terms with the loss of their loved one through suicide. We help each other. I help them as I listen to their struggles such as anger, disbelief, shock and utter painful, gut wrenching sadness and they help me as I feel immense pleasure to be there for them knowing how hard it is to actually get somebody to ‘listen’ to you during this difficult time. Some people can listen, but they might ask imposing questions or make references as to why they think a person did ‘commit’ such an awful thing to those left behind.
Comments such as the latter, don’t help and rather than making the victim of suicide feel better, it actually makes us feel worse and we shut down. Or we get the friends who know what happened and find it too painful to broach the subject, so they say nothing. Not sure what is worse in total honesty, as I find it is quite unforgivable when a person doesn’t make an effort to even say “thinking of you”…. Anyway enough of my waffling as I want to take this subject to a slightly different place in my next paragraph.
I read a lovely book which I hope you will all read if you are struggling with the loss of a loved one through suicide or if you have a friend that is struggling and you are not sure how to handle it. It is a book by “Eleanora Betsy Ross” called “After suicide, a ray of hope for those left behind”. This book became like my bible, coupled with lots of praying and yelling at the big upstairs after my loss. It helped me immensely.
Food for thought and one that I hope will change the way that victims of a suicide loss start to reprogram their way of thinking, which hopefully will reprogram other people’s way of thinking so it helps with the journey that the victim is on and helps them become better equipped to cope with the loss of their loved one in more delicate terms than by such an aggressive term as “Committing suicide” implies.
The paragraph that I will quote here was taken straight out of the book ……
Terminology: Suicide is a form of death which often may be stigmatized by terminology. We say people commit suicide, commit crimes and are committed to institutions. We do not say they commit heart attacks or cancer. We say they died by a heart attack or cancer – why not say they died by suicide?
I for one, ever since reading this paragraph in the book mentioned above will erase the term “Commit suicide” from my vocabulary and replace it with “She chose to die by suicide, or she died by suicide”.
What do you think?
Your friendly comments on this new way of phrasing the term are of importance to me..
Claire
Leave A Comment