“When you lose a child, you lose your future.” Yes, of
course, suicide survivors lose that sweetness of projecting our child’s life
into the future: the joy they would have brought to our lives with their
friends and romances and accomplishments and adventures; the life cycle celebrations
we would have treasured; the new people they would have brought into our
families to love; the chance to live vicariously through them as their lives expanded
and ours contracted; our comfort in old age. We lose the possibility of passing
some of who we are on to the next generation—our little hold on immortality.
When we lose a child before they have had a chance to mature,
we lose out on seeing them become their adult selves and find their place
(or varied places) in the world. We lose out on the culmination of our
parenting, which was to launch them as independent, adult beings ready to enjoy
and engage in life. Their act aborts the launch, implies they did not feel
equipped or inclined for the journey, thus calling our parenting into question.
And so, while grappling with the enormity of this truth, we
lose our present as well. We lose our grounding in the things we loved or believed
or thought we understood. We lose entire weeks, maybe months, while our bodies
and psyches absorb the shock of suicide. And we lose the present of the little moments of
daily life we shared with our child, all the small things we took for granted
but would give anything to recapture now.
And we lose the past, with family memories overshadowed by a
violent, unnecessary death. How can we look at pictures of happier times when
all we can think of is how it was never meant to lead to this? Maybe eventually
we can face the past without bitterness and be grateful for the years we had with
our child. So far, I find it hard to be grateful because I cannot accept
that there will be no more years with my child.
We are suspended in time, without the future, present
or past we thought we had.
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