After a suicide, parents and others struggle with terrible feelings of guilt

There’s a stretch of the Jersey Shore where the train line parallels the coast. People living in those towns can hear the Atlantic Ocean to the East and the train’s whistle to the West. Walter Craig hears that train every time it goes by, and that’s about 34 times a day. And every time its whistle blows, he thinks of his son, who died by suicide in 2010 by walking on the tracks.

Marcus Craig, whom most knew as Kyle, was a junior at Vanderbilt University in Nashville when he started taking Adderall, initially for studying and then for socializing as well. But when he realized he was getting in too deep, he stopped taking it abruptly, sending him into a withdrawal that caused depression and hallucinations. He started seeing a therapist, who warned him not to drink alcohol. But when friends returned from college, they had a few beers, and at about 1 a.m., he left the bar, sent a text to his family and friends telling them he loved them, walked over to the rail line and stepped in front of an oncoming train.

“Until his Adderall addiction at age 21, Kyle was nothing but a bright, athletic socially well-adjusted individual,” his father wrote in an email.

It has been 13 years, yet the guilt Craig feels about his son’s suicide still percolates just below the surface — the what-ifs, the I should’ves, the if onlys. Maybe he should have taught his son not to worry so much about his grades, or about getting a job in finance in New York. Maybe if he’d given his son more of a grounding, he wouldn’t have felt he had to turn to Adderall, Craig said.

It’s hard to say, “Wow, that happened,” without asking, “How did that happen?” and assessing blame, Craig said. “Nobody else is more responsible. Kyle and me, you know? Who’s responsible after Kyle? Somebody.”

Losing a loved one to suicide is one of the worst blows someone can experience, psychologists say. It’s not just dealing with grief, which is hard enough, it’s the terrible guilt, especially so when it’s a child.

“As a parent, we want to think that we could have saved them, we could have protected them, it could have turned out different. And there’s no answer to that. And I think that’s part of the torture of when you have a child die by suicide is you just don’t know,” said Christina Liparini, a licensed psychologist and volunteer at Good Grief, a nonprofit group that serves families that have experienced the death of a parent or child.

Liparini, who also heads up the PsyD program in counseling psychology at St. Elizabeth University in Morris Township, N.J., said it almost doesn’t matter the child’s past. If there were previous suicide attempts, the parents might wonder, did I find the right provider? Did we make mistakes with treatment? Were we doing enough? And if it seemingly comes out of the blue, or the parent finds out there was bullying in school or social media or in relationships, they might think, how did I not know this?

“I hate the idea of closure when we talk about grief, anyway, but there truly is no closure. There’s no answers for the parents,” Liparini said.

Studies show a mental health crisis among young people in particular. Suicide rates for the population in general are climbing after declining for a few years — up 4 percent in 2021 from 2020, to 14.1 deaths per 100,000 people, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. That was the largest one-year increase in data collected from 2001 to 2021.

A 2020 study of 575 bereaved parents, most of whom had lost a child to suicide, all said they had feelings of “blameworthiness associated with grief difficulties, complicated grief, PTSD, depression and other mental health difficulties.” The self-blame was worse for those who had a mixed or negative relationship with the deceased child or who were stigmatized by people in their lives whom they deemed to be socially significant.

William Feigelman, an emeritus professor of sociology at Nassau Community College and one of the study’s authors, can speak to that firsthand. His son hanged himself in his apartment at age 31, and even though he knew his son had a drug problem and was coming down from a cocaine high when he took his life, Feigelman couldn’t shake a feeling of blame. At one point, he chastised himself for insisting his son quit smoking before agreeing to pay for cosmetic dental work. His wife wondered whether they should have had a different kind of boat so his son could have gone tubing off the back of it.

“These are the thoughts that go through loss survivors’ heads,” Feigelman said. “You just get into this stew, where you’re just beating yourself up and yearning for the lost loved one, and blaming yourself, and going over and over it.”

The truth is, most parents couldn’t have saved their kids, because a lot of children hide the extent of their pain, said Lynne Hughes, founder and chief executive of Comfort Zone Camp in Richmond, a bereavement organization for children. But then guilt isn’t a rational emotion, she said.

“Of all the emotions that you experience after a death, guilt is the trickiest to get over, because it’s not rational,” Hughes said. “You’re not dealing with logic, and your brain starts tricking you and deceiving you into kind of a dark place.”

Rachel Dickinson has been roaming the halls of that dark place since 2011, when her 17-year-old son, Jack Gallagher, went up to his room, took out a shotgun and killed himself. She heard the gunshots from downstairs. She became so despondent, her husband brought all of her son’s belongings, his dresser, notebooks filled with his handwriting, his art supplies and violin and banjo, and the poster that hung in his room from the book, “Where the Wild Things Are,” and placed them in the attic under a big blue tarp, so his wife wouldn’t have to see them. It was there that he also placed their son’s suicide note, in which Gallagher blamed Dickinson and almost everyone else in the family for his unhappiness. Over time, Dickinson came to see the blue tarp as a protective barrier through which nothing could escape. Her husband recently told her that the blue tarp she always refers to isn’t really a tarp. It’s not even blue. It’s a white drop cloth like one might use for painting.

“It’s a really strange thing, what your mind does to protect yourself,” she said.

Dickinson, who has written extensively about her son’s death in a book called “The Loneliest Places: Loss, Grief, and the Long Journey Home” said she needed a barrier between herself and the relentless guilt, where everything she did led her on a road to self-incrimination.

But a burning source of guilt was that she and her husband, Tim, had guns in their home: Tim, because he hunted birds, and Dickinson, because she held on to a 1920s gun that belonged to her grandfather. It didn’t matter that none were loaded. Her son went out and bought ammunition for them. She felt like she provided the means for her son’s suicide.

“Everywhere I went, I was going to be wounded over and over again. That's how I felt,” she said. “I also felt like people were judging the family. Because we had a child that killed himself.”

She knows that because she did it herself, growing up in a small village and knowing two teenagers who had killed themselves, and how she wondered what it was in their home life that made them do such a thing.

Indeed, research suggests that the suicide bereaved face feelings of shame and stigmatization, which can lead to social withdrawal and concealing the cause of death, both of which can complicate the grieving process, thereby prolonging it, experts say.

But worse, the parents of children who died by suicide may have suicidal ideation themselves caused by the suicide of their child or a partner.

“We know that losing a loved one to suicide puts people at risk for their own suicides,” said Julie Cerel, a psychologist and social work professor and director of the Suicide Prevention & Exposure Lab at the University of Kentucky. She said she knows this not just from research but as a licensed psychologist. She said she has seen it in her clinical practice.

The prolonged grief — meaning intense and persistent enough to interfere with daily life — also can make the suicide bereaved more susceptible to becoming sick and dying before their time, research shows.

Parents of children who die by suicide need to know that it’s not their fault, said Susan Tellone, clinical director at the Society for the Prevention of Teen Suicide in Manasquan, N.J.

“It’s a momentary disconnect, from the survival instinct, and there’s oftentimes an irrational component to it,” Tellone said. “That’s why it’s so difficult to understand.”

The individual is usually suffering from an unbearable amount of emotional pain, and they see the only way to end their pain is to end their life, she said.

“It's not necessarily that they're choosing to die. They’re choosing to end the emotional pain that they're in,” Tellone said.

As damaging and traumatic as suicide is to those left behind to pick up the pieces, experts said that some good can come out of their grief: It’s a concept called post-traumatic growth, in which people who have gone through a terrible experience, such as a loved one’s suicide, can sometimes develop other skills that take their lives in new and different directions — and take them away from the constant rumination on “why?”

“People with post-traumatic growth end up at a place in their lives that they wouldn’t have gotten to except because of their experience. There are several facets to PTG including new possibilities, relating to others, personal strength, spiritual change and appreciation of life,” said Cerel, who has studied the phenomenon. She said that studies about the concept have been done on people who lived through 9/11, the Holocaust or even cancer.

It’s not a matter of resilience, where people go back to where they would have been before the suicide, Cerel said. It’s more someone changing course, for instance getting a master’s degree to be a social worker and help other families or start foundations or advocacy work based on their loss, to help change the world and make it better, in ways they never would have understood they could do before their grief, she said.

“The thing we do know is that altruism helps a lot [when dealing with terrible grief]. Being able to see outside of yourself — whether that’s volunteering, mentoring other bereaved families, starting a foundation, doing advocacy, doing clinical work, something that doesn’t just keep you in your own grief and guilt,” Cerel said.

Since his son’s suicide, Feigelman has made studying the suicide bereaved his life’s work. Dickinson wrote a book of painful and probing essays that may help others who lose a child to suicide. And Craig left his job running a private equity firm to take the reins of a charity, Interfaith Neighbors, that provides meals, housing and jobs to low-income communities. He said he wanted to help people in the way that friends and family had helped him and his family in their darkest moments. Leaning into God and helping others has been a path out from the torment of his son’s death, he said. He then quoted a passage from Second Corinthians about how God comforts us in our time of need so we can comfort others in need.

“Putting that into deeds, not just words, eased many pains,” he said.

He also has reached a level of self-forgiveness, and that, researchers say, is important to finding one’s way out of the guilt. A 2020 study showed that suicide-loss survivors with low levels of self-forgiveness showed the highest levels of depression and suicidal ideation compared with other groups in the study. Conversely, those who forgave themselves were better protected against their own depression and suicidality.

In his journey, Craig has come to understand this: people have free will, and that includes one’s children. There’s a belief that we can control all of the circumstances involving our children, and if we don’t, we have failed as parents, he said. But some things are out of our hands.

“I’m more understanding of the fact that [Kyle’s life] was not my life to control,” he said.

If you or someone you know needs help, visit 988lifeline.org or call or text the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988.

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