This section is intended to help you understand more about common reactions to bereavement by suicide – physical and emotional – and how it can affect different people in the family and community.
We all respond differently to any sort of bereavement. We are individuals who each had a unique relationship with the person who died. There is no right or wrong way to feel.
When someone dies by suicide, it reaches out across the community like ripples on a pond. Families and friends are devastated – and many more people are touched. You do not have to have had a family or personal relationship – the loss of an acquaintance, colleague, client or even a stranger can affect you.
Since losing our son Jonathan to suicide in May 2011, we have done quite a lot of fundraising. We have held boot sales, stalls at fetes, skydives and many, many raffles.
In 2005 we tragically lost Fee – beloved wife and mother, when she took her own life. The shock and loss was enormous and it wasn’t until 2009 when we discovered Survivors of Bereavement by Suicide. This charity has helped all three of us, in different ways, in coming to terms with such a painful loss. It is a loss that you never get over, but their involvement in our lives has helped us to move on but not forget.