Suicide Survivor -- Feeling of Rejection & Understanding of the Deceased

Nonetheless, one common theme for suicide loss survivors is to perceive the death as a rejection, abandonment, or even a betrayal by the deceased. Note that how the act of suicide is experienced is “in the eye of the beholder,” and for some survivors, there may be little or no feeling of disloyalty or duplicity by the deceased. But for many people, the death is perceived to be a choice with a critical interpersonal message for the survivor from the deceased about the lack of worth or value of the relationship. All of this can add to the feeling of alienation and estrangement from the deceased. Continuing bonds theory, as well as common clinical experience, suggests that this kind of sudden breaking of a relationship extracts an even heavier toll from survivors of suicide loss in their mourning process. Correspondingly, an effort by clinicians to help the mourner to reinstate and repair the relationship with the deceased, and to make their peace with the “unfinished business” in the relationship, is often a necessary task of healing after a suicide loss. In my experience, this work often needs to be accomplished by some form of dialogue with the deceased – a dialogue that might have happened if the deceased had betrayed the survivor in some other way, and then was willing to make amends for the damage. The form this dialogue takes can include letter writing to the deceased, empty chair enactment of conversations with the deceased, and other forms of communication between the deceased and the mourner that are experienced as authentic and healing for the bereaved survivor (Jordan, 2012; Neimeyer, 2012, 2016; Botkin, 2014; Neimeyer, in press; Valdez et al., in press). • Development of a Durable Biography of the Deceased Walter (1996) has suggested that one of the important tasks of mourning is to create a “durable biography” of the deceased. A durable biography is a narrative of who the deceased was, what they had accomplished, and what they have left behind from their life. He argues that this process is accomplished primarily by a process of shared remembering and storytelling amongst people who knew the deceased. This process typically begins immediately at the time of death (e.g., at the funeral), and may continue on for years, or even generations within family systems. It is a universal and natural way for the community around the deceased to share their grief, and to combine and enrich each mourner’s personal narratives of interaction with the deceased over the course of their life. Suicide, however, may present special problems for the accomplishment of this important task of mourning. More specifically, because suicide is both a relatively rare and a socially stigmatized cause of death, establishing the communal narrative about the life of the deceased can become either taboo, or alternatively, almost exclusively focused around the mode of death itself. In other words, when someone dies by suicide, that fact may become the only “important” thing about their life story. Thus, mourners who wish to remember the entirety of the life of their friend or relative, not just the manner by which Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org 5 April 2020 | Volume 11 | Article 766 Jordan Lessons Learned they died, often need to make an extra effort to share (and request that others share) memories that predate and highlight other important aspects of the deceased’s identity and life story. And they also must overcome the social discouragement about talking about and remembering the deceased that comes from others in the interpersonal network, who may view the suicide as a shameful and dishonorable form of death. This implicit prohibition of the “social remembering” aspect of the mourning process can add to the emotional distress and difficulty of the survivors in integrating the loss into their own life narrative as an associate of the deceased.