What happens in the aftermath of a suicide?

Suicide is responsible for 800,000 deaths globally every year, reports The World Health Organization. The impact a suicide has on loved ones is impossible to measure.

Anyone looking to read about suicide will likely find number-orientated articles, how many people have died. There is a lot of missing content here, not only on personal stories of the people who have died by suicide, but the people they left behind.

I lost my brother to suicide this year. I didn’t know he was suicidal until he died. Much like others who lost someone to suicide, I had a lot of questions. Why did he do it? How did I not see it? I wanted to know more about suicide and why it’s so prevalent. Grief became such an integral part of my life and I felt a need to learn more about it. Grief is a complex, windy road and I was looking for streetlights to follow.

I felt incredibly isolated after my loss; it was hard to find media about suicide loss, especially sibling suicide loss. I largely found news articles reporting a suicide, but few in-depth articles talking about suicide loss and interviewing sources with personal experience. The lack of this content compelled me to dig deeper, and find the answers I was looking for. I talked to Lena Heilmann, who lost her sister Danielle to suicide in 2012, and wrote a book about it.

“Maybe a few days or a few weeks after my sister died, I heard from two people who had lost siblings in similar ways. And it was the first time that I was able to feel like a) someone understood what I was going through. And b) they were able to survive this…And it was the first time that I was like, oh, maybe I can do this too,” said Heilmann

Heilmann mentioned that she also struggled to find research on sibling suicide loss or even people who wrote about their own lived experience. She reflected that sibling grief often takes the backseat to the grief of parents.

“When I moved away from Colorado, and from my community, to teach, I would tell people I lost my sister to suicide, they’d be like ‘Oh your parents, I’m so sorry for your parents, how are they doing?’”

She believes that it’s essential for those grieving a suicide to be able to talk to others who have had a similar loss, and the more people who discuss their experiences openly, the better.

Heilmann tries to include her sister in her daily life as a form of keeping her memory alive. She goes to her grave, lights candles for her, and tries to incorporate things her sister liked into her life. She collects Gingko leaves, which her sister loved.

“Sometimes when I’m laughing really hard, I think in that moment, “This is something I want to share with my sister’ and I kind of like intentionally sharing that laughter with her,” she says.

These little ways can be a healthy way for suicide loss survivors to move on, without letting go of the person they have lost.