by Trudy Meehan, PhD., D.Clin.Psych., C. Psychol., PsS.I.
When my daughter’s father died by suicide, I didn’t know what to do or say. I went to the books for advice. I couldn’t find what I needed, so I wrote my own book, The Way Home.
In this blog I’d like to talk you through how I went about negotiating this very complicated issue with my daughter, explain how I used the book, and what else I found helpful. Every death is unique, and a death by suicide is just the same. This is written from my personal perspective as a mother, with a layer of knowledge from being a clinical psychologist. However, we always have to remember how unique our situations are, and what worked for me may not be appropriate for your situation.
I started by explain the concept of death first, and I told our daughter that her father had died. My daughter was just two years old at the time, and I had found really helpful advice in books and online at the Irish Childhood Bereavement Network about how to explain death to children. It said that you should use the correct words, say ‘death’ not ‘gone to sleep’. Use clear, concrete, age or developmentally appropriate language. The advice explained that at different ages and stages, children have different ideas about death. It also said that you will need multiple conversations with your child as their understanding changes and as they have new questions. So far, so good. I felt that this all made sense, and was easy to follow. I even brought our daughter to the funeral home to say goodbye to her Dad, and the Undertaker said, “Thank God! I’m sick of telling people to include children in the funeral arrangements, you’re doing the right thing”. I was relieved, and felt happy that I was doing the right thing as a mother.
However, as well as being a mother, I’m also a Clinical Psychologist. At the time of this loss in our family, I was working with adolescents bereaved by suicide. The big question they kept asking was, “if they loved me so much, then why would they leave me?” I knew that as my daughter got older, she would eventually ask the same question, and I didn’t have a good answer for her. I thought for a long time about how to explain how someone who loves you so much could also leave you. I didn’t know what I could say to explain it. Then one day I thought about torture. Soldiers are trained to be loyal to their country, and never give up secrets, but when the pain applied is bad enough if they are tortured, they tend to give up the secrets. It hit me, pain can be stronger than loyalty, and even stronger than love. That was the answer, pain can be stronger than love, pain can disconnect us.
I had an image then of an astronaut stranded in space, he had been out on a spacewalk when a solar storm hit and he gets all smashed up.
His radio is broken and his oxygen is low. He is in pain, and he can’t hear messages of love from home base. Rescue ships are on the way, but because his radio is broken he doesn’t know that help is close by, and he just needs to hold on a little longer, and not give up hope. But the silence of space gets to him, and he loses his sense of gravity, his hope is too small and his pain is too big. In the book the astronaut cuts his safety chord to avoid the pain of having no oxygen and feeling like he is all alone in space. It’s a sad story but there’s a lot going on. In the section below I’d like to unpack the book a little so that anyone reading it or using it to talk about loss with a young person can get the most out of the book.
That was the answer, pain can be stronger than love, pain can disconnect us.
The metaphor of the astronaut whose hope is too small and his pain is too big
It’s important to point out that the book is metaphorical, the astronaut’s story is meant as an idea that you can use as a conversation starter with a young person. It is not meant to map exactly onto their loss or life experience. Some conversation topics or questions might be:
Mental Illness Specific
If you need to explain mental illness, the book might assist, and you might say something like “When your Mam/Dad died, they had a disease called depression (you can change this slightly depending on the specific mental health/mental illness). Depression makes a person’s thinking confused, and mixed up, and can make people believe that things are really bad, and that they are all alone, it can even make pain feel worse than it is. Maybe when they ended their life, they felt a little bit like the astronaut? Maybe they got confused, and lost hope, and they thought there was never going to be any help, and that their pain would not end. Maybe the pain got so bad that it stopped them being able to feel all the love they had inside of them?”
Addiction/Separation/Abandonment
In the story, the astronaut really loved their daughter, and they tried to hold on. But they had a lot of pain and they felt like there was no way that it would ever stop. They didn’t have any hope or belief that things could get better, and they would be able to get back to normal again. This is similar to how people may feel during times when they have to make a decision to leave their children with someone else who they believe is better placed to care for them. You might say something like, “They decided to leave because their pain was too big and their hope was too small but they still loved their child.”
More generally
You could prompt, “The astronaut lost hope in the story, what do you think about that?” Be prepared for the young person to be angry, they may say something like “It’s not okay for an adult to give up like that, it’s such a bad example to set young people, this is a terrible story!” Reactions like this allow a young person to feel anger about someone ‘giving up’, and dying by suicide. Anger isn’t allowed to be expressed usually, and it is particularly hard to express it towards someone they love, who they have lost. It can be impossible to express negative feelings towards a dead loved one. The book makes the expression of these kinds of emotion safe, because it is towards an imaginary character. Allow the young person to have what seem like negative reactions to the story or character in the book, this can be an opportunity for them to express taboo, contradictory or unacknowledged feelings.
More generally
It might be appropriate to say “I wonder was it a bit like this for your Mam/Dad when they died?” This is a way to open a possible conversation without forcing things. It also allows the young person to say ‘no, I don’t think it was anything like that’ or ‘why do you think it was like that?’ and in so doing further a conversation about the circumstances of the bereavement. It even opens up the possibility of conversations about not knowing what was happening for the person who died, and how hard not knowing ‘why’ is. My intention with this part of the book was that while my daughter is young, we just read this story as a regular picture book, and not link it directly to her Dad’s death. Then in a few years when she starts to ask things like ‘why would he leave me?’ I can refer back to the story and say “well, remember that story about the astronaut whose hope was too small and his pain was too big? I think it was a bit like that for your Dad when he died.” I intend the metaphor and images in the book to help me scaffold, and support future conversations that need big adult type concepts. I hope that by being able to use a story to explain these concepts, the conversation will be easier.
Even in the hardest moments, we can always find our way home — if we just hold on a little longer
While the loss of hope is a stark and sad moment in the book, there’s also a lot of positivity, and reminders that it’s worth holding onto life. That was a deliberate decision on my part. I was very conscious that I wanted to book to have a message that we should stay for each other, and choose life. I wanted to share that message as a suicide prevention message. I also wanted to share it to remind those grieving that even in the darkest of times, we can always find our way back home, and often all that we can do is hold on while we wait for that time to come.
This idea can be used to support conversations with young people about the importance of their own hope in hard times. We can encourage them to believe that things can get better especially when they look hopeless. Ways to do this include comments such as, “remember in the book, the astronaut thought there was no help coming, but the rescue ship was on its way. Sometimes we don’t know how or when help will come, we just need to get through the hard time until that help arrives. If he had waited just a bit longer, the rescuers would have gotten to him on time” or “remember in the book when the astronaut’s radio was broken, he could only hear some of the words in the messages. He started to mishear their words and he thought everyone was against him and didn’t love him. He misinterpreted what they were saying because he was listening through a broken radio. What would have been different if he had been able to hear them properly?” Whilst advocating for hope is good, it’s important not to blame the person for not holding on. Sometimes in real life, help is too slow, waiting lists are too long or the help is the wrong kind of help. So another thing to say might be “The astronaut was lucky because there was help, and love all around, it’s really sad and unfair that help didn’t come for your Mam/Dad in the way they needed it to”.
The ending is open in the book, maybe the rescue ship did arrive in time? Did the astronaut get rescued or were they too late? The young person finishes the story
An important part of the book is that the young person gets to finish the story. At the end of the book, the rescue ship arrives, and the lights shine on the astronaut as he is floating off into space. They call for him to hold on, and say “it’s time to go home” as the book ends. The next page asks the reader to ‘finish the story’. This is an important creative resource for a young person. It gives them the possibility of having a choice. They can choose to make a connection between the story in the book, and the real bereavement they have had by suicide, and say that it is too late, the astronaut is dead. Or they can choose to not talk about their own bereavement, and instead choose to move into a more positive story where the astronaut is rescued. Neither is right or wrong. Allowing this choice does not avoid facts or the truth about their bereavement, it simply gives them control about how and when they choose to process this bereavement. The open ending is not about rewriting or avoiding reality, it is about respecting the young person’s capacities to process, and giving them a chance to step away from pain and grief briefly. In an unexpected and tragic death such as suicide, all agency is lost and the young person has very little control over many things at that time. Giving a young person some control in the time after a death, and especially in how the choose to grieve, and process the death can be restorative. It can help young people regain a sense of agency and predictability in their lives.
We always start with the real concrete facts, that’s always the first step, but we also need to give the young person some choice and creative resources through which to negotiate their grief.
We always start with the real concrete facts, that’s always the first step, but we also need to give the young person some choice and creative resources through which to negotiate their grief. I found Safe Harbour a useful book for explaining the concrete facts, now I use both Safe Harbour (NOSP) and The Way Home (online) or hard copy (here) together, and pick one depending on the type of conversation that is needed.
Another choice in this part of the book is choosing how to metaphorically stay connected to the astronaut. They may be rescued or allowed to float off into space depending on the young person’s preference for continuing a relationship with them or not. Sometimes imagining the astronaut coming home in the rocket ship can be a pleasing metaphorical way to imagine continuing the bonds and staying connected with a loved one. In the same way, when there has been a particularly negative or traumatic connection with the deceased, the young person may prefer to discontinue the bond, and let them float off into space at the end of the story. This too can be respected, and it can be expressed in metaphor without the young person being made to feel guilty for not loving enough the person who they want to end the bond with.
Young people need honest, factual, concrete, developmentally appropriate language to understand bereavement but they also need creative tools to help them process their grief and to give them opportunities to move in and out of that process depending on their choices and their emotional needs.
Be sure to visit our bookshelf for more book recommendations and information.
About Trudy: Dr Trudy Meehan (DClinPsych, PhD) is a Chartered Clinical Psychologist and a Lecturer in the Centre for Positive Psychology and Health at RCSI University of Medicine and Health Sciences, Dublin, Ireland. She is a TedX speaker and author. Trudy worked for Stanford University as Director of the BING Overseas Study Program, Cape Town. As a clinician she was a Senior Clinical Psychologist in Child and Adolescent Mental Health in the HSE, and Clinical Director for ‘50808’, an innovative initiative that provides 24/7 text message support for mental health issues for young people. Trudy’s research explores the value of art in the context of health and the social/political determinants of health.
Trudy was awarded funding through Irish Hospice Foundation’s Seed Grant programme supported by Creative Ireland, to engage with artist Fergal O’Connor to illustrate the text of this fictional picture book aimed at young people (and adults) who have been impacted by the sudden, complex abandonment by a loved one, such as bereavement through suicide.