So much of grieving is suicide prevention

Can we stop being coy about it?

When we talk about grief, we talk a lot about how to cope. What we rarely expand on is what we mean by that.

If you read between the lines, if you squint, you might spot the truth we’re too polite or alarmed to openly acknowledge: that the pain of a life-changing loss is so incomprehensible, so all-consuming and so traumatising that it feels like it could kill us, too.

Not metaphorically. Literally.

When you’re in the pit of grief, as I have been since the loss of my mum seven-and-a-half months ago, life seems unrelenting and, ironically, endless.

It’s not surprising that sometimes, the idea of your own death doesn’t sound so bad.

Certainly, during the hellscape that comprises the luteal phase of my period, I regularly hope that someone will deliver a quick and painless blow to my head so I don’t have to keep dragging this lumpen body around for what feels like no purpose whatsoever.

It makes me sad to admit it, but every day, to a greater or lesser extent, for anywhere between a few seconds and several hours, part of me wishes I were dead.

I’m not actively suicidal and I don’t have a plan to end it all. In moments of despair, my mind unwittingly flashes to throwing myself out of the window but it’s so close to the ground I’d sprain my ankle at most.

But I always feel delicate and raw, like an exposed nerve. If my outside matched my insides, I’d be shaking like a chihuahua.

Every day takes enormous effort to get through because it feels like with a smidge less care and attention, I’ll slip through the cracks of this world and into another.

I’m only able to keep going to the extent I do — writing and reading for my PhD, stacking the dishwasher, washing my clothes and body on occasion, intermittently leaving the house — by sticking to the mantra “just make it until midnight”.

That makes sense, it’s manageable. It prevents me from spiralling into the bleakest of places.

You can get through a whole day like that, more automaton than human. But it’s not the life anyone dreams of. And it’s exhausting.

I feel like both invalid and carer; chivvying myself to get up, eat something, put on socks, make the bed…

Over the last few months, I’ve arranged my week so that, on as many days as possible, I have a grief support group in the evening.

That way, I can push through the day, ignoring my feelings, getting work done, powered by caffeine and protein bars, and then fall apart among others at night, knowing I’m not as alone as I feel.

I go to between four and seven grief support groups every week, because the first time I went I felt so comforted that I was able to cook and eat a meal for the first time since my mum died, when previously I’d been subsisting on small chunks of Wensleydale.

I still need these tentpoles of my week or I think I may possibly collapse onto the floor, start weeping and never stop.

Although that’s always an option, I can’t let myself fall so far or feel so bad. Not while I’m on my own. It doesn’t feel safe.

If there isn’t a support group (someone please start a Friday night one for losers!), I’ll speak to a friend or go to a Zoom social or an online writing class or a somatic experiencing workshop or whatever else I can find to make me feel a bit better or at least more tethered to the world and not like I could drift out of it.

I wonder how many other people feel like this: uncomfortable, unwelcome, unloved (even when like me, they still are, just… less). It amazes me that more of us aren’t drowned by the wave of our feelings, crushed by the weight of our loss.

Yet somehow we keep going. We see our dentists and refill our prescriptions and if we have any sense, mask up in the face of a continuing global pandemic.

And all of this is suicide prevention, too, on a longer-term scale, fighting the urge to give in to total neglect (partial neglect is, I think, to be expected).

Of course I understand that, like most things, this probably isn’t true for everyone. Recently I heard a griever say that for them, grief means swinging between pain and joy.

I sat there, stupefied.

Joy? Joy felt out of my reach before and is oceans away now. I occasionally have a pleasant dissociation for an afternoon or an evening but for the most part, I’m not swinging between pain and joy. I’m swinging between pain and slightly less pain.

Maybe some people with partners and children and siblings and local friends and a job outside the home don’t feel the same intensity of sadness, or at least have a corresponding upswing.

But those of us on our own have less opportunity to focus on anything outside ourselves, especially if our lives are quite isolated. Especially if we lived with the person we lost.

But I’m not the only one who feels obliterated.

According to the grief support charity Sue Ryder, “Grief can be so consuming and overwhelming, and it can often be hard to see things getting any better. Many people say they have thought about taking their own life after a bereavement or wish they could be reunited with the person who has died in some way.”

I think we need to demystify this, to stop being so secretive, to talk about feeling hopeless and pointless and worthless.

Talking doesn’t make those feelings or the likelihood of suicide increase — the opposite is true.

Even in grief support groups, it can seem as though we’ve tacitly agreed to not be too bleak. We hint our way around the depths, talking about low moods and life not being worth living but seldom admitting that at times, even for fleeting moments, we don’t want to be here anymore.

No one wants to get flagged for a mental health check or considered a less capable griever than everyone else.

If I ever expressed my most overwhelming emotions, I’d say that I’m fighting for my life despite very little desire to live it. I know it’s what my mum would want, though, so in the absence of any other motivation, I’m going to follow the brilliant comedian Maria Bamford’s advice.

She’s survived more than one mental health crisis as well as the loss of her parents and advises her audiences: “If you stay alive for no reason at all, please do it for spite”.

That feels manageable. That I can do.

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If you feel suicidal, please don’t hesitate to contact SHOUT, the Samaritans or your local mental health helpline. The volunteers are almost always wonderful but even if they don’t quite understand, give them the benefit of the doubt; give life another five minutes. And another. For yourself. For your family. For spite.