Losing My Brother to Suicide: What Nobody Tells You About After
Grief & Loss · Mental Health
Shared by Priya S.
People asked how I was doing for about three weeks. Then life moved on for everyone except me. What they don’t tell you about losing someone to suicide is that the grief comes in layers — the loss itself, the questions you’ll never answer, the guilt that isn’t yours to carry but you carry it anyway, and the strange loneliness of a grief that makes other people uncomfortable.
My brother died on a Thursday in April. He was 31. He had been struggling — I knew that — but I didn’t know how close to the edge he was. That’s the first layer: the loss. Raw, physical, world-altering. The kind of grief that makes you forget to eat, that wakes you up at 3am, that makes ordinary objects unbearable because he touched them.
The second layer came later. The questions. Did I miss something? Was there a call I didn’t return, a conversation I didn’t push far enough, a moment where I could have changed what happened? Suicide loss survivors live with questions that have no answers. The mind keeps running the tape anyway.
The guilt — and I want to say this clearly — is not logical. I know that. I’ve been told that by therapists and grief counselors and people who love me. Knowing it and feeling it are different things. I carried guilt that wasn’t mine for a long time before I understood that carrying it wasn’t honoring him. It was just hurting me.
The loneliness is the part nobody prepares you for. Suicide loss is a grief that makes people uncomfortable. They don’t know what to say, so sometimes they say nothing. Or they change the subject. Or they ask questions that feel like they’re looking for a reason — something that explains it, something that makes it make sense, something that means it couldn’t happen to someone they love. I learned to be careful about who I told. That carefulness was its own kind of loss.
I found a suicide loss survivors support group two years after he died. I wish I had found it sooner. Being in a room — even a Zoom room — with people who understood the specific texture of this grief changed something for me. I was no longer alone with it.
If you’ve lost someone to suicide: your grief is valid. The questions are normal. The guilt is not yours. And you don’t have to carry this alone.
Support for suicide loss survivors is available. Visit our Resources page or call/text 988.