Healing After Suicide Loss: What the Journey Actually Teaches

Editor’s Note: This post replaces an earlier piece I first published on April 8, 2019 at SOS Madison. It was the tenth anniversary of us losing our son John to suicide. That original came from the heart, quickly, the way grief writing often does. It said what it needed to say. But I have wanted to return to this theme for a long time, because what I wrote then deserves more room. You can still read the original, ” Healing Is A Journey And Not A Destination” at the link above. This current version goes deeper.

In the world of grief support, “journey” is one of the most overused words in the language.

I know, because I have used it myself. For years, I said it to survivors who were sitting across from me in our support group, people who had just come in out of the cold and barely knew how to say out loud what had happened. I meant it kindly. And I meant it vaguely, the way we mean most things we say in those first conversations when the right words don’t come easily.

But after seventeen years of facilitating SOS Madison with my wife Teri, and seventeen years of living with the death of our son John, I have been rethinking what “journey” actually means. Because healing after suicide loss is not what the greeting cards describe, and it is not what I thought it was in those first raw months when I was desperate to believe there was somewhere to get to.

There is no destination. There never was.

What I know now is something different. The journey is not a path between where you are and where “healed” lives. It is a practice. A daily one. And after seventeen years, it is still teaching me something new.

If you are in crisis right now, please call or text 988. The 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available around the clock. Suicide loss survivors carry an elevated risk, and you do not have to be alone with this tonight.

Why Suicide Loss Makes “Journey” Feel Like a Hollow Word

I want to say something about why suicide loss grief is different, because the word “journey” fails in suicide loss in a way it does not quite fail in other kinds of loss.

When someone dies of cancer or a heart attack, the people around you understand what happened. They can follow the story. They know the vocabulary. They know how to show up. The path to the death was defined by an illness.

When someone dies by suicide, something else happens. The unanswerable question arrives. The guilt arrives. The stigma arrives, or the fear of it, which can be just as isolating. The people who would have shown up for other kinds of loss begin to drift, because they don’t know what to say, and because your grief makes them uncomfortable in ways that grief over an illness does not.

The anger arrives too. Anger at the person who died, at the illness that took them, at the system, at the people who say the wrong thing at the worst moment. Anger and love are not mutually exclusive in this grief. And for survivors who watched someone they love suffer for a long time before the death, relief can arrive alongside the grief, followed quickly by shame about it. I have written about that directly in a companion post, Relief After Suicide Loss: Why It Doesn’t Mean You Didn’t Care .

This is not a metaphor. It is what research on suicide bereavement consistently shows. Suicide loss survivors carry a heavier grief burden than survivors of most other kinds of loss, with higher rates of guilt, self-blame, shame, and social isolation. Dr. Jack Jordan, who has spent four decades studying grief after suicide, describes the survivor’s experience as complicated by the perceived intentionality of the death and the unanswerable questions that intentionality leaves behind.

That is the grief you are being told to journey through. And the word falls short, because it implies forward movement, implies a direction, implies that you will eventually arrive somewhere. What suicide loss actually gives you is something closer to a reckoning that keeps returning. Not once. Repeatedly. At each new milestone, each new year, each new beginning you reach without the person you lost.

It Came a Little at a Time

I can trace some of the moments where healing arrived, even when I could not feel it while it was happening.

• It came a little in the first week, when we got through the funeral.
• It came a little in the first month, when we found a support group and sat across from people who understood something that almost no one in our regular lives could.
• It came when the police and coroner’s reports arrived, and for us, we had a few more facts to hold, even though the facts could not answer the question that mattered most.
• It came when we put the headstone on John’s grave.
• It came as we struggled through each of those first holidays, each of the first birthdays, each time we got to the other side of a day we had been dreading.

None of that felt like healing while it was happening. It felt like survival.

Survival, I have come to believe, is how healing begins.

It does not travel in a straight line. A good week followed by a day that takes you back somewhere you thought you had left. Laughing at something and then feeling guilty for it an hour later. Getting through a birthday and then being undone by something ordinary the next morning. Many survivors interpret that kind of setback as evidence that the progress was not real. It is not evidence of that. The oscillation is how grief actually moves.

The Thousand Choices (It Was Never a Path)

People ask me sometimes, in our support group meetings, whether healing is something that happens to you over time, or something you have to do.

After seventeen years of sitting with survivors, I finally believe there is a clear answer. It is a thousand choices.

Not one heroic decision to heal. Not a single moment of commitment that turns the tide. A thousand small ones, made over years, some of them made without fully knowing what you were choosing at the time.

In the beginning, the journey was solitary in ways I did not fully understand while it was happening. Teri and I walked through it side by side, but we were each alone in ways that are hard to describe.

It was difficult to speak about what had happened except with a small number of people we trusted. Outside that circle, the truth of our loss felt too raw, too charged, too likely to land wrong.

Then we began making choices that moved us toward something different. Not all of them came early. Some took years to become possible.

• The choice to walk into a support group when everything in us wanted to go home.
• The choice to work with a grief counselor who helped us get some footing under us in those first brutal months.
• The choice to lean into our church community when our faith was shaken and shelter was still offered.
• The choice to find the people who gave us energy and hold tight to them, and to let go of the relationships that were adding to our pain. Not everyone has the capacity to walk alongside you in this kind of grief. Recognizing that is not bitterness. It is just the truth of how loss reshapes a life.
• The choice to say John’s name out loud at a dinner table when the silence had gone on too long.
• The choice to return to our faith even when it had been shaken in ways that were not fully resolved and might never be.

You cannot go back and stop the death. That is the brutal, permanent truth at the center of this loss. You cannot go back to the person you were before it happened, either. That person is gone, which is its own kind of grief.

What you can do, slowly and imperfectly, is pick up the pieces and begin to put them together into something new. The person you become through this is different from who you were before. Not lesser. Different in ways that take years to understand, and that carry a capacity for compassion you would not have found any other way.

This is not a statement about willpower. Many survivors in our group have described the early months as a time when they could not choose anything, when grief had taken over entirely. That is true and real. The ability to choose comes back slowly, and it comes back differently for different people, and there is no shame in how long it takes.

But the accumulation of those choices, stacked across weeks and months and then years, is what healing is made of. Not a destination you walk toward. The choices themselves.

I have written about what blocks those choices in Roadblocks to Healing After a Suicide Loss, and I encourage you to read that if something feels stuck right now. The obstacles are real and they are worth facing.

The Milestones That Keep Accumulating

One thing no one told us in 2009 was that the milestones would not end.

I do not mean that as a warning. I mean that there is a quality to this grief that keeps presenting you with new ground to cross, new markers you did not anticipate, and each one teaches you something about where you are and what you are carrying.

Some you expect.

The first year teaches you how to survive the firsts. The second year teaches you something harder, because the numbness has lifted, the support has dropped away, and the world has moved on in ways you have not.

Some you do not expect at all. Earlier this year I wrote about the day the math tipped, the day I had been grieving John longer than he had been alive. I called it the Balance Point. I did not know until that morning what that day would feel like. Then I did, and it taught me something new about what integrated grief actually means, about carrying a loss rather than trying to move past it.

The anniversary of the death teaches. Birthdays teach. Graduations that do not happen teach. Weddings teach. The birth of a grandchild teaches. Each of these moments is a new encounter with the loss, not a repetition of the first one.

What I have also learned is that the approach to a milestone is often harder than the day itself. The weeks before an anniversary. The slow dread building toward a birthday. Getting through that approach, getting to the other side of it, is its own form of what this journey requires.

This is what I mean when I say the journey has no destination. It is not that healing does not happen. It does. It is that healing is not a place you arrive at and then occupy permanently. It is a relationship you keep developing with the loss, and the loss keeps presenting you with new material.

The research on this resonates with what I have experienced. Tedeschi and Calhoun’s work on post-traumatic growth describes something many long-term survivors recognize: the loss does not diminish you permanently. Alongside the ongoing grief, something else can develop, a capacity for compassion and presence that would not exist in quite the same form without having been through this. Not because the loss was worth it. Never that. But because surviving it, day by day, changes you in ways that are not all loss.

The Jack people meet today is a better version of the Jack I was before the loss of my son. It did not come easy, I lost our son to get this insight.

What the Continuing Bond Has Taught Me

I want to say something I have been circling around for years and now I am finally saying out loud.

I can still hear John’s voice.

Not auditorially, not like a hallucination. But in the way that seventeen years of loving someone leaves an imprint that does not fade. When I am about to make a decision and I pause, something in me knows what he would say. When I am in the garden near the sunflowers he called the happiest flowers because they were always smiling, I feel his presence the way you feel warmth when the cloud moves and the sun comes back.

When our daughter got married, more than seven years had passed since we lost John to suicide. We had survived the early years. We had built a life that had real joy in it again. And walking into that wedding knowing John would not be standing up there with us was still one of the harder things I have done. His absence was specific and sharp in a way that a regular day is not. I wrote about that experience in Weddings After Suicide Loss, about what it takes to hold grief and celebration in the same room at the same time.

But John was not absent, either. That is the part that is harder to explain.

Not long ago I was sitting on the couch scrolling through YouTube when an algorithm handed me something I did not expect. A David Guetta remix of “Forever Young,” and somewhere in the first few bars I closed my eyes and I was picturing John dancing like he owned the room. I wrote about that in a piece called Forever Young, about how the same handful of notes that once sounded like mourning could arrive, seventeen years later, and sound like celebration. John was in the living room with me. I could feel it. That is the only way I know how to say it.

This is what the research calls continuing bonds. The concept, first formalized by Klass, Silverman, and Nickman in 1996, holds that maintaining a connection with the person who died is not a failure to grieve. It is part of how healthy, integrated grief works. For decades before that, the field told bereaved people to “let go.” We now understand that to be wrong, and harmful.

But the lived experience of continuing bonds is something the theory does not fully contain. What I feel when I think of John is not the anguish of 2009. It is not the absence of him, either. It is something I can hold, something I carry that has become part of how I move through the world.

If you have felt this, you are not imagining it. You are not holding on incorrectly. You are doing what many long-term survivors find to be the most sustaining part of the journey, allowing the relationship to transform rather than requiring it to end. If you have not felt it yet, you are not doing something wrong, grief just moves on it’s own path and timeline for each person.

What Seventeen Years Has Actually Changed

I am not the same person I was on Good Friday 2009, when we lost John.

Some of that is loss. I know things now I would give almost anything not to know. I have gotten stronger carrying a weight that was not there before. My wife Teri and I have had conversations no one should have to have, in rooms that were too quiet, at times that came too early in the morning.

And some of what has changed is something harder to say without feeling like I am betraying the grief by admitting it.

I am, in some ways, more present than I was before. More deliberate about what matters. More capable of sitting with someone in their worst moment without flinching, because I have been in a worst moment of my own. I know what it feels like. I tell people that I am not walking in their shoes, but I know how painful they can be. This is what the researchers mean by post-traumatic growth, and what it looks like in practice is not dramatic. It looks like ordinary life, lived with a different kind of attention.

What I know now that I did not know in 2009.

Grief does not have to be fought to be survived. You can let it come and let it pass and let it come again, and that movement is not failure. It is how it works.

The losses did not stop with John. Friendships that could not hold the totality of the loss. A faith shaken close to its foundation. A future for our family that simply disappeared. Rebuilding those losses has been its own work. The faith piece took years of hard-fought ground, and I have written about what that looked like in Faith After Suicide Loss: What Good Friday Taught Me and The Hard-Fought Hallelujah. Those paths back are real. They are part of the journey too.

One dimension I neglected for too long was the physical one. I was exhausted in ways that felt permanent. I ate too much and gained weight, and told myself I was managing when I was not. About twelve years in, I finally made a change with my physician. Teri and I started walking four miles together every morning. I lost ninety pounds. I had not understood until then how much of the grief had been stored in my body alongside everything else.

Healing is not just emotional and intellectual and spiritual. The body is part of it too.

The people who stay will sometimes surprise you. There are real helpers. The community of other survivors has been one of the most important parts of our healing, not because they have answers but because they understand the questions in a way no one else fully can.

The relationship with John has not ended. It has not been replaced by grief. It has been transformed. The love that existed before is still here, in a different form, teaching me something new almost every day.

And understanding the specific shape of suicide bereavement, including the guilt, the unanswerable question, the way this loss carries its own particular weight, has been part of how I have learned to carry it rather than just endure it.

The Journey, Reclaimed

I want to take back the word to reuse it in it’s new meaning.

Journey.

Not the greeting-card version. Not the vague, implied direction from here to somewhere better. The real thing.

The journey is the accumulation of every choice you make to keep going. Every morning you get up when you do not want to. Every time you say the name of the person you lost, out loud, in a room that might go quiet. Every milestone that arrives without warning and teaches you something you could not have known was coming. Every moment the bond surfaces and reminds you that love is not cancelled by death.

After seventeen years, that is what healing after suicide loss looks like for me. Not a place I arrived at. A practice I am still in, every day.

You do not have to be moving fast on this. You do not have to feel like you are moving at all, sometimes. The AFSP’s Healing Conversations program connects newly bereaved survivors with trained survivor volunteers, one-on-one, for anyone who needs to talk to someone who has been further down this road. The Alliance of Hope for Suicide Loss Survivors offers an online forum for survivors who cannot yet find in-person support.

We are all still turning toward the light. Seventeen years in, that is still what I call it. The sunflowers John loved do not face away from the sun. They do not stop turning. They just keep doing it, steady and slow, season after season, the way survival works.

That is enough. Whatever year you are in, wherever you are on this, that is enough.

Posts You May Also Like

• Physics = Love: Continuing Bonds After Suicide Loss – Uses the physics principles of Persistence of Vision and Conservation of Energy to explain how the bond with the person you lost continues to exist in a real and meaningful way.
• Which Is More Important: The Journey or the Destination? – Explores why “healed” is not a real destination and why the people alongside you on the road may matter more than any particular milestone.
• Words That Help After Suicide Loss: Ten Hard-Fought Words – A word-by-word look at what integrated grief can feel like from the inside.
• 5,000 Days vs. 6,244 Days: Long Term Healing After a Suicide Loss – A concrete, numbers-based look at what that journey actually adds up to after thirteen-plus years.
• Seventeen Years and Still Counting: Long-Term Survival After Suicide Loss – A milestone essay written on John’s 34th birthday, exploring what moving through loss rather than past it actually looks like after nearly two decades.
• Grieving Longer Than They Lived: A Suicide Loss Milestone – Introduces the Balance Point concept and what integrated grief looks like for survivors of young deaths.
• Forever Young: The Remix That Taught Me to Dance Again – The personal essay behind the moment described in this post, on continuing bonds, presence in spirit, and the possibility of dancing while grieving.

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