Editor’s Note: This post is a fully rewritten and expanded version of “Why? The Glass Full of Water,” originally written in 2015 for his earlier blog at SOS Madison (sosmadison.com), the suicide loss support group Jack and Teri Klingert have co-facilitated in Madison, New Jersey for more than fifteen years. The glass metaphor has become one of the most requested pieces we share with newly bereaved survivors, especially those still searching for the single event that explains everything. This version keeps the original symbolism intact and builds a fuller, more clinically grounded case around it.
You have replayed it more times than you can count. The last phone call. The last time you saw them. The argument, the silence, the sentence you wish you had said instead of the one that actually left your mouth.
Somewhere in all that replaying, you have probably landed on one moment and decided that if it had gone differently, none of this would have happened. That single moment is usually where the search for why suicide happens begins.
In fifteen-plus years of facilitating a suicide loss support group, I have watched survivor after survivor search that one moment for an answer. I understand why. Sitting with a loss that has no clean explanation is exhausting.
That single moment is almost never the actual cause.
Rarely is it one singular event that leads to a suicide, it is far more often an accumulation of life issues that finally overwhelms a person’s capacity to cope with what they are facing.
Unfortunately their brain betrays them.
This is the glass full of water story. It is one of the oldest teaching stories I share in our support group meetings, and for the survivors who hear it, something shifts almost every time. They come in convinced that one moment explains the death. They leave understanding that the moment was never big enough to carry that much weight on its own.
If the weight of blame or guilt in this post feels like more than you can carry right now, please reach out. You can call or text 988 to reach the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, or text HOME to 741741 to reach the Crisis Text Line. Both are free, confidential, and available right now.
Why Suicide Happens Is Rarely About One Moment
Think about a glass of water. Now imagine that the person you cared for deeply was carrying that glass every day of their life. Every unresolved struggle added a little water. Childhood wounds that never fully healed. A tendency toward depression or anxiety that nobody around them caught, or caught too late. Fear and shame that kept them from saying out loud how much pain they carried. Losses of their own, large and small, that stacked up over the years.
Some of the water evaporated on its own. Good days. Moments of connection with people they cared about. But the glass never fully emptied. And on some days, more water went in than ever came out.
None of us saw the glass filling. Often, they made sure we didn’t. People carrying deep pain get remarkably good at managing how they look from the outside. They learn early that the world does not always respond well to what they are actually feeling, so they smile through it, and they do their performance of normal, and protect the people around them from what they are really carrying.
After enough time, the glass reaches the brim. Not because of anything that happened that day or that week. Because of everything that happened over a lifetime.
Then one last drop falls in.
The glass overflows.
What came out was not the last drop, it was a lifetime of issues.
There is another version of this idea that I share often at the same time around the room at SOS Madison.
A psychologist is teaching a class on stress holds up a glass of water and asks the students how heavy they think it is. Answers range from eight ounces to twenty.
She shakes her head. The weight does not matter, she says. It depends on how long I hold it. Held for a minute, it is nothing. Held for an hour, my arm aches. Held for a full day, my arm goes numb and I cannot feel it anymore.
The glass never gets heavier. The longer you hold it, the heavier it becomes.
That is the glass your person was carrying. Not necessarily heavier, in absolute terms, than anyone else’s glass. But held for so long, in so much silence, that it became something almost impossible to keep holding.
By the time a glass is that full, many people slip into what researchers describe as a suicidal trance, a narrowed, tunnel-vision state where the pain in front of them is the only thing that feels real. That trance is not the cause of the overflow. It is what the overflow feels like from the inside.
What Was Actually Filling the Glass
Research on suicide tells us something important and hard to hold at the same time. According to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, more than 90 percent of people who die by suicide were living with a diagnosable mental health condition, most often depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, or some combination of these. Many were never diagnosed. Many were diagnosed but never adequately treated. Many struggled quietly for years, sometimes decades, before anything visible broke the surface.
That statistic is not meant to reduce anyone to a category. It is one way of describing what was actually inside the glass.
Mental health struggles are not always loud.
They can live alongside achievement, humor, a full calendar, and people who care.
Someone in real pain often does not look, from the outside, like someone in that much pain.
That gap between the inside and the outside is part of what makes this loss so disorienting for the people left behind.
There is also a genetic thread researchers are still working to understand. Some people carry a higher inherited vulnerability to suicidal thinking that has nothing to do with anything they did or failed to do. It is simply part of what was already in the glass before life added anything else.
The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention’s risk factor list identifies some of what tends to fill a glass like this one. This is not a checklist to run down for the person you lost, or for yourself, or for anyone else in your life right now. It is simply a picture of what commonly fills glasses like this one, drawn from research across many thousands of losses.
- Physical health conditions
- Chronic pain
- Financial crisis
- Job loss
- Difficult life transition
- The end of a marriage or another significant relationship
- Childhood abuse, neglect, or early trauma
- Family history of suicide
- Access to lethal means during a moment of crisis
None of these things alone explains a death.
Together, over years, they are exactly the kind of accumulation this whole post is about.
If this list has you worried about someone else in your life right now, secure storage of firearms and medications is one of the most effective ways to keep them safe while they get the support they need.
One factor deserves its further details, because so many survivors carry a particular kind of guilt around it.
A previous suicide attempt is, according to that same AFSP list, one of the strongest known risk factors for a later death.
If your person had attempted before, you may be carrying the weight of believing this time should have gone differently, or that you should have known it wouldn’t. That weight belongs in the glass too, and it was never yours to carry alone.
Alcohol and other substances are also frequently part of the picture. National surveillance data collected through the CDC’s Violent Death Reporting System has found alcohol to be a contributing factor in roughly a third of suicide deaths, many of those who died were legally intoxicated at the time.
Substance use does not cause a suicide by itself, but it can lower the barrier between pain and action in a moment that might otherwise have passed.
It is one more way a nearly full glass can overflow. If your person had been drinking or using substances that day, that is water that was already in the glass, not a new last drop you could have poured out by taking a bottle away. The glass does not work that way.
If you want to go deeper on how mental health struggles specifically shape a suicide loss, mental health and suicide loss covers that ground more fully than one section here can.
If reading about mental health and suicide risk feels dangerously close to home right now, both for the person you lost and for yourself, that reaction makes sense, and you deserve support for it too.
One small thing that can help if you are worried about your own mental health while grieving is this. A single honest sentence to a doctor, something like “I have not been myself since I lost someone to suicide,” is often enough to open the door to the right kind of help.
Why the Last Drop Gets All the Blame
When we lose someone to suicide, grief almost always goes looking for the last drop. This is completely understandable. The mind is wired to search for causes, and it wants, more than anything, a cause we could have acted on.
So we fixate on the last conversation. The thing we wish we had handled differently. The warning sign we think we missed. The day we were not there.
Hindsight bias makes this worse. It is the mind’s habit of rewriting history with knowledge we did not have at the time, insisting we should have known something that was, in fact, invisible.
But the last drop did not cause the overflow.
The glass was already full.
This is where the guilt so many survivors carry usually comes from, not from anything a survivor actually did, but from mistaking the last drop for the whole glass.
Around the room at SOS Madison, I have a name for this cycle I use constantly, “the Could Have, Should Have, Would Have loop”.
It is the same handful of moments, replayed over and over, each time landing on a version of yourself that somehow should have seen what could not have been seen.
Whatever the last drop was in your situation, and it may have been something very small, something that would not have mattered on any other day, it did not carry the weight you have been assigning to it.
The glass was already carrying a lifetime.
That last drop had nowhere else to go.
The Real Answer to Why Suicide Happens
There is a why that exists. It is just not the one grief tends to look for.
The why is not the last argument, or the semester that went badly, or the job that was lost. Those things may have been the last drop. But the glass was already full before any of them fell in.
Suicide is not about a desire to die, it is about a desire to end the pain they are feeling.
That distinction matters more than almost anything else in this post. Researchers call the unbearable psychological pain behind it psychache, and understanding it changes the entire shape of the question. Suicide crisis syndrome describes the narrow, urgent state that can take over in the hours before a death, which is part of why the person could not simply reach out and tell you what was happening.
Is suicide a choice?
I do not believe it is, not in the way we normally use that word. A choice implies options a person can actually see and weigh against each other. By the time the glass overflows, their brain has betrayed them, and the options that used to feel visible are no longer there.
If any part of this explanation feels less like understanding someone else and more like recognizing something in yourself right now, please pause. Suicide loss survivors carry a higher risk of struggling with their own thoughts of suicide, and there is no shame in that. You can call or text 988 or reach the Crisis Text Line any time, for a crisis or just to talk.
The clinical research on suicide loss grief, including John Jordan’s peer-reviewed framework, describes the death as something survivors eventually have to understand in full context, not as a single act, but as the end point of a long and largely hidden struggle.
That is the why.
It does not belong to you.
It does not belong to the last drop.
What This Means for the Guilt You Are Carrying
Many survivors find, over time, that they have located a factual answer to why. They know the sequence of events. They may even know, in broad terms, what the person was struggling with.
But the pain does not lift.
Why can’t I just accept this and stop asking why?
Because the question underneath the question was never really about facts. What you are actually asking is closer to this.
- Could I have saved them?
- Did they know how much they were cared for?
- Would they have let me carry some of this if they had known I was willing?
- Were they in more pain than any of us understood?
Those are the questions that actually need tending, and they rarely have clean answers.
What I can tell you, from years of sitting with survivors around the room at SOS Madison, is that the guilt so many people carry is almost never proportionate to the role they actually played. The if-only list is almost never a list of things that would have changed the outcome.
Moving past that guilt starts with understanding the whole glass, not just the last drop.
One thing that has helped many survivors in this exact spot is simple. Write down the if-only list once, on paper, and next to each item write what you actually knew at the time, not what you know now looking back. It will not erase the guilt. It usually loosens it a little.
John’s Glass
When we lost our son John to suicide in April 2009, the why question nearly swallowed me whole. He was seventeen. A junior in high school. An outstanding student, a football player, in the school play that spring, active in our church youth group, and a second-degree Black Belt in Taekwondo. By every outward measure, our son was thriving.
Then came a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, and within less than four months, John died by suicide.
For a long time, my grief looked for the last drop. Was it this? Was it that? Was there something in those four months I should have caught? I did what many suicide loss survivors do. I also looked for a single answer, I also looked at his diagnosis to see if that was the answer to why. With time and support I realized that they were exercises that did not solve the question of why. John’s glass had filled for many reasons.
The diagnosis is not the answer, and I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to let it become one.
It is not a bow that ties the loss up neatly.
It is one piece of a glass that had likely been filling long before any of us understood what was happening.
Every year in the United States, tens of thousands of families join a club nobody chooses to be part of. In New Jersey alone, hundreds of families are added most years. And in our case, it was one seventeen-year-old boy who loved sunflowers in our garden, who loved his youth group and his teammates, who filled a house with noise and football gear and Taekwondo trophies.
John is not defined by his suicide.
That is, sadly, just how he died.
If you are a parent walking this specific road, losing a child to suicide goes further into that particular grief than one section here can.
His glass overflowed. But the glass held an entire life, and that life is his, and it holds so much more than the last drop.
If you are early in this loss, be patient with why. You will ask it more times than you can count, probably in the middle of the night, the way you already have.
But when grief pulls you toward the last drop, the single event, the final argument, the moment you replay, try to step back far enough to see the whole glass. The glass that was filling for years. The glass your person carried in silence, often while carrying everything else that made them who they were.
The overflow was not your fault.
Why suicide happens is rarely about the day it happened.
It is about everything that came before that day, most of which you could not see and none of which you could have stopped alone.
If you want support while you sit with this, there are suicide loss support groups across the country , and there is no pressure to come before you are ready, whenever that turns out to be. AFSP’s Healing Conversations program is another option, matching newly bereaved survivors with a trained volunteer who has lived this too. Alliance of Hope’s online community is there for the three in the morning hours when nothing else is open.
The person you lost deserves to be remembered for the whole of who they were, not only for the moment it became too heavy to hold.
Posts You May Also Like
- The Quest for Understanding: When Facts Don’t Answer the Question “Why” – A deeper look at why survivors keep searching for answers even after they know what happened, and what understanding actually looks like in this grief.
- Understanding Anger and Conflicted Emotions in Suicide Loss – The emotions that follow this specific loss are often contradictory; this post holds space for the ones that feel hardest to admit.
- Understanding Grief – A broader look at how grief actually works after a suicide loss, for readers who want the fuller picture beyond this one post.
- Witnessing or Discovering a Suicide: What Survivors Carry – For survivors who found the person, this post addresses the distinct layer of trauma that comes with discovery.
- Finding Your People: The Healing Power of Suicide Loss Support Groups – Why peer support specifically, and not just any grief support, tends to help survivors of this particular loss.
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