Losing a Grandchild to Suicide: Grief, Guilt, and the Double Loss

You have been through loss before. Maybe you lost your own parents many years ago, or a sibling, or a close friend. Perhaps even a spouse. You know what grief feels like. Or at least, you thought you did until this happened.

Then the shocking call came. Losing a grandchild to suicide is one of the most disorienting forms of grief a person can carry, and also one of the least talked about.

I am a grandfather myself. I remember the excitement of meeting each of my own grandchildren for the first time, and the particular kind of love that asks nothing back. I haven’t lived through losing one of them, but in more than fifteen years of facilitating our support group with my wife Teri, I have sat across from many grandparents who have lost a grandchild. And everything they understood about grief turned out to be inadequate for what they found after their loss. You are not alone.

It doesn’t fit the mold of your earlier grief experience. It breaks rules you didn’t even know existed. There is no accumulated wisdom or previous heartbreak that prepares you for this. The death of your grandchild by suicide hits like a tidal wave against you and everything you thought you understood about the world.

And then, somewhere beneath the shock, you see your son or your daughter. The parent who lost their child. You watch them. You cannot reach them. You cannot fix it. It is a pain inside the pain.

This post is for the grandparents who are devastated, who are trying to hold themselves together for people they love, and who are wondering whether anyone sees what they are carrying.

If you are in crisis right now, please call or text 988 for the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, available around the clock. Suicide loss survivors carry a higher risk themselves, and that includes grandparents. Please reach out if the weight of this becomes too much to carry alone.

Jump to a section:

• This Is Not the Natural Order
• The Grief You Knew Doesn’t Quite Apply
• Guilt Has Its Own Shape Here
• Stigma in Your Own Generation
• How Many Grandchildren Do You Have?
• Watching Your Adult Child Struggle
• What You Were Taught About Suicide May Not Hold Anymore
• The Search for Meaning
• What You Can Do for the Parents
• Finding Your Own Support
• You Are Still Their Grandparent
• Printable Guide PDF
• 10 Things to Know

This Is Not the Natural Order

One of the most destabilizing things about losing a grandchild, to any cause, is what it does to the path you thought your life was following. Grandparents are supposed to die first. That is the unspoken arrangement, that is the natural order that organizes how we think about generations and time and what comes next.

When a grandchild dies, that order is reversed. When the death is by suicide, this reversal feels even more painful. There are no long term illnesses that explain it, no accidents to point to. The mind reaches for reasons and finds questions instead. And the grief, which you may have worked through before in a relatively straightforward way, suddenly is very confusing.

The Center for Loss and Life Transition has written about this dimension of grandparent grief, noting that when a young person dies, the violation of the natural order triggers a particular kind of anguish. It is not just the loss of who they were. It is the loss of who they were becoming, and of your place in that future.

I remember watching our son John’s own grandparents try to face this. They cared for him without any conditions, the way grandparents do. In the months before he died, they could see something in him was struggling. But they did not have the words or the life experience for a struggle like his, and after he was gone, they did not have the solutions to fix it. It was disorienting for them. That was not a failure on their part. Nobody comes into this with a map on how to deal with a suicide loss already drawn.

You were part of their story. They were part of yours. That story was supposed to continue well past you.

The Grief You Knew Doesn’t Quite Apply

You may have experienced real, significant losses before this one. And in some ways, that experience makes this harder, not easier. You understand what grief is supposed to feel like. You know you have survived it before. And yet what you are feeling now doesn’t seem to follow the same rules.

Research on bereaved grandparents consistently shows that grandparent grief is frequently underestimated, including by grandparents themselves.

You may have minimized your own pain because someone else’s seemed greater. You may have pushed yourself into a support role before you had a chance to absorb what happened to you.

And when the death is by suicide, there are layers that don’t appear in other losses. The shock is more acute. The questions are harder. The stigma can make it more isolating. The support that would naturally flow toward you may be thinner, because the people who would normally offer it are themselves devastated.

Many grandparents describe a particular loneliness in this loss. Mourning deeply, and quietly, in a room where everyone’s attention is rightly on the parents. The grief is real. It is heavy. And the grandparent’s grief is often invisible.

Some grandparents reading this were not in a secondary role at all. If you were the one raising your grandchild, getting them up for school, signing their permission slips, this loss sits closer to losing a child than to the more distant grief this post mostly describes. Everything here still applies to you. So does everything written for parents who have lost a child, and you deserve both kinds of support, not just one.

If that is your experience, you are not imagining it.

Guilt Has Its Own Shape Here

Guilt is one of the most common features of any suicide loss. The questions that follow a death by suicide are relentless and personal. Could I have known? Did I miss something? Was there a moment I could have reached them differently?

For grandparents, the guilt sometimes takes a similar form. You may wonder whether your grandchild ever came to you with something they were struggling with, or why they didn’t. You may replay a last visit, a last phone call, a last holiday dinner, looking for a turning point. The mind searches for the moment that, if you could return to it, you would handle differently.

This searching is not a reflection of failure. It is a reflection of how much you cared for them. Many suicide loss survivors go down this path.

But the hindsight bias that follows a suicide loss is well-documented. It is the way the mind, after a shocking loss, reorganizes the past so that everything looks like a warning in retrospect. The warning signs that feel obvious now were almost never obvious then. The conditions that lead a person to take their own life are complex and rarely reducible to a single missed moment.

The guilt you are carrying is real. The premise underneath it, that you could have prevented this if only you had seen more clearly, is almost certainly not true.

Both of those things can be true at once.

Our posts on guilt after suicide loss and the difference between guilt and responsibility may offer some company as you work through this. Guilt tends to be stubborn in suicide loss. It doesn’t usually respond to logic alone. It needs time, support, and the company of others who have carried it too.

Stigma in Your Own Generation

There is an isolation that many grandparents describe, and it is different from the isolation that bereaved parents face.

Your peer group, the people your age who have known you for years, may hold views about suicide that make it hard to be honest with them. The friends who would normally rally around you may not know how to respond to this one. Some may say something that reveals an older, less compassionate understanding of suicide. Some may go quiet. Some may say well-intentioned things that hurt.

This doesn’t make them bad people. It often means they are frightened, and that they are drawing on the same frameworks about suicide that you yourself may be dealing with that is discussed in the section below on faith and culture. It can leave grandparents in a painful position, grieving a death you cannot fully explain to the people who are supposed to support you.

If you live far from where your grandchild lived, this isolation can have another layer. People may quietly assume the distance means the loss hits you less hard, even when it doesn’t. Geography was never a measure of how much you cared for them.

Some grandparents find themselves softening the cause of death in conversation, describing it as a sudden loss or a medical crisis, because the full truth feels like more than they can manage alongside someone else’s discomfort. That is understandable. You do not owe anyone a full explanation, especially not in early grief. But the cost of that protection is real. It can deepen the isolation that suicide loss already creates.

It can help to have a few short lines ready for the moments when someone says the wrong thing. “I don’t need you to understand it, I just need you to let me feel it” works when someone tries to talk you out of your grief. “That’s not something I’m ready to explain right now” works when you don’t owe anyone the full story. “I’d rather you just say you’re sorry” works when someone reaches for an explanation instead of comfort.

Finding a suicide loss support group matters especially for grandparents for this reason. In a room of suicide loss survivors, you do not have to manage anyone else’s reaction to the cause of death. You do not have to explain or protect or soften. You can say what happened, and the people around you will already understand.

How Many Grandchildren Do You Have?

Someone will ask you this. A neighbor, a doctor’s receptionist, a person at an event, someone who doesn’t know. And you will stand there for a moment, deciding what to say.

Do you say the number that was true before the death? Do you include the grandchild who died? Do you say their name and then have to watch the other person’s face change and spend the next several minutes managing their discomfort while your own grief sits on your chest like a stone?

Many grandparents describe rehearsing this answer for months. They do it in front of a mirror at first. Some settle on including them always, regardless of what follows, because the alternative feels like a small erasure that adds up over time. Others find a version that protects them in simple encounters and reserves the full truth for people who have earned it. There is no single right answer, and what works one day may not work the next. It’s your story and you get to decide who does and does not hear it. That is your choice.

You do not have to answer in a way that deletes your grandchild from your life. They are still part of the count. They are still yours. One grandparent told me they say they have three grandchildren, and one of them is in heaven.

Watching Your Adult Child Struggle

This may be the hardest part of all of it.

You are grieving your grandchild. And at the same time, you are watching your own son or daughter, the one you raised, absorb a grief that you cannot reach into and undo.

Every parental instinct is telling you to fix this, to protect them, to carry this weight so they don’t have to. There is nothing you can do. Nothing makes it better. You can show up. You can stay. But you cannot carry this for them. That helplessness is its own specific agony.

In the immediate aftermath, the casseroles arrive at the parents’ door. The calls of condolence go to the parents. The grandparents are often standing just outside the circle, holding their grief in one hand and trying to steady their child with the other. You are doing two things at once. Grieving. And parenting a grieving adult. That is exhausting in a way that is hard to explain to people who haven’t experienced it.

You cannot grieve your grandchild well if you have no space to grieve at all. Supporting your child through their loss does not require you to set your own grief aside indefinitely. Grief that is consistently postponed can become heavier over time, not lighter. You need your own support. You deserve it, not as a luxury, but as a necessity.

The stress of this kind of loss ripples through entire family systems. Marriages can strain. Siblings can pull apart. Family communication that worked before can suddenly fail. Our post on marriage after losing a child to suicide was written primarily for parents, but many of the dynamics it describes spread outward in the family. If you have noticed tension or distance in your family in the months since the loss, that is common and it can be worked through.

If there are other grandchildren, siblings of the one who died, you may find yourself holding two things again. Your own grief, and theirs. Children and teenagers watch how the adults around them grieve, and they take their cues from what they see. You do not have to have this figured out to be a steady presence for them. Answering their questions honestly, in language that fits their age, and letting them see that grief is survivable, is enough. You are a role model, and it is ok to show that this is difficult. Honesty matters.

What You Were Taught About Suicide May Not Hold Anymore

Many grandparents were raised in a time, and in faith traditions or cultural contexts, where suicide was spoken of very differently than it is today. In some traditions, it was considered a sin. In some cultures, it carried deep shame, not just for the person who died, but for the entire family. In some communities, it was simply not spoken of at all, which had its own kind of message built into the silence.

Those early teachings don’t disappear when someone you cared for deeply dies. They sit in the background of your grief, and they complicate it in ways that are hard to articulate, even to yourself.

You may find yourself holding two things at once. A lifetime of belief on one side. Your grandchild on the other. The person you knew, who you cared for so deeply, who you watched grow up. That person does not fit inside the framework you were given for thinking about suicide.

Something important has happened in the last generation in how faith communities and mental health researchers understand suicide. The consensus that has emerged is that suicide is almost never a simple choice made by a person in a sound state of mind. The mental pain and distorted thinking that precede most suicides are now understood as features of serious illness, not failures of character or faith.

What you were taught when you were younger was the understanding of that time. It was not the final word. If you are carrying the specific fear about where your grandchild is now, our post on whether people who die by suicide go to heaven addresses that question directly, from the perspective of this Catholic dad who has lived with it for seventeen years.

This doesn’t mean grief becomes simpler. Balancing your beliefs you have held for decades with your profound grief is hard. You may feel disloyal to your tradition, or angry at teachings that seem inadequate to what happened to your grandchild. All of that is legitimate.

Our post on faith and the doubt that follows suicide loss touches on some of this territory. When I lost our son John, my own Catholic faith was shaken in ways I am still working through. What I found is that faith and doubt are not opposites. They can exist in the same person at the same time, and the faith that survives a loss like this tends to be more honest, and more durable, than what came before it.

You do not have to resolve this. You do not have to choose between your faith tradition and your grandchild. You are allowed to carry both, and to let your understanding of each develop in its own time.

One thing that has helped many survivors is bringing this directly to their spiritual leader, whether a priest, pastor, rabbi, imam, or another trusted figure in their faith community. A good spiritual leader can sit with you in the uncertainty, help you understand how their tradition has evolved in its thinking about suicide and mental health, and offer a space where faith and grief can coexist. Not every spiritual leader is equally equipped for this, but many are more prepared than you might expect.

The Search for Meaning

The meaning of a life shows up most clearly in how we imagine it continuing.

A grandchild carries forward something of you, a name, a laugh, a habit of kindness. Our son John carried my name, he carried his grandfather’s names. That continuity is part of what makes grandparenting feel meaningful. You are not just caring for them. You are part of their formation, part of what they are taking into the future.

When a grandchild dies by suicide, that sense of continuity is ruptured. Many grandparents describe something beyond sadness. A loss of footing, a sense that the story they had been living no longer holds together. Why did I live this long while their grandchild did not? What do I do with however many years I have left?

These are not morbid questions. They are the natural consequence of a loss that overturns the expected order. They deserve to be taken seriously, not dismissed.

If the question of why you are still here turns into something darker, please call or text 988 for the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.

Wondering why you outlived your grandchild is common in this kind of grief. Wanting to not be here yourself is different, and it deserves real support right away.

David Kessler, who collaborated with Elisabeth Kubler-Ross and has spent decades working with bereaved people, writes about meaning-making as the sixth stage of grief. Not something that arrives automatically, but something grievers build slowly through honoring who was lost and carrying the loss forward in how they live. It is rarely a dramatic turning point. It is more often a quiet accumulation of small moments.

What tends not to work is trying to reason your way back to meaning while still in the acute phase of grief. Meaning often arrives later. It cannot usually be forced. But it is real. Many survivors find it. It is seventeen years since our son’s suicide and I am still finding new meaning. Time doesn’t heal all wounds, but it does give you a perspective.

What You Can Do for the Parents

There is no perfect script for supporting your child through this. Most grandparents discover quickly that the things they would normally offer, the reassurances that have worked before, do not help the way they used to. That’s not a failure of your love. Suicide loss sits in a different category of grief, and the things that help with other losses often don’t reach into this one.

What tends to help is presence without pressure.

Showing up, not with answers or explanations, but with willingness to sit in the room.

Not rushing them toward healing.

Not offering interpretations of why this happened, even if you have found one that feels true to you.

Not pointing toward the future before they are ready to look at it.

Keep showing up over time. The first weeks often bring a surge of support that fades long before the grief does. A call at six months, a note at the one-year mark, a text on the anniversary. These things matter more than people realize.

And let people support you, too. You can find support in places you might not even imagine. You deserve support and help after your loss.

Finding Your Own Support

There is a difference between grief that is heavy and grief that has stopped moving. If the guilt does not ease at all with time, if hopelessness settles in and stays, or if it becomes hard to function in ordinary life for weeks on end, that is not a sign you are grieving wrong. It is a sign that peer support alone may not be enough right now, and that this is the moment to bring in a professional who understands suicide loss specifically.

The Alliance of Hope for Suicide Loss Survivors offers an online forum that operates like a 24/7 support group, clinically moderated and peer-led, open to all kinds of survivors including grandparents.

The Compassionate Friends is one of the few national organizations that explicitly addresses grandparent grief alongside parent and sibling grief after the death of a child. They have hundreds of local chapters and a sustained understanding of what it means to lose a grandchild.

AFSP’s survivor hub at afsp.org/ive-lost-someone includes resources for anyone who has lost someone to suicide, and their Healing Conversations program connects newly bereaved survivors with trained volunteer survivors for one-on-one conversation. I volunteer with that program myself, and I have seen what it does for people who feel like no one in their life can possibly understand.

If you are ready to work with a professional, our post on finding a grief counselor after suicide loss walks through how to find someone who genuinely understands this kind of grief, what questions to ask, and what to look for in a therapist who has experience with suicide bereavement specifically.

Finding a suicide loss support group is one of the most consistently useful things survivors describe. Not because any group provides answers. But because being in a room with people who already understand this grief, who don’t need it explained to them, changes something. You stop having to translate yourself. You don’t have to watch the words you use, they have been down this path. You may be older than most of the people in the room. That’s okay. Grief does not sort itself by generation.

You Are Still Their Grandparent

Here is something worth holding onto, especially in the early, disorienting weeks and months.

Losing your grandchild to suicide does not end your relationship with them. It changes it, permanently and in ways that are hard to articulate. But the bond does not disappear. Who they were to you, the specific weight of their presence in your life, the particular joy of them, that does not dissolve because they are gone.

Modern grief research has moved away from the idea that healing means letting go. What research and clinical experience consistently show is that the bond transforms rather than ends. Our post on continuing bonds after suicide loss explores this in depth. Your relationship with them continues in memory, in the things they left behind, in the ways their life shaped yours and yours shaped theirs.

They are still your grandchild. That does not change.

When I lost our son John to suicide seventeen years ago, one of the truest things I learned is that grief this big does not respond well to being carried alone. It needs witnesses. It needs a community. It needs people who already know the territory. If you are reading this in the early days, know that survival is possible. Not the same as before. Not without the weight of what happened. But possible.

You are not alone in this. And you do not have to carry it without help.

Posts You May Also Like

• Grieving the Future They Never Had After a Suicide Loss – Covers the future a grandparent loses too, including the role of Pop or Grandma they never got to grow into, alongside the missed milestones every relationship in the family is grieving.
• The Quest for Understanding: When Facts Don’t Answer the Question “Why” – For those searching for reasons and finding only more questions.
• Feeling Shattered – A compassionate look at the acute early days of suicide loss, when nothing feels real.
• Understanding Anger and Conflicted Emotions in Suicide Loss – Grief after suicide rarely comes without anger. This post sits with that honestly.
• Talking With Family About Your Grief After Suicide Loss – How to communicate across the grief divide when everyone is hurting differently.
• Something You Get Through: Finding Hope After Suicide Loss – For the days when it feels impossible to believe that surviving this is actually possible.

PRINTABLE GUIDE PDF

A two-page PDF guide has been generated for survivors to print, save, or share.

10 Things to Know When You Lose a Grandchild to Suicide

Here is a one page list of things to consider after your loss.