Is Suicide a Choice? What I’ve Come to Understand After 17 Years

If you’re reading this, that question has probably found you at 3 AM, staring at the ceiling. Because underneath it lives the question that really cuts: “Did they choose to leave me ?”

It hits you when you’re doing something ordinary. Grocery shopping. Driving to work. And suddenly you’re right back in it, wrestling with a word that feels like a verdict on your relationship, your love, your entire history with the person you lost.

I know this question and the emotions wrapped up in it. When my son John died by suicide on April 10, 2009, I wrestled with it constantly. John was seventeen years old. He was a football player, an honor student, a second-degree Black Belt. By every outward measure, he was thriving. Then came a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. And within four months of that diagnosis, he was gone.

Did he choose death over us? Over his future? Over everything he had to live for?

Here is what I have come to understand, through my own grief and through more than seventeen years of sitting in a support group with other survivors at SOS Madison: Suicide is not about a desire to die. It is about a desire to end unbearable pain. That distinction changes everything.

The word “choice” feels like a knife. If they chose this, what does that say about your love? About everything you shared? About whether you mattered at all?

You mattered. You still matter. The person you lost did not leave because you weren’t enough.

When “Choice” Becomes a Weapon Against Yourself

Every time someone says “they chose to die” or “it was their choice,” it probably feels like they’re telling you the person you cared for chose to abandon you. Chose to inflict this pain. Chose something else over you.

And then your mind goes to the dark places. If they chose this, then maybe you weren’t important enough to stay for. Maybe the relationship didn’t mean what you thought it did. Maybe they didn’t really love or care for you. Maybe you failed them somehow.

These thoughts are not the truth. But they feel true, because the word “choice” has poisoned how we talk about suicide. In fifteen years of facilitation, I have watched many survivors carry these exact thoughts into our meetings. They sit with the weight of a word that was never theirs to carry. Guilt after suicide loss is one of the most common and painful responses survivors experience. Knowing that does not make it lighter, but it may help you feel less alone in it.

What I have learned is this: suicide happens when someone’s brain is so compromised by illness that their capacity for rational thought essentially disappears. The word “choice” implies a functioning mind weighing options. That is not what happens.

Is Suicide a Choice? The Pain That Has A Name

The person you lost probably wasn’t sitting calmly at a table, making a pros and cons list about whether to live or die. They weren’t rationally weighing their love for you against some other option.

They were drowning in what researchers call psychache: a term coined by suicidologist Edwin Shneidman to describe psychological pain so intense it overrides everything else. Shneidman spent forty years studying people who died by suicide. Here is what he found: the most common sentiment in suicide notes was not “I don’t love you” or “I want to hurt you.” It was “I can’t stand the pain anymore.”

Not the pain of a breakup. Not the pain of losing a job. The pain of existing. The pain of being inside their own mind. Pain that felt unbearable and endless, with no visible way out.

Think about the worst physical pain you’ve ever experienced. Now imagine that pain is in your mind, and there’s no medicine for it. No emergency room. No way to make it stop. And imagine it has been there so long that you can’t remember what it felt like to not hurt.

The person you lost was not running away from you. They were running from that.

When the Brain Becomes the Enemy

Do you remember watching the news coverage on September 11th? Do you remember seeing people fall from the towers? We watched in horror, but we never said they “chose” to die. We understood they were facing an impossible situation. The fire and the smoke and the heat were so unbearable that jumping was not a choice to die. It was a desperate attempt to escape an unfathomable pain.

That is the closest comparison I have found to help survivors understand what happened to the person they lost. They weren’t standing calmly on solid ground, deciding between life and death. They were trapped in a burning building that existed inside their mind. The psychache had become so unbearable that their brain convinced them there was only one escape.

When we use words like “choice” and “decision” about suicide, we speak as if the person’s brain was working normally.

It wasn’t.

Dr. John Jordan, a clinical psychologist who has spent forty years working with suicide loss survivors, describes what he calls “perceived intentionality” as the central wound of suicide grief. Survivors experience the death as a choice the person made. That perception unlocks a cascade of painful questions. Why wasn’t I enough? Who is responsible? Could I have stopped it? His clinical research confirms what many survivors instinctively know: these questions rarely have clean answers. Many never do.

In those final hours, the brain of the person you lost was sending them dangerously false messages that felt absolutely real to them:

• “You’re a burden to everyone.”
• “The pain will never end.”
• “Everyone would be better off without you.”
• “There is no other way out.”
• “You are helpless.”
• “You are hopeless.”

These messages felt as real to them as the heat and smoke felt to those people in the towers. When your brain keeps screaming these lies around the clock, when you can’t reason them away because the reasoning part of your brain is also compromised, that is not choice. That is brain failure.

Is Suicide a Choice? What the Research on Suicide Notes Tells Us

In those final hours, maybe even days, the person you knew most likely wasn’t fully present anymore. Researchers call it a suicidal trance: a state where the mind enters a tunnel and only one thing exists. Escape from the pain.

In that state, they couldn’t see your face. They couldn’t feel your love, even though it was real. They couldn’t imagine tomorrow. They couldn’t remember that pain can change, that feelings pass, that help exists.

When researchers study suicide notes, they find the same themes over and over: helplessness, hopelessness, and feeling like a burden. Not “I don’t love you.” The notes say “I’m helpless to fix this.” They say “there’s no hope.” They say “everyone would be better off without me.” These are not rational conclusions. They are the thoughts of someone whose world has narrowed to a single point of pain.

Even the method itself was likely not a choice in the way we normally understand that word. Research shows people often use whatever means is most readily available in that moment of crisis. It wasn’t careful evaluation. It was a compromised brain latching onto whatever was accessible.

Many people who survive serious suicide attempts describe those moments as feeling almost automatic. Like watching themselves from outside their body. Like time moved differently. Some cannot even remember the events that led up to the attempt. They just remember the pain. That is not what choice feels like.

What This Means for You

If you’re angry at them, that is okay. You can be furious and still understand they were sick. Both things are true at once. Anger is one of the most common responses after this kind of loss, and it does not make you a bad person.

If you feel guilty, please understand that there was no magic combination of words, no perfect action you could have taken that would have fixed their broken brain chemistry. You couldn’t have loved them hard enough to cure their illness.

Over the years, I have spoken with survivors who lost the person they loved right in front of them. Pleading, rational conversations, declarations of love and family and the future did not change the outcome. Because it is not that simple. Their brain had taken them somewhere else entirely. It had betrayed them.

If you feel abandoned, that feeling is valid. The impact on you is real, even if the intent was not what it feels like. They did not leave to hurt you. But you are hurt. Both things are true.

You do not have to choose between understanding they were sick and feeling your own pain. You do not have to forgive them right now, or ever, if forgiveness doesn’t fit. You do not have to make peace with this on any particular schedule.

What you need to do right now is survive this.

What I Eventually Accepted

I came to accept that while I may have some general sense of what was happening in John’s mind near the end, I will never truly understand the chaos that had taken over. The bipolar disorder had arrived suddenly, violently, in the last months of his life. And I will never know what it felt like from the inside, in those final hours.

I made a decision. I would remember his life and the precious moments we shared, and I would leave the concept of “choice” to the philosophers. What I know from lived experience is that there was love between us. Real love. That did not change.

That acceptance did not come quickly. It took years. Some days I still wrestle with the questions. But as time has passed, the questions come less often. And I have found something like peace in knowing that John did not choose to leave me. His brain, ravaged by illness, convinced him there was no other way to stop the pain.

You will find your own way to understand what happened. There is no right way to do this. But I hope knowing that mental illness, not your relationship, not your love, not you, drove what happened helps lift some of the crushing weight of that word.

Is Suicide a Choice? Moving Forward

Healing does not mean forgetting the person you lost or the circumstances of their death. It means learning to carry both the love you shared and the pain of loss as you rebuild your life.

The path is not linear. You may circle back to the question of choice many times. Your understanding may shift as time passes. That is normal.

Some people find meaning in connecting with others in support groups or in advocacy. Others find their way through therapy, creative expression, or spiritual practice. Some simply allow time to soften the sharp edges while allowing themselves to experience moments of joy without guilt. There is no one path.

There is no timeline for this. No stage you’re supposed to reach by a certain date.

Research consistently shows that more than 90% of those who die by suicide had a diagnosable mental health condition. Many did not receive the treatment they needed, and they lost their lives to a disease that most people still don’t want to talk about honestly. The Alliance of Hope for Suicide Loss Survivors is one place survivors turn when they are ready to find others who understand this kind of grief.

When that 3 AM question comes back, remember this: the person you lost was fighting a battle you couldn’t see. Their brain turned against them. In those final moments, they weren’t thinking clearly enough to make the kind of choice we would recognize as rational. They weren’t choosing to leave you. They were trying to escape unbearable pain, and their troubled brain convinced them there was only one way out.

You were enough. Your love was real and it mattered, even if it couldn’t cure a fatal illness.

You are going to survive this, even though it doesn’t feel that way right now. One breath at a time. That is all you need to do today.

Posts You May Also Like

• Moving Beyond Guilt: A Path Toward Healing After Suicide Loss – If you’re carrying the weight of “what if” and “I should have,” this post explores why guilt is so common after suicide loss and how to begin setting it down.
• Hindsight Bias: Healing the Pain of “Could Have Known” After Suicide Loss – Your brain is playing tricks on you, making signs seem obvious in retrospect that were not visible at the time. Understanding this can help lift the burden of self-blame.
• Understanding Anger and Conflicted Emotions in Suicide Loss – If you’re furious at the person who died, at yourself, or at the world, you are not alone. Anger after this kind of loss is real and it makes sense.
• The Quest for Understanding: When Facts Don’t Answer the Question “Why” – For many survivors, the search for answers becomes its own kind of grief. This post explores what it means to make peace with not knowing.
• Marriage After Losing a Child to Suicide: Can It Survive? – For parents carrying this loss together, this post looks honestly at how suicide loss strains relationships and what helps couples find their way through.

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