Author’s Note: This reflection was originally shared on my personal Facebook page on Good Friday 2025, marking sixteen years since losing my son John to suicide. I’ve expanded it here to offer deeper guidance for others walking this difficult path.
Today marks sixteen Good Fridays and sixteen Hallelujahs since we lost our son John to suicide. John died on April 10th, but that year, the date was also Good Friday. So therein lies the dichotomy of our loss: there is the secular date that he died and there is the spiritual date that he died. We tend to acknowledge both since they both represent the different journeys that your soul goes through when you tragically lose someone that you love. Over these sixteen years, I have learned that spiritual healing after suicide loss is perhaps the most complex and least discussed aspect of the grief journey.
Three Paths of Healing After Suicide Loss: Intellectual, Emotional, and Spiritual
Shortly after John died, we joined a suicide loss support group, a place where we could openly talk about our loss with other families who had lost loved ones. It has had a profound impact on us, and for almost 14 years now, my wife Teri and I have co-facilitated a suicide loss support group meeting twice a month where we meet with 30-40 other folks who struggle with the loss of a loved one to suicide.
We often talk in the group that there are several major parts to healing after losing someone to suicide. These paths intertwine and overlap, each requiring its own time and attention. None of them follow a linear progression, and you may find yourself moving back and forth between them as you navigate your grief journey. In essence, it comes down to healing in three essential places: your head, your heart, and your soul.
The Intellectual Path: The Quest to Understand Why
The first is the intellectual part. It is the search to understand what happened and why. In the aftermath of losing someone to suicide, many of us become detectives of our own devastating loss, driven by an intense need to make sense of what seems impossibly senseless.
You may find yourself scrolling through months of text messages at four in the morning, rereading their final emails until you have memorized every word, or studying their recent photos with the intensity of someone trying to decode a message written in a language you have never learned. If you have searched their browser history while your heart breaks anew, or held their journal entries like sacred texts that might contain answers to your anguish, please know that you are not alone in this beautiful, heartbreaking quest for understanding.
The detailed information feels like something solid to hold onto when everything else has crumbled. Police reports, timelines, final conversations, these pieces seem to offer the promise of clarity in the midst of overwhelming chaos. Many survivors find themselves caught in what psychologists call hindsight bias, believing we should have seen signs that only became visible in retrospect.
Yet as you gather these pieces of your loved one’s final story, you may discover one of grief’s most profound truths: the why you seek is not about the mechanics of their final day. It is about the sacred, private landscape of someone you loved deeply, the invisible pain they carried, the thoughts and feelings that led them to believe that leaving this world was their only escape.
This emotional why exists in a realm that no police report can reach, no timeline can illuminate. The deepest questions about your loved one’s final actions may remain forever wrapped in mystery. And yet, over time, something important happens in this intellectual quest.
Eventually, most survivors piece together an understanding from the fragments they have gathered. It may not be complete. It may not answer every question. It will certainly be imperfect. But you build a narrative that your mind can rest with, a framework that helps explain the unexplainable, even if only partially.
You might come to understand that your loved one was fighting battles you could not see, that their pain exceeded their ability to cope, that mental illness distorted their thinking in ways that made death seem like the only solution. This intellectual framework, imperfect as it may be, offers your restless mind a place to settle when the questions become overwhelming. It becomes the story you tell yourself when you need to make sense of the senseless, the answer you have built from the pieces available to you.
For most loss survivors, reaching this place of intellectual understanding is one of the longer journeys in healing. But it is a crucial one, because it allows your mind to rest with a complex question, even when your heart still aches and your soul still searches for deeper meaning.
The Emotional Path: Wrestling with Love and Loss
The more complicated part is the emotional healing. Many loss survivors struggle with the “could of, should of, and would of” type of questions. We struggle with what our role was in their death. We struggle with why our love was not enough to keep our loved ones here.
Just like love cannot stop cancer, nor can it stop a heart attack, love alone cannot stop suicide. This is a much longer journey for most loss survivors. Eventually, most people begin to understand that while the person we lost has physically left our lives, our love for them continues. As I recently wrote about in Physics = Love, the energy of our loved ones and our connection to them persists even though they have disappeared from our view.
But in the end, it is about how our love for someone survives their passing. The words from the classic Celine Dion song “My Heart Will Go On” capture this feeling beautifully:
Every night in my dreams, I see you, I feel you
That is how I know you go on
Far across the distance and spaces between us
You have come to show you go on
Near, far, wherever you are
I believe that the heart does go on
The Spiritual Path: A Journey Beyond Understanding
But today is Good Friday, so I want to talk about a more complex concept: spiritual healing. Many of us were raised by our parents to follow their family’s religious faith. Sadly, many folks have lost their spiritual faith as they grew older. There are many reasons why, but holding onto a spiritual faith is a complex topic.
The definition of spirituality can be captured by the phrase “We walk by faith, not by sight.” Spirituality is something that is felt and something that often takes harder insight to understand. Finding faith often means going beyond the dogmas taught by our parents and spiritual leaders. It truly is something that you must experience and explore for yourself.
A Personal Journey Toward Understanding Faith
Four years ago I wrote a blog post, Good Friday: What is Faith?, where I shared how I came to a deeper understanding while on a business trip to Israel. It was a moment in my life when I took the time to understand what my faith was and what the road to spiritual healing looked like to me. I went on a business trip, and in the midst of a busy schedule, I took the moment to listen to the inner calming voice that helped me understand that there was spiritual healing after loss.
That quiet moment of reflection, away from the daily demands of life, allowed me to connect with something larger than my grief. It reminded me that faith is not about having all the answers or never questioning. Rather, it is about remaining open to the possibility of meaning and hope even in the midst of profound darkness.
Another Hallelujah: Choosing Hope at John’s Funeral
For those that attended John’s funeral know that we chose to play a song, “Another Hallelujah” by Christian rocker Lincoln Brewster, as the final song at his funeral mass. Six years ago I had written a blog post, “Another Hallelujah on Good Friday,” where I described some of the thoughts behind why we chose a song with soaring guitars and drums as we left the church.
The word “Hallelujah” is considered a joyful word of praise to God. In some ways it was our way of thanking our God for taking John safely in his hands and protecting him for us after John was no longer present with us. In the Roman Catholic faith, we do not use the word Hallelujah during Lent, and only begin singing and saying it as part of our religious services on Easter Morning.
With his funeral mass right after Easter, we wanted to include a Hallelujah in the service. We understood that while John had left his earthly existence, he was beginning his heavenly journey. It gave us comfort during the darkest moment of our lives.
The Reality of Spiritual Struggle After Loss
Was this an easy journey? Absolutely not. There are so many difficult moments where our sanity and our faith were challenged after we lost John. Like I mentioned, there is an intellectual healing, an emotional healing, and finally a spiritual healing, all wrapped up in a bundle of difficult series of thoughts.
These are not things you often share with those around you. Most see suicide loss survivors as we try to move on in our lives. We put on a mask every day and try to smile and present a happy face to people around us while we struggle with the internal thoughts that have no easy answers.
Many survivors struggle with their faith after losing someone to suicide. Some are angry at God for not intervening. Others feel abandoned in their darkest hour. Some cannot reconcile their religious teachings about suicide with their love for the person they lost. These struggles are normal, valid, and part of the journey for many of us.
Fr. Charles Rubey wrote at Alliance of Hope acknowledging that faith struggles after suicide loss are common and understandable. There is no timeline for when or if spiritual healing will come, and there is no right or wrong way to approach questions of faith and spirituality on this journey.
Yet even in the midst of this struggle, there are moments when faith and grief can coexist, when we find our own hard-fought path toward healing.
The Hard-Fought Hallelujah: A New Understanding
Which leads me to this Good Friday and another Hallelujah thought. There is a new song out by Brandon Lake and Jelly Roll called “Hard Fought Hallelujah.” For those of you who do not know Jelly Roll, he has had his series of struggles with his own mental health, addiction, was jailed for selling drugs, and has finally come out on the other side with a new respect for his journey and where he has been and where he is heading. He often talks about his journey and his faith in interviews and through his music.
So when I first heard this song, it touched my soul. Spiritual healing is not simple. It is not something that comes without struggle. The one line of the song so perfectly captured the struggles I have had along the way with trying to balance the spiritual side along with the secular journey of healing I have been on:
I’ll bring my hard-fought, heartfelt, been-through-hell hallelujah
And I’ll bring my storm-tossed, torn-sail, story-to-tell hallelujah
I have fought through my loss. I have been through intellectual, emotional, and spiritual hell along the way. I have struggled through the waves of pain and I have the torn sails in my heart to show the pain of the journey. But in the end, I still believe that Hallelujah is the right word.
I am grateful and give praise for knowing John and that we had seventeen years to share with him before we lost him. That gratitude coexists with the pain, the questions, and the ongoing grief. This is not about finding silver linings or being thankful for the loss itself. Rather, it is about allowing light back into your life while still honoring the darkness you have been through.
What Spiritual Healing Can Look Like
Spiritual healing after suicide loss does not mean going back to your faith exactly as it was before. For many of us, our spirituality has been fundamentally changed by our loss. What was once simple may now be complicated. What once brought comfort may now bring questions.
But spiritual healing can mean:
- Finding moments of peace in the midst of grief
- Reconnecting with practices that bring you comfort, even if they look different than before
- Discovering new ways to understand your faith that make room for both love and loss
- Building a relationship with spirituality that is honest about your pain rather than denying it
- Finding community with others who understand the complexity of faith after profound loss
- Allowing yourself to question, to be angry, and to wrestle with difficult theological concepts
The research on spirituality and grief shows that for many people, spiritual beliefs and practices can be an important source of meaning-making and support after loss. However, this often requires a process of spiritual reconstruction rather than simply returning to previous beliefs.
Singing Through the Journey
So in a few days, on Easter Sunday, I will sing Hallelujah with all my heart and soul. I give praise that our son is safe in his creator’s hands, and know in our hearts that John is awaiting us when we eventually join him in Heaven. And now I begin my journey on to the seventeenth Hallelujah.
Music has always played a profound role in my healing journey. As I have written before, music becomes a bridge to healing in ways that words alone cannot reach. Songs have the power to hold our grief when we cannot find the language for our pain, to give voice to emotions too complex to name, and to accompany us through the darkest valleys of loss without judgment or expectation.
The lyrics of “Hard Fought Hallelujah” capture this beautifully:
Yeah, I don’t always feel it
Yeah, but that’s when I need it the most
So, I’ma keep on singing
‘Til my soul catches up with my song
There are times when my hands go up freely in praise, and times when it costs everything I have. There are days when a praise comes out easily, and days when it takes all the strength I have got. But I keep singing, even when I do not feel it, because that is when I need it the most.
Your Own Path to Spiritual Healing
If you are reading this and struggling with questions of faith and spirituality after losing someone to suicide, please know that your struggle is valid. There is no timeline for spiritual healing, and there is no right way to approach it.
Some survivors find comfort in returning to their faith traditions. Others find they need to step away, either temporarily or permanently. Some discover new spiritual paths that were not part of their previous experience. And some find that their spirituality becomes less about formal religion and more about personal practices of meaning-making and connection.
Whatever path you find yourself on, you are not alone. Many of us in the suicide loss community have wrestled with these same questions. We have experienced the anger, the doubt, the searching, and sometimes, the unexpected moments of grace that come when we least expect them.
Your hallelujah, if and when it comes, will be your own. It may be hard-fought, heartfelt, and born from walking through hell. It may come wrapped in questions and tears. It may look nothing like the faith you had before your loss. And that is okay.
Moving Forward with Hope
As we mark another Good Friday and prepare for another Easter, I am reminded that the spiritual journey after suicide loss is ongoing. Sixteen years later, I am still learning, still growing, and still discovering new layers of meaning in my faith.
The Easter story itself is one of suffering, death, and resurrection. It acknowledges the reality of profound loss while also holding space for hope and renewal. For those of us who have lost someone to suicide, this resonates deeply. We know the darkness of Friday. We live in the waiting of Saturday. And we dare to hope for the light of Sunday.
Living with Questions and Faith Together
God has been patient with me through this journey. God has been gracious when I have raged and questioned. God has remained faithful, whatever I have been feeling or facing. And so I bring my hard-fought, heartfelt, it-is-well hallelujah.
Because even in the midst of ongoing grief, even with torn sails and a storm-tossed heart, I have found that praise is still possible. Not because the pain is gone, but because love endures. Not because I have all the answers, but because hope persists. Not because the journey is easy, but because I am not walking it alone.
If you are at the beginning of this journey, know that healing is possible, even when it feels impossible. If you are years into your loss and still struggling, know that there is no expiration date on grief or on the search for meaning. And if you have found your own hard-fought hallelujah, may you continue to sing it, even on the days when your soul needs to catch up with your song.
The path of spiritual healing after suicide loss is hard-fought, but you do not walk it alone.
Posts You May Also Like
- Do People Who Die by Suicide Go to Heaven? A Catholic Dad’s Answer – One of the hardest theological questions suicide loss survivors carry; this post works through the Catholic teaching honestly, from the perspective of a father who has lived with that question for years.
- Faith After Suicide Loss: What Good Friday Taught Me About Faith – A companion reflection on how the Good Friday story speaks directly to the experience of surviving a suicide loss and what it means to hold onto faith when everything feels broken.
- The Quest for Understanding: When Facts Don’t Answer the Question Why – A deeper look at the intellectual path of healing described in this post and why the why survivors search for can never be fully found in police reports or timelines.
- When Music Becomes a Bridge to Healing – Explores why songs like Hard Fought Hallelujah reach places that words alone cannot, and how music has served as one of the most consistent companions on the long road of grief.
- Seventeen Years and Still Counting: Long-Term Survival After Suicide Loss – What the journey looks like for survivors who are years or even decades out from their loss, and why healing is not a destination you arrive at but something you keep building.
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