Which Is More Important: The Journey or the Destination?

What Healing After Suicide Loss Actually Looks Like

A few weeks ago, a meme scrolled past me on Facebook. It asked a simple question:

“Which is more important, the journey or the destination?”

I almost kept scrolling. But something made me stop.

The question sits at the heart of something I have been thinking about for a long time. It is one of the central questions in healing after suicide loss, and I have tried to put it into words in different ways over the years since I lost my son John to suicide on April 10, 2009. I realized I wanted to try again, with everything I have learned since then.

So let me work through this question with you, because I think the answer matters more than the meme’s creators probably realized when they posted it.

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published on March 20, 2023, on sosmadison.com, the website for SOS Madison, one of New Jersey’s largest suicide loss support groups. It has been substantially rewritten and expanded for Sunflowers After Suicide.

Why There Is No Destination Called “Healed”

When you are deep in the early weeks and months after a suicide loss, people will say things to you that are meant to comfort. They will tell you that time heals. They will say it gets easier. Sometimes they will hint, or even say directly, that one day you will be “healed” and this pain will be behind you.

I want to be careful here, because the people who say these things usually mean well. They are reaching for words. But the idea that healing is a destination you eventually arrive at, a place where grief is finished and life returns to what it was, is a myth worth discussing.

There is no destination called healed.

What exists instead is a place called healing. It is not a fixed point on a map. It is a continuous stretch of ground you move through over time, and many people who reach it do not even recognize it when they arrive. They are still having difficult days. They are still visited by grief without warning, ambushed by a song or a smell or a date on the calendar. They assume that because they still hurt, they cannot possibly have made any progress. So they beat themselves up for not being “better yet,” never noticing how far they have actually come. If you recognize yourself in that, Roadblocks to Healing After a Suicide Loss looks closely at the patterns that keep survivors stuck and how to recognize them.

I have written about this at length in Healing Is a Journey, Not a Destination, and I come back to it often because it is one of the things suicide loss survivors need to hear. The grief you carry after losing someone to suicide is not a problem to be solved or a wound to be sutured closed. It is something you learn to integrate, to carry differently over time, so that it no longer pins you to the floor.

That integration is real. It is measurable. Research on suicide bereavement confirms that many survivors do experience meaningful shifts over time, even when those shifts feel invisible from the inside. The weight does not disappear. But for many people, the way you carry it changes.

And that brings me back to the question. If healing is a continuous process rather than a destination, then maybe “the journey” is the right answer after all.

Except I am not sure it is.

The Fork in the Road

When someone you love dies by suicide, you do not walk a single road forward. You stand at a fork.

That fork is the moment everything changed. And when you look up from the wreckage and try to figure out which way to go, you realize there are three roads before you.

The first road runs backward. It is the road of what was. Many survivors spend enormous amounts of time on this road, replaying memories, revisiting moments, searching for the thing they missed. Could they have done something differently? Should they have said something? Would a different choice have changed the outcome? This road pulls hard, especially in the early months, because it is the road back to when the person you lost was still alive. The longing to walk it makes complete sense. There is no shame in the time you spend there.

But you cannot live on that road. And at some level, many survivors come to sense this, even if it takes time.

The second road runs toward the future you thought you were going to have, the one that included them. This road closed the day they died. It does not disappear from view, which is part of what makes grief so disorienting. You can still see where it used to go. You just cannot reach it anymore.

The third road is the one you build with your feet by walking it.

This road runs forward into something unfamiliar. It is the road toward what some people call the “new normal,” though I have never loved that phrase. It does not feel normal. It feels like the ground you have to cross because there is no other ground available. And this is the road where grief work actually happens, where healing is possible, where you slowly learn to carry John, or whoever you are grieving, alongside you rather than feeling their absence as a wall in front of you.

You do not leave them at the fork. That is one of the things I most want survivors to know. The continuing bond with the person you lost does not end at death. It transforms. You carry their spirit, their humor, their particular way of seeing things forward with you. Loving them does not stop. It just changes form.

This is clinically grounded, not just comforting language. Modern grief research has moved away from the idea that recovery means letting go. Researchers like Dr. John Jordan, who has spent four decades working with suicide loss survivors, describe the continuing bond with the person who died as a healthy and central part of long-term healing, not a sign that you are stuck.

So the journey forward is real. It matters. The steps you take on that third road are how healing unfolds.

But I still do not think the journey alone is the right answer.

The Meme’s Actual Answer

The Facebook meme resolved its own question in a way I did not see coming.

The answer was not the journey. It was not the destination.

It was the company.

I stopped when I read that. And I have been sitting with it ever since.

Because whoever wrote that meme may not have been thinking about suicide grief. But they got something exactly right.

The company you keep on this road is not secondary to the experience. For many survivors, it is the experience. It is what makes the difference between a grief that isolates and slowly crushes you, and a grief that opens into something you can survive and eventually, in ways you cannot predict right now, grow through.

What Good Company Looks Like

I want to be honest about this, because “get support” is easy advice to give and much harder to actually find.

The company that helps is not everyone around you. Some of the people in your life will say things that hurt, even when they mean well. They will suggest you should be “over it” by now. They will change the subject when you try to talk about the person you lost. They will say things like “at least they’re not in pain anymore” or “everything happens for a reason,” not knowing that these phrases can land like a boulder on your fragile heart.

The company that actually helps is different. I wrote about this in Day 2,922 of Our Journey: The Gift, where I tried to describe what it felt like to realize how many people had given something essential to our family in the years after John died. A friend put it to me this way once, and it has stayed with me:

there are people who are firefighters for the soul. They are the ones who rush toward the burning building rather than away from it. They do not stand at the edge wondering what to say. They come in, they stay present, and they help carry you out.

What does that look like in practice?

It looks like someone who asks about the person you lost by name. Not a general “how are you holding up” but a specific “how are you doing today, thinking about John?” That specificity matters enormously. It signals that the person you lost is allowed to be remembered, named, and held in the room.

It looks like someone who sits with you in the hard moments without rushing to fix them. Grief is not a problem to be solved. Good company understands this. The most valuable thing another person can do for you in grief is not to make it go away. It is to stay while it is there.

It looks like someone who has been where you are and is still standing. There is something irreplaceable about the company of other survivors. When someone who has walked this same terrible road tells you that they are still here, still moving forward, still finding reasons to get up in the morning, it does something that no amount of well-intentioned advice can do. It shows you that survival is actually possible. Not just theoretically. Actually.

Why Support Groups Matter for Healing After Suicide Loss

This is one of the core reasons I believe, after more than fifteen years of co-facilitating a suicide loss support group alongside my wife Teri, that peer support should not be optional for survivors. It is often foundational. Research backs this up. A 2008 study by McMenamy, Jordan, and Mitchell published in Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior asked survivors directly what helped them most. The answer that came back most consistently was contact with other survivors; either in a support group or one-on-one. Not professional help alone. Not information alone. The company of people who had been there.

Support groups work because they put you in a room with company. Real company. People who do not flinch when you use the word suicide. People who have had the same unbearable thoughts and are still here. People who will not try to talk you out of your grief because they are living inside their own version of it.

The Alliance of Hope for Suicide Loss Survivors runs an online forum with more than 27,000 members that operates like a 24/7 support group. The gift it offers is exactly what peer support is built on; the reduction of isolation, the normalization of experience, and the quiet, powerful testimony that other people have made it through.

The AFSP Healing Conversations program is built on the same foundation. Newly bereaved survivors are paired with volunteer survivors who are further along in their own grief. The currency exchanged is not expertise. It is presence, shared experience, and the credibility that comes from someone saying “I know this pain from the inside, and I made it through.”

You may be at the beginning of that walk right now. Or you may have been at it for years and still feel, on the hard days, that you are starting over. Either way, the company around you matters.

If you are looking for a support group near you, the AFSP Find a Support Group directory is a good place to start. There are groups meeting in person and online, across most of the country.

The Company You Are Still Becoming

Here is the part of this that took me a long time to understand.

The company you keep does not just help you. You become part of the company that helps others.

Every survivor who has made it further down that third road carries something the newly bereaved need desperately. Not answers. Not a map. But proof. The proof that comes from simply being present and upright, from having survived something unsurvivable and finding ways to hold it and still find meaning.

What’s Your Grief writes about giving back in grief and explores how helping others and receiving support often become intertwined over time, each feeding the other. You reach a point, and you may not see it coming, where the same things that helped you survive begin to flow outward toward others.

This does not require credentials or training, though training helps. It requires what you already have. Your story. A willingness to show up. And the knowledge of what it feels like to need someone to stay.

Mr. Rogers of childhood television once said,

“Look for the helpers. Because if you look for the helpers, you know that there is hope.”

He was right. And I would add one more step for those of us on this road. Let the helpers find you. And then, when the time comes, let yourself become one. If you are wondering what survival actually looks and feels like from the inside, Something You Get Through: Finding Hope After Suicide Loss is one of the truest things I have written about that.

The Answer, Revised

So: the journey or the destination?

I will give you the same answer I now give myself.

Neither one, alone.

The answer is the journey with the right company alongside you.

The destination does not exist the way we imagine it. Healing is not a place you arrive and then stop. It is something you carry, day by day, with changing weight and changing grace.

But you do not have to carry it alone.

There is hope, and there is healing after suicide loss. There are helpers. And there is a road forward, however unfamiliar it looks right now, that is better walked with others than alone.

Posts You May Also Like

• Healing Is a Journey, Not a Destination A deeper look at why healing works as a continuous process rather than a fixed endpoint, and what that means for how you measure your own progress.
• Day 2,922 of Our Journey: The Gift A personal reflection on the unexpected gifts that arrived in the years after losing John, including the extraordinary people who showed up to walk alongside us.
• Finding Your People: The Healing Power of Suicide Loss Support Groups If you are wondering whether a support group is right for you, this post explores what peer connection offers that no other form of support quite replicates.
• Roadblocks to Healing After a Suicide Loss An honest look at the common patterns and beliefs that can stall the healing process, and how to recognize them in yourself.
• Changing the Old Normal and Exploring New Roads On the work of building a life that is genuinely different from the one you had, rather than just a broken version of it.