Nandini Murali's Left Behind: Surviving Suicide Loss; An Excerpt

Nandini Murali's Left Behind: Surviving Suicide Loss  talks about coping with suicide loss. An Excerpt:

Take, for instance, Meenakshi Raja and S. Raja, a soft-spoken and erudite couple who teach at a college in Karaikudi, a town near Madurai. Theirs was a stereotypically happy family, with parents providing tender, loving support to their two brilliant sons. The family was close knit and spent a lot of time together—at dinner, over the weekends and travelling whenever possible. Bhuvanesh, the younger boy, was a class twelve student. He had been a topper throughout his life, scoring a GPA of 4.8/5 in class ten. With the board examination just a few months away, his teachers expected him to surpass this performance.

According to his parents, teachers and family, Bhuvanesh was an affectionate, caring and fun-loving boy, and everybody’s favourite. He was adored by his teachers and peers. One day, when his parents returned from work, they found that their son had hanged himself. ‘People were quick to point fingers at us. Our parenting style was questioned. We were accused of having failed to prevent the suicide. Our son’s teachers, classmates and parents refused to have anything to do with us. In the early days, I felt comforted if I talked to my son’s classmates and often phoned them up. They responded a couple of times, and then they refused to take my calls. I suppose their parents would have warned them to distance themselves,’ recalls Meenakshi Raja.

Her husband admits that the negative media publicity mentioned the victim’s name and school. These additional factors exacerbate the primary loss in suicide bereavement and make grieving a slow, agonising and isolating experience for survivors. Interestingly, such accusations need not be explicit. Often, they are subtle and subversive, and as survivors of suicide loss, we are acutely sensitive and perceptive to such sub-texts.

No one pointed fingers at me blatantly for Murali’s suicide, especially when it became known that he had been struggling with bipolar depression for years. Yet, I picked up the silent accusations. The verdict: In a conventional sense, despite everything, the suicide sealed my performance appraisal as a wife; I had failed. My childfree status bolstered my inadequacy as a woman—I was a ‘childless’ widow, a typical patriarchal label.

Sigmund Freud made a pertinent observation that seems as valid today as it was decades ago. Commenting on a friend who died by suicide, he said, ‘What drove him to it? As an explanation, the world is ready to hurl the ghastliest accusations at the unfortunate widow.’

By internalising and amplifying the blame attributed to them, survivors of suicide loss become their own worst enemies. I often wondered if I should have acted on my impulse to ring Murali on the night he decided to end his life. There was nothing specific I had to share with him, and since I would be meeting him in the morning, I had postponed the call. Could my call have made the difference between life and death? Could it have tethered him to life? After all, that night, around the presumed time of Murali’s death, I had experienced a great sense of unease and discomfort. Even months after the incident, I reconstructed his last moments in my mind in a desperate attempt to make sense of it all. Should I have listened to my inner voice when I sensed that there was something unusual in the parting gift that Murali had given me? I constantly wrestle with the ‘would have/could have/should have’ interrogative process, relentlessly post-morteming my lack of prescience.

I indulged in this self-flagellation despite the fact that I had done everything a human being could possibly do for another. However, the reality of suicide—the shock and the traumatic impact—leaves one gasping like a fish out of water. We asphyxiate on our own toxic emotions of guilt and shame. ‘The decision to die of suicide creates a sense of utter helplessness for those of us who are left behind. In order to maintain a sense of control, we often blame the deaths of our loved ones on actions we took or omissions we made,’ writes Carla, in the book that eventually became my guiding light, No Time to Say Goodbye.

When I met Carla, we spoke about the ramifications of blame and self-blame for survivors. Following her husband’s death, Carla recalled that she had faulted everyone she knew—his friends, family and colleagues—for not standing by her husband. ‘Most of all, I blamed myself. It seemed inconceivable that my life force had not been strong enough to keep both of us alive,’ she said.

The above excerpt from Nandini Murali's Left Behind: Surviving Suicide Loss has been reproduced here with permission from Westland Publications.

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