Something to Do After a Suicide Death
The following is a glimpse of one family’s creative response to the sudden death of a young person from suicide when home-based natural death care, often referred to as a “home funeral,” proved impossible. Karen van Vuuren, founder of non-profit, Natural Transitions and co-founder of its new Natural Transitions Institute, shares this story to inspire and encourage others who experience traumatic loss, and long for “something to do.”
The phone rang early that morning, and when I answered, I heard the faint voice of a young-sounding person. “Hi, it’s Jill. I’m hoping you can help me. My brother died last night.” I knew Jill had a brother, and I knew that he had been mentally ill. But I wasn’t aware that he’d been facing any kind of potentially terminal illness.
I tend not to come out with the rote “I’m sorry” statement when people inform me of a death of a relative or friend. I’ll express kindness and care in the tone of my voice, but I choose to wait until I am moved to say something that for me is more authentic and original. I never want to assume either how someone feels about a death until I know more. My approach is to first open myself to understanding the other person’s pain, meeting it with compassionate action if possible. “I’m sorry” just does not feel like the most helpful first words, somehow. “That sucks” (which I wouldn’t say, at least, not quite in that way) might not be very elegant, but it might often be more fitting. Either way, I never assume that saying “I’m sorry for your loss” is appropriate, because I’ve learned that sometimes, it isn’t. I have a whole essay on that I’ll share in a future blog post.
But back to this story. I guess I was shocked when Jill told me of her brother’s death. I allowed a few pregnant moments to elapse, as a cue for Jill to fill me in further. “I found him last night in our barn. He shot himself.” I knew Jill as one of the sweetest, kindest young women I had ever met. I could not imagine how she was holding it together.
In the US, suicide is the eleventh leading cause of death, according to 2022 data from the National Center for Health Statistics, Centers for Disease Control. Nationally, suicide is most prevalent among white middle-aged men. In 2023, the American Association for Suicide Prevention identified firearms as the method of choice in 55 percent of suicide deaths. When an individual employs a gun to attempt suicide, they usually succeed. Men more than women are likely to end their lives through shooting. Women more frequently choose routes such as poisoning or overdosing on drugs. This may result in hospitalization for critical care rather than death. Not surprisingly, most people who die by suicide have experienced serious depression. Jill’s brother, Brian, who died in his mid-twenties, had struggled with it for years.
“I saw a light on in his room in the barn late last night. I was wondering why Brian was still up” Jill told me. “Something felt wrong. I decided to check on him and knocked on the door. There was no answer, so I went in. Karen, I sat there and held him in my arms for hours. I knew that when I called 911, they’d take his body, and I wouldn’t be able to be there with him. I had to have that time.”
I envisioned Jill sitting in that blood-bathed room, cradling her brother’s broken body, head bowed in shock and grief. I was glad she chose to claim those precious hours for herself, and perhaps also for him, before the EMTs and the coroner’s staff swept in.
I went to Jill’s home with two other home funeral guides. The scenario called for a multi-person approach. We didn’t know what the family wanted. We weren’t sure how to help. Brian and Jill’s mother had already engaged a funeral home to embalm and arrange an open casket memorial service. Although Jill would have welcomed her brother’s body home once the coroner had completed the autopsy, the wheels were already in motion to follow a more hands-off conventional funeral. There had been no time, no space to talk through natural options.
Jill invited us to visit the room where Brian had ended his life. Looking at the utter craziness within those four walls was like peering through a window into Brian’s mind. Papers, books, clothes, trash, strewn everywhere, and then, still in its cardboard tube, an image of the peace and tranquility Brian so desperately sought, a wall-sized poster of a shore and a vast ocean.
We set to work transforming that room into a sacred space for prayer, meditation, and vigil. We tacked the poster to the wall, so it would be the first thing anyone saw upon entering.
The process of clearing and instilling a sense of calm into that chaotic space had occurred in silence. We placed beeswax candles on a makeshift altar with images of Brian and his family during happier times. Order replaced disorder. The positive energetic shift was palpable.
Even more than by sadness, Jill was overwhelmed by feelings of helplessness. Her brother’s body had been removed and taken to the coroner’s. After the autopsy, it had been passed, at Jill’s mother’s request, to the local funeral directors for embalming, dressing, and cosmetizing, in preparation for a conventional open casket viewing at a memorial service. Jill knew the choice of funerary care was her mother’s decision, but she yearned to do something that would provide a channel, an outlet, for her grief.
Jill knew about the community-based support Natural Transitions had offered over many years to families seeking meaningful ritual and natural care of their dead. I know she was grappling with feelings of guilt, a notion that someone in the family could have done something to save her brother. And while many family members may be paralyzed, experience a freeze response to the trauma of finding a loved one dead from suicide, Jill was desperate to do something, anything, to support what she saw now as her brother’s journey beyond the physical and into the spiritual world.
Jill was Christian, but open to the wisdom of other faith traditions. We talked about her beliefs about Brian’s post-death experience. She felt Brian would still be able to receive her loving thoughts in his non-material state. So, we returned to the barn with books from our own libraries with spiritual messages of comfort and love that she or others could read at the altar. These included Buddhist and Christian prayers to relieve suffering, to surround the departed one with love. Brian’s mother, who at first had been unable to enter the barn, took a deep breath then crossed the threshold into a space that now emanated an uncanny peace.
Since Brian’s death, I have encountered other families impacted by suicide who are unable to participate in the type of hands-on, natural deathcare rituals Natural Transitions has facilitated for so many years. Yet, even when the body is absent because the manner of death caused too much trauma, or when resources are not available for family-led natural death care, the simplest ritual can deliver great meaning, such as creating an altar with candles that burn with the bright light of enduring love for and connection to the one who is gone from our sight.
I have made it my practice to ask families, “Do you believe that we remain connected after death?” If the answer is yes, there is much they can do to create healing ritual in alignment with their belief systems, practices that offer comfort, strength, and love to those who could not stay. There is also much solace we all can gain from creatively mourning and honoring our dead.
A couple of days after our visit to the barn, Jill called me with a request. She wanted me to accompany her and her mother to the funeral home to view Brian’s body now the undertakers had finished their work. Jill was anxious about what they would encounter. I agreed to go, and on that chilly fall evening, we met a solemn young funeral director in the lobby of the funeral parlor. He ushered us into a “slumber room” in which a faded landscape painting hung crookedly on the wall.
I had never met Brian, so I did not know what to expect, but encountering the heavily made up, oddly rectangular jawed, puffy powdered face of a young man quite took me aback. Brian’s mother was similarly disturbed by this poor semblance of her son and declared, “It doesn’t look anything like him. I’m going to tell them to forget the open casket and burial. We’ll just cremate him and bring the ashes to the memorial.” Within minutes of entering the room, she had turned on her heels and left.
A few days later, the memorial allowed for the sharing of sweet stories about Brian and his colorful life. While those recollections were balm for the soul of his grieving community, the barn with its altar, became a place of pilgrimage and healing ritual for his immediate family, a sacred site for daily prayer, meditation, and song. And the backdrop for it all was the nature poster Brian had purchased, a reminder for mourners to envision him now in a vast ocean of love.
By Karen van Vuuren
Director, Karen van Vuuren, formerly the executive director of non-profit, Natural Transitions, is currently a faculty member of Natural Transitions Institute, and president of its board of directors. She has created three, four-week online end-of-life educational enrichment courses HERE dealing with how we prepare for death, how we creatively respond to and mark death, and green and natural choices for after-death care. Van Vuuren is also completing her training as a clinical mental health counselor whose focus is on spiritual transformation after loss.
Karen's Courses: https://www.naturaltransitions.org/store
