1) Survivors of suicide often struggle to understand why their loved one died by suicide and search for answers to explain the tragedy. However, every suicide involves some element of mystery as suicidal thoughts and behaviors can be complex and contradictory. 2) While factors like depression, addiction, and other mental illnesses may have contributed and provide some understanding, suicide ultimately stems from unbearable inner pain that the deceased believed could only be relieved by death. 3) Accepting some aspects of the suicide as unknowable and focusing on the relationship with the deceased rather than searching endlessly for causes may provide survivors with greater peace of mind and understanding.

1. © 2015, Franklin James Cook. All Rights Reserved. Contact franklin@personalgriefcoach.com.
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Nov. 21, 2015
Enigmatic Nature of Suicide May Answer the Question "Why?"
By Franklin Cook
Survivors of suicide loss are understandably troubled over why their loved
one died by suicide, and some struggle mightily with this question. The
doggedness of the question "Why?" takes some people bereaved by sui-
cide to the point of feeling distraught over their attempts to solve
myriad—even maddening—puzzles related to the tragedy that has befal-
len them. If you have lost a loved one to suicide and have experienced a
long, distressful struggle of this kind, please consider asking yourself
what it might mean to you if satisfactory answers to your questions truly
do not exist (or are impossible to grasp and hold onto in a useful way).
After all, to some degree isn't every suicide an enigma?
Certainly, treating the suicide of someone about whom you care deeply
as being a profound mystery should not stop you from also pointing to
specific causes that explain at least in part what happened. Depression,
alcohol and drug addiction, and other mental illnesses can be causal
factors in suicide. Numerous other personal vulnerabilities and environ-
mental forces—heredity, family and social circumstances, interpersonal
and emotional difficulties, life changes and losses, and lack of resources
and coping abilities—all can play a role in suicide. Also, suicide is almost
universally understood to be an escape from unbearable mental-
emotional pain that the suffering person believes can be alleviated only
by death, and it can be useful to consider how such inner torment might
have been driving the person who died toward suicide.
If you have looked carefully into how various factors such as those
contributed to your loved one's death, but—in spite of finding some
answers that make sense to you and some explanations that are even
comforting—you always eventually wind up feeling bedeviled by the
question "Why?" it may be helpful for you to set aside your search for
causes. Certainly, don't reject the causes you have found that seem
reasonable and do continue to value them as part of the story of what
happened—but is it also possible for you to focus on the idea that suicide
is an ultimately inexplicable phenomenon—and to do so in a way that
leads you to greater understanding and peace of mind?
Consider the following observations, which illustrate vital components of
suicide that make this self-directed fatal act seem inexplicable:

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1. Suicide requires the person who dies to overcome the innate
human will to live, which is genetically designed to be a powerful
and even invincible force.
2. Suicidal people, in almost every instance, are ambivalent about
killing themselves—so their behavior leading up to their death can
be starkly contradictory because actions driven by the fact that they
want to die occur side-by-side with actions motivated by the fact
that they want to live.
3. Before the person died, internal factors existed—and perhaps also
some external circumstances—that only he or she knew about.
4. In the end, the only person who is eligible to say firsthand why a
particular suicide happened is the person who died by suicide in
that instance.
Each of these conundrums in itself shows how asking the question “Why?”
can go far beyond seeking to understand the logical connections between
causes and effects. The larger question at hand for survivors might go
something like this: “How could suicide have even happened to this
person in my life, whom I know and love so well?” When it is framed that
way, the observations outlined above must be assessed not only in
general nor as abstractions, but also as they might apply to someone
with whom the bereaved person has an intimate relationship. Here are
examples of very personal questions generated by each of those obser-
vations, respectively:
1. How could my (father, mother, brother, sister, son, daughter,
friend, colleague) possibly have been able to negate his or her will
to live?
2. How can I make sense—in the face of my loved one's self-inflicted
death—of behavior that clearly demonstrated that he or she had
reasons and the desire to live?
3. What was going on in my loved one's private inner world (and
perhaps private outer world, as well) that contributed to his or her
death and about which I have no knowledge or understanding?
4. How can I even pretend to know—if it were even possible, which it
is not—how my loved one would actually explain his or her suicide
to me?
Perhaps increasing your understanding and peace of mind by some
measure is, indeed, possible if you are able to reflect on such questions
not with an eye toward answering them but rather with the intention of
embracing them as confirmation that some aspects of your loved one's
suicide are unknowable. How might such reflections be reassuring and
affirming? They can be so because allowing the unknowable to enter into
the reality of what happened opens up space for you to see the story of

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events purposefully through the lens of your relationship with the person
who died. Is there a story about your loved one's death that you can claim
as your own—and altogether valid—based on who you knew the person
to be (and who the person in essence still is, in relation to you)?
This is not to suggest that it doesn't matter whether your story has any
attachment to reality; rather, it invites you to take everything that is
known—as well as everything that cannot be known—and to say in your
own voice not only what you believe occurred but also, from a relational
point of view, why it happened. And not only the why that is "proven" by
cause-and-effect but also the why focused on what is meaningful to you
in the face of a most perplexing—and fatal—circumstance. Perhaps by
substantiating the element of mystery as being as real as any other
aspect of what that tragedy is all about, you can discover a story that
answers the question "Why?" in a way that frees you from being haunted
by it.