Life After Suicide

Life After Suicide provides a clear and sensitive description of the experience of survivors after suicidal death: of their struggles to deal with suicide and incorporate it into their own personal life histories, and of their efforts to reconstruct their lives in its aftermath. The material is based on suicide survivorship literature and on interviews of survivors of suicide, accident, homicide, and natural death bereavements. The impact of suicide, as in any death, most assuredly varies depending on the type and closeness of the relationship lost. Fathers and mothers, husbands and wives, daughters and sons, sisters and brothers, and "just" friends and lovers have been affected by a suicide. Although the impact of a suicide is greatly determined by the closeness of the relationship that had been formed with the decedent, no one associated with this form of death can escape its effects, regardless of distance from the deceased. Suicide touches something deep in the core of our humanness, and we can, none of us, be neutral to its occurrence. Life After Suicide provides insight into suicide survivorship, not only for those who experience, first hand, another person's self-destructive act, but also for those who interact with the survivors in the aftermath of the death. This book has found its place on the shelves with the most helpful books about the special grief reactions survivors experience after the death of a loved one by suicide. It is important reading for survivors, family members, professional helpers and friends.