Melissa Fay Greene on Her Son's Life and Suicide

Melissa Fay Greene writes about the suicide of her son.

It was so impossible, so unthinkable, that even when we sat in the office of the university president on Friday afternoon and were told by the county sheriff that they’d found a body, we scoffed and said it couldn’t be him. Then the sheriff said the coach had identified the body, and for me, at that moment, the air above the sheriff’s head split open, a rent in the fabric of the world as I’d known it....

It turns out there are a lot of things the general public doesn’t know about suicide. At least I didn’t know them. And learning about three specific aspects has helped me, a little.

The first bit of information arrived a few days after the event, as I staggered in shock through a neighbor’s tangled backyard, sleepless, unable to eat, barely able to swallow. A friend of our middle daughter phoned to say he’d recently learned something about suicide, following the shockingly sudden death of his own close friend. He felt it was important for us to know, in case we didn’t, that there were two types of suicide: the widely known “premeditated” and the lesser-known “impulsive.”

...Suicide-prevention strategies are based on the theory that a person first thinks about suicide, then plans it, then attempts it, and that this “template” can take weeks, months, or years to unfold. Interventions can occur at various points along the timeline, beginning with the identification of an “at-risk individual” whose progression from one stage to the next you try to interrupt. But people who act impulsively blow past the timeline. The Centers for Disease Control recently reported that suicide rates have risen in nearly every state and that “more than half of people who died by suicide did not have a known mental health condition.” Scientists hope that, in time, a set of red flags will be identified for this different sort of at-risk population. But, for now, there aren’t any.

...The second fact I learned about suicide is that about a third of people who kill themselves used alcohol just prior.

And the third, she says, is that just as it it too late to change their minds, many suicides regret their choice. Greene finds that a comfort.