Emma’s Experience
What phrase do you use most often to describe how your loved one died?
Died by suicide
2. Did you struggle with that language?
I used to say ‘killed themself’ or ‘committed suicide’ because thats what I heard a lot across society and so I only adjusted to ‘died by suicide’ after researching the history of the term ‘committed’ and learnt more about mental health. I find it offensive/ short sighted when people still use these terms now.
3. How do you find having conversations about the person you’ve lost?
Hard. Even now we speak about it often because of the charity. I still find it incredibly sad. I struggle using pronouns like ‘my’ (e.g my Dad) because it makes me think about the enormity of the loss.
4. How do you find having conversations about your grief and what you’re going through?
I find this more manageable as time goes on and the more I hear about others' grief. I often have to write how I feel before I feel comfortable to say it out loud - almost have a conversation with myself before I start the dialogue with the outside world.
I think I often pass off ‘griefy moments’ as stress or a multitude of other factors when in reality I am processing grief. People universally understand ‘I feel stressed’ or ‘I feel abit anxious’ but it’s harder to say ‘I feel griefy’ or ‘I’m experiencing a bad grief day today’.
5. What do you think could make these conversations easier?
Creating the right environment for grief conversations, i.e giving people the right questions to ask to give permission for grievers to lean into the conversation without feeling like they are forcing their grief, emotions and personal experience on others.
Explaining what can be triggering so people know to avoid certain phrases - for example, ‘at least’ makes me want to scream because it feels like people are loudly invalidating what I’m saying. ‘Everything happens for a reason’ is another example of an unhelpful, triggering throw away comment which is widely used in grief conversations.
6. Do you have tips for others in this situation?
My tip would be to have conversations with yourself, self validation and acceptance is just as important as external validation.
When you’re discussing someone else's grief be cautious of their barriers and listen, judgement free listening is empowering for the person who is sharing their story.
Have the conversation no matter what - its 2021! Talking about stigmatised topics can only bring them into the mainstream and dust off the archaic stigma/stereotypes/ misinformation which is out there.
7. Was there one thing you wish people had said or asked you after your bereavement?
I wish people had showed up for longer. The grief didn’t disappear after a year but friends stopped asking and started presuming it was all fine.
I wish that people didn’t make jokes about ‘wanting to kill themselves’ or pass comments about celebrity suicides.