More on Suicide: No One is to Blame

Suicide is different. If my husband died by suicide next week, people would wonder why I didn’t see it coming. They’d puzzle over why I hadn’t known that he was depressed and gotten him to a doctor. They’d question why I’d left him alone, why I’d decided to go to meetings all afternoon, saying goodbye to him buried under the covers of a messy bed.

They would blame me.

I remember taking a young friend to a teenage boy’s funeral. His parents stood next to his open casket and shook people’s hands. I didn’t know them but I shook their hands anyway and told them I was sorry. In the back of my mind, I thought, ‘how could you have let this happen?’ And then just as fast, I thought ‘anything can happen.’

Anything can happen.

If planes can fly into skyscrapers and no one, not air traffic controllers nor…