I’ve gotten the impression that the grief of having lost someone to suicide is considerably stronger than losing them to old age, say.
Losing someone to old age is something that people expect will happen eventually, and they’ll usually have the time to mentally prepare. In contrast, suicide can be sudden and unexpected, even if a person’s depression may give something of a warning. Someone’s suicide also involves grief about the things the dead person will never have a chance to see or do that they would have if they’d lived to a natural death, grief about not having seen it earlier and done something about it, etc.
I’ve lost agemates to accident, to homicide, to suicide, and to disease. And I’ve lost people a lot older than I am to accident, to suicide, to disease, and to old age.
FWIW, I agree that having time to prepare is useful; unexpected death is harder in some ways to deal with than expected death. I’ve been a lot angrier about the suicides, but I haven’t grieved them more. I’ve grieved the loss of young people more than the loss of old people.
All of this is very noisy generalization, since of course the specifics of my relationship to the person matter way more than any of that stuff.
I’ve gotten the impression that the grief of having lost someone to suicide is considerably stronger than losing them to old age, say.
Losing someone to old age is something that people expect will happen eventually, and they’ll usually have the time to mentally prepare. In contrast, suicide can be sudden and unexpected, even if a person’s depression may give something of a warning. Someone’s suicide also involves grief about the things the dead person will never have a chance to see or do that they would have if they’d lived to a natural death, grief about not having seen it earlier and done something about it, etc.
I’ve lost agemates to accident, to homicide, to suicide, and to disease. And I’ve lost people a lot older than I am to accident, to suicide, to disease, and to old age.
FWIW, I agree that having time to prepare is useful; unexpected death is harder in some ways to deal with than expected death. I’ve been a lot angrier about the suicides, but I haven’t grieved them more. I’ve grieved the loss of young people more than the loss of old people.
All of this is very noisy generalization, since of course the specifics of my relationship to the person matter way more than any of that stuff.