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Each year around this time, I write about my father’s death by suicide. I’ve been writing on this topic for 15 years, through my early 30s and now into my mid-40s. Each year, my take on this traumatic experience shifts as I continue to change, grow, learn, and become.
Now, I’m past the age my mom and my parents’ friends were when my father died. I’m in what I hope is the middle of my life, surrounded by other adults in the middle of their lives and our children, just getting started with their lives.
Deaths of people in my peer age range are jarring. We aren’t supposed to die in midlife, something I didn’t entirely understand when my father died. Though his cause of death was intentional and self-inflicted, I now understand that part of the shock of his death came because it felt "wrong." It was wrong not just because he had taken his own life, but because he was a young man when he died. Young men aren’t supposed to die.
This summer, I was stunned by the sudden death of a 45-year-old father who had been a part of my community. Hearing of his death, which was not the result of suicide, affected me for days. I couldn’t socialize normally, I couldn’t interact with my children in the way I wanted. When I was explaining to my children why I was upset, what came out of my mouth was, “Children should have more time with their dad. A dad should be able to see his children grow up.” This death hit too close to home, for too many reasons.
Not long after our community was grieving over the death of this young father, Brandon Miller, a 43-year-old real estate developer whose life had looked picture-perfect on social media, died by suicide after business deals on which his financial future depended fell apart. Miller was the father of two young children. When contacted for comment, a family spokesperson said: “Candice [Miller’s wife] is devastated by the loss of her soul mate, and her two young daughters’ lives are forever impacted by the loss of their beloved daddy.”
It seems like in so many places that I look, men around my age—and around the age my father was when he died—are dying. Some are dying by suicide and some are dying of other causes, but either way, to me, in what I call my “trauma brain,” all these men are my dad. The lives of children whose parents died too early—myself and the Miller children included—will be forever impacted by such a death.
In my mid-40s, a time when I am pretty much a functional adult, there’s a part of my brain that responds to deaths that come close to my father’s as if I were a young child, experiencing his death again all these years later. There’s a reason for that: The traumatized brain gets stalled at a point of trauma. A picture gets painted by the brain, and the emotional part of the brain dominates. The part of the brain that processes information using reason gets hijacked, in a way, by the emotional part of the brain. I feel like I’m stuck in a loop. It’s not a loop that I play out all the time. But when there’s a trigger, the loop starts and it is hard to get it to stop.
Trauma does not have to look like an untimely, tragic death. The tools we have available to heal from trauma are the same even if your trauma doesn’t look like mine. Things that have worked for me include and are not limited to expressive therapy focused on grief and loss, talk therapy (for life!), and participation in instrumental coping activities like advocacy.
Sometimes, the most powerful tool in healing is knowing that what you’ve gone through is hard and can be acknowledged as a trauma. As a child, I didn’t know that losing a parent was considered traumatic because it was my lived experience. Naming it as such helps me make sense of all of the feelings I continue to have about it.
Copyright 2024 Elana Premack Sandler. All Rights Reserved.
If you or someone you love is contemplating suicide, seek help immediately. For help 24/7 dial 988 for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, or reach out to the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741741. To find a therapist near you, visit the Psychology Today Therapy Directory.
