Living With Suicide

Undoubtedly in the normal cycle of life on Earth, as we know it, children are not to die before their parents. However, the laws of nature are not always followed and many a time the parents are left behind to mourn the death of their offspring. As imagined, such experience is the darkest for a human. The loss of a child is thousands of times more painful that giving birth to a baby. Why? Because it is an excruciating pain which never ends and continues for the remainder of one's life; however many days, months, or years left of it.

One would think there is nothing worse which could possibly happen to a parent, however, there is. If one's child dies of suicide, the loss, the pain, and the grief are compounded by the monumental weight of guilt and regrets. Parents always strive to protect their offspring to the best of their abilities but a suicide changes the landscape in such a way that one feels totally lost and bewildered. Suicide of a child is extremely difficult for a parent to digest, understand, accept and live with. 

Since losing my beautiful and intelligent daughter to suicide over two years ago, I have continuously been tormented by the demons of guilt and regret. There has not come a day since the day of her passing that I have not asked her for forgiveness. From the moment I discovered her lifeless body, I have felt like a failure. More than two years have passed and I still feel like an utter failure, and will most likely feel this way until the day I die. How can I best express how I feel? It is not easy but I will try.

Apart from the fact that suicide of my daughter shattered many of my dreams and hopes and drastically altered my future, and my family's future, but it also infused a sense of inadequacy, doubt, mistrust and failure of my own abilities, not only as a human being but most importantly as a mother. I see Shahdi's suicide as a proof of our poor parenting, as a proof of our lack of skills in raising a happy and productive young member of society. Shahdi's suicide was our fault, mine and her father's, by not taking better care of her emotional needs, by not looking outside of the box and seeking more effective treatments for her anxiety, by possibly contributing more to her anxiety by our lack of knowledge and understanding of her illness, and by not trying harder. Had we been more knowledgeable in the field of mental health, we might have been able to provide her with more effective options than a generic drug administered haphazardly by a nurse practitioner! 

Sometimes I feel like we killed her by our ignorance and our wishful thinking that sooner or later the old Shahdi would reappear and all the problems would be behind her. By our desire to believe that Shahdi would return to her old self, the highly driven, capable, bright, confident, happy student at the top of her class. Our wishful thinking cost our daughter her life. Why would a 19-year-old wish to die? A beautiful talented young lady from an affluent family with doting parents and grandparents should not die of suicide unless her parents made very serious mistakes in guiding and helping her. Yes, we truly did. We are to blame for her state of mind in that afternoon, for her hasty decision to end her pain due to an anxiety attack, for her unhealthy fascination with death. We are responsible for her fatal action. And for that reason, I ask for her forgiveness every single day.

Suicide of a child is like blanketing one's spring meadow with a permanent dark mist of gloom and doom. Suicide of a child is like having gone through the School of Life for years, in my case for fifty one years, preparing, testing, failing, trying harder, climbing higher, learning, and growing, only to get a failing grade at the end, wiping out all those years of hard work and all those hours spent in teaching one's child how to talk, walk, read, write, play, create, think, discuss, grow, feel, and dream. Shahdi's suicide put a final end to all of her achievements in her nineteen years of life, and in one brush destroyed not only all of her efforts in her short life but also all the effort we had put in as her parents. 

Shahdi was the priceless and perfect present we were given in 1993. She entered our home on Christmas Eve and from that moment on, our lives were forever changed by her vivacity, wit, intelligence, creativity, self-confidence and beauty. We were given a perfect child, a child who was every parent’s dream for the first thirteen years of her life. But, somehow, somewhere along the way, we seriously messed up to the point that the beautiful happy girl whose name meant joy, ended up taking her own life due to depression and anxiety. We were given a jewel but in nineteen years, we managed to destroy our treasure! We obviously were not fit parents and did not deserve the gift we were given. And for our failure, we have to suffer until our end. I just hope if I ever get to see Shahdi again, hopefully in another realm, she would be willing to forgive me.  Knowing her kind and compassionate heart, I have no doubt that she will.

As her parent, I constantly wonder what I could have done differently to change the outcome. The nagging regrets are forever with me, so is the painful guilt of being a failure as a mother.