What Is It Like to Survive the Trauma of a Parent Dying by Suicide?
Key takeaways:
Richard Brockman was a child when his mother died by suicide.
The event influenced the path of Richard’s life, including his career choice as a professor of psychiatry.
Now 76, Richard has published a book about surviving a loved one’s death by suicide and explains how he found the strength to go on.
Richard Brockman, MD, was 7 years, 2 months, and 2 days old when his mother died by suicide. For years, he considered the date of her death, December 15, 1954, as the day “my life as a boy ended and another narrative began.”
The event inspired him to study psychiatry, genetics, and neuroscience. Now, decades later, he’s written “Life After Death: Surviving Suicide” (Skyhorse Publishing, 2023), a work that’s part-memoir, part-scientific study. It recounts his personal story while exploring the effect psychological trauma has on the brain and body and providing insights on navigating life afterward.
Uncontrollable trauma like his mother’s death “is a consequential marker in one’s life,” says Richard, now 76 and an associate clinical professor of psychiatry at Columbia University’s Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons and a visiting professor at the University of Namibia’s School of Medicine and the Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia.
After an event like his mother’s death, “one must recreate one’s narrative,” he says. “Because if you don’t, you will remain to a certain degree more or less at the mercy of the trauma itself. You can’t erase the trauma, but you can rebuild. The question is how.”
Richard says he wants to help others who have lost loved ones to suicide. He sees himself as both a survivor and a healer. It took him years to realize that his mother’s choice was not a reflection on him.
“My mother didn’t do anything bad. Her suicide wasn’t a bad thing. It was a sick thing in the biological sense. I can’t be angry. I’m sad, but I can’t be angry,” he says. “I realized, in retrospect, that I had a lot of strength, and that didn’t come from nowhere. She provided the strength for me to survive. She gave me the strength to deal with life.”
Picking up the pieces
Living after the suicide of a loved one is a challenge facing a growing number of Americans. The national suicide rate increased by 35% between 2000 and 2021, with more than 48,000 Americans dying by suicide in 2021, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. More than 1.7 million others attempted to end their own lives. Early data indicates the number of suicide deaths increased by almost 3% in 2022.
Suicide is an all-ages problem and is among the Top 10 leading causes of death for Americans ages 10 to 64.
Ruth Brockman had bipolar disorder, manic episodes, and was “the life of the party,” her son says. She’d sought treatment and undergone electric shock treatments more than once. She was in psychoanalysis when she died.
“When she wasn’t sick, she was this fun-loving, beautiful, athletic, sexy young woman who my father adored. But then she’d get depressed,” he recalls.
Richard, the youngest of three children, was the only one living at home when his mother died. She was 46.
With Richard’s sisters out of the house and his father working during the day, his mother must have known he would be the one to find her when he returned home from school, he says.
“For a long time, I held that as evidence that she didn’t care,” he says. “After her death, I kept wanting her to ‘come back’ to explain why she didn’t care if I found her or, if she did care, to explain that. It was my irrational attempt to ‘force her soul’ to return and explain.”
For decades, Richard didn’t know that his mother had written a note explaining her actions. He found the letter, addressed to his father, while cleaning out a family storage unit flooded by 2012’s Hurricane Sandy.
In the note, Ruth Brockman assured her husband that, while he would be sad initially, ultimately her death would be better for the family.
“It’s that delusional or psychotic belief that people who are suicidal or who attempt suicide or complete it have, that ‘I’m doing something that’s good for you. You’ll thank me later. You’ll see how much happier you are when I’m gone,’’’ Richard says. “It was a reaffirmation of how sick she was.”
It was only with time and effort that he began to let her go, he says, to give up “my quest to bring her soul back, to let her go, and to accept that she had been sick — to accept that she had killed herself and that she loved me. Both. Indeed, the healthy years she gave me were evidence of her great love and great strength, and I was very lucky to have had such a wonderful woman as my mother, even if the time I had with her was very short.”
How do you go on after a parent dies by suicide?
Richard says successful survival like his also involves “a lot of luck, a lot of help, a lot of people and the kindness of strangers.” After his mother’s death, his two older sisters, a neighbor and other relatives took on maternal roles.
“I’d lost my mother, but I had these other women there,” he says.
His mother’s death played a large part in his career path. He wanted to better understand the workings of the brain. He says he hoped that would give him insight not only into his mother’s choice but also into his own feelings.
“I wanted to understand psychological trauma and what it does to the mind and what is required to get past it,” he says. “I wanted to examine how trauma attacks one’s personal story and how it can be restored.”
Richard has been a published author for years, often writing about irreplaceable loss, but focusing on his mother’s death and its aftermath seemed appropriate only in recent years. The people who would possibly have been upset by his writing had died, he says, and he realized that “I’d been writing around my mother’s suicide, rather than aiming directly at it,” he says.
It took Richard about 2 years to complete his manuscript. It includes insights from his very small clinical practice, where he’s noticed that many people need someone to blame for a life-changing event. People get stuck, he says, and fail to acknowledge that one reason for that is biological.
“Changing that is not easy, and there are ways to get hope to change the biology of the story and maybe be a little gentler with oneself,” he says. “That simple awareness alone could be liberating.”
Writing about his experience has changed the way Richard views his mother’s life and death, as well as his own life choices.
“I transitioned from the blame side to the gratitude side, and that allowed me to love [my mother] in a way I don’t think I really had,” he says. “If I could have handed the manuscript to her, I would have, but with love.”
For additional resources or to connect with mental health services in your area, call SAMHSA’s National Helpline at 1-800-662-4357. For immediate assistance, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988, or text HOME to 741-741 to reach the Crisis Text Line.
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