Anger is a necessary stage of grief.  Right?  It may be the therapist in me but I can’t get mad at my dead wife.  Technically, it’s her fault that she’s dead (by suicide).  I’ve got no beef with her because I understand.  And you can too.

I recently read “Suicidal: Why We Kill Ourselves” by psychologist Jesse Bering.  Ok fine, I listened to the audiobook while doing yard work.  I found the book oddly satisfying and peaceful.  Death has that effect on people - especially horrible deaths.  The really sad things end up….well, validating.  It makes us morbid and we want to talk about gross stuff.   It can also make us really funny - like the beautiful charm of my dead wife’s thumbprint on a necklace.  IT’S A CHERISHED KEEPSAKE!  It doesn’t matter that the print was taken posthumously.  As the widow, you have to agree with me.

Dr. Bering’s book is a mix of academic research and personal stories.  He touches on Baumeister’s stage theory of suicide first described in the 1990 article “Suicide as escape from self.”  Dr. Berring applies Baumeister’s stages to the diary of a young woman who died by suicide.  On the outside, the young woman appeared successful and happy.  On the inside, she was suffering.  Her journal entries follow a predictable pattern, describing the downward spiral towards her death.  

As you know, suicide is a bit of a soapbox for me.  Baumeister’s steps bring order to a chaotic experience.  For me, it shifted how I thought of events before Patty died.  Instead of thinking of it as a series of choices she made, her death became something that happened to her.  Understanding the progressive stages of suicidal thinking makes the process knowable.  It doesn’t answer the bigger question of why bad things happen but it’s a start.

To my fellow suicide loss survivors - this doesn’t mean you missed something.  Obviously, we did because, you know...but let’s take the young woman as an example.  It only became evident to her parents in retrospect.  We only see the whole picture once we’ve put the puzzle together.  In the middle, there’s not enough information to know anything for sure.  However, these stages do provide important information for more effective prevention.

I was trying to think of the perfect blend of dark humor and suicide education.  It’s actually not that funny aside from one liners like, “Thanks for your help!  I would have asked my wife but dang it, she killed herself,” or “Patty and I had planned to move south for retirement but she retired early.”  The best I can do is give you interesting information and hope this helps you understand your loved one.  Here’s my interpretation of the stages:

Stage 1: Falling Short of Unrealistic Standards

An earthquake event creates what I call the tsunami.  Something big happens- bad news, a diagnosis, loss or divorce, or a critical tipping point.  It crashes over and overwhelms you.  We’ve all had this happen to us.  How we deal with it comes down to locus of control - in other words, who gets the blame and responsibility.  Generally, everyone is inclined to either believe the world acts upon you (externalizing) or you act upon the world (internalizing).  The objective truth lies somewhere in the middle.   In the extreme, externalizers point to everyone else as the cause of their misery while internalizers put themselves at risk by hoarding all the blame for themselves.  

Stage 2: Attributions of Self

Taking blame and responsibility is power.  However, some internalizers also have unrealistically high expectations of themselves.   Realistically, sometimes things just happen to us (i.e. the world acts upon us) and there’s no one to blame.  An internalizer’s downfall is believing they have more power than they do.  Some complex experiences can’t be fixed by one person and internalizing individuals believe this is a personal failure.  This is a point of intervention if the person can catch it.  Otherwise, it’s the kindling of despair and low self esteem.  

Stage 3: Heightened Aversive Self Awareness

Now that the individual has absorbed more blame and responsibility than they can possibly manage, they cannot help fixating on the painful awareness of failures.   An unintended result is withdrawing and detaching from the support of friends and family.   As these connections are lost, the individual feels trapped  inside a thick wall of glass.  Unable to receive help or shift to the bigger picture, the individual turns further inward.  Without access to perspective and social support, they begin running out of options.   

Stage 4: Negative Affect

A downward spiral builds on negativity from the previous stages.  The awareness of perceived inadequacies is now excruciating.  Coupled with social detachment, the individual feels completely alone with their now unsolvable problems.  The pain, endless and unbearable, gradually overwhelms their ability to cope.  

Stage 5: Cognitive Deconstruction

Escape from their own mind is the one last, stopgap strategy.  Now detached from their internal struggle, the person avoids or rejects the pursuit of answers or meaning.  Time slows down as a switch from future thinking to each current moment occurs.  “Going through the motions” temporarily numbs painful emotions as the individual distracts from the pain with mindless, concrete functions like chores, simple games, or mundane tasks.  Tightly holding back the tide of painful thoughts takes all their emotional energy.  Little consideration is given to friends or family and the individual may see themselves as a burden.

Stage 6: Disinhibition

In this last stage, the person can only think in black-or-white.  The pain inside the glass prison has no time - no beginning or end.  Substance use, careless or risky behaviors, self harm, and social passivity are signs of impaired reasoning.  After exhausting all other strategies, the individual concludes it comes down to  inescapable pain or death.  No one could endure this level of  unremitting pain for long.   Resigned and accepting their impending death, the individual’s pain tolerance increases and their fear of death crumbles.  

Passing through these stages may take months or even days with significant overlap between them.  In retrospect, I can see my wife moving quickly through each of these stages over a handful of days.  She didn’t know what was happening and neither did we.  One of the reasons we don’t always recognize this process is precisely what makes it fundamentally human - the individual is trying to solve their problems.  It’s instinctive to seek options to ease our own pain.   How can we tell when someone crosses that razor fine line between coping and the downward spiral when it looks the same?

It’s important to understand that a death by suicide is something that happened to your loved one rather than a series of rational choices.  Inside the experience of intense pain, time stops, rational thought leaves you and the options narrow.  We’re not inside their heads but we can map out the path they took.  Consider this: imagine you’ve lost something precious down a deep well.  You climb down inside, searching ever deeper for it.  You know it’s there but you can’t find it.  Darkness falls and now you’re stuck clinging to the wall.   How deep is the well?  No one hears your cries for help.  You’re cold and your muscles are giving out.  How long could you hold on?

A reasonable person with perspective does not choose death.   Yet as a culture, we still lay blame and responsibility in the dead person’s lap.  What we don’t understand, we externalize.  They decided to kill themselves, right?  This assumption lacks empathy.  The raw fact is in a similar situation, we might make the same “choice” as well.  Everyone has a limit.

After my wife died, the pain of losing her has been intense and unyielding.  I longed to be with her.  My own death seemed the only choice to accomplish this goal.  If she’d dealt with her pain by running off to Antarctica, I’d want to follow her there.  What has protected me from following the path we’ve outlined?  

For starters, I see life from a different angle.   While I’m an internalizer, I also give the world it’s fair share of responsibility.  Sometimes shit just happens and life isn’t fair.  As a recovering control freak, I now acknowledge my high need for control - and the limits of it.  Most of the time, I control by choosing not to fight.  

Our motivations are different as well.  What pushed her down the path was a tangle of events she found too complicated to resolve.  Similarly, I too have a complicated tangle of grieving her while sorting out the estate, comforting the kids, and making very difficult choices for my life.  

One big difference between me and most people is that I never fail.  It’s not that I don’t make mistakes, of course; it’s what I do with these adverse experiences.  In my mind, they are puzzles to solve.  Even as an optimist, I’ve had to work on that mindset.  Understanding something is powerful.  It also strips away anger.  Following knowledge to the root brings clarity.  I just don’t feel angry towards my wife because she didn’t choose to leave us.  She was trying to relieve a terrible pain with the only methods she knew.  She didn’t understand the implications herself.

Right now, I’m solving the puzzle of my wife’s suicide.  Even if I get deep in the well of figuring it out, I’ve got my safety rope to climb back up.  Another tsunami could easily knock me off right now.  The tsunami is the perfect storm.   Given the right set of circumstances, we’re each at risk for suicide.  Research is still figuring out the puzzle of prevention for now.   In the meantime, when the world acts upon you - control by deciding to be vulnerable.  And wherever you go, take your own rope.