You have agencies with a 24-hour hotline number, which you can call when you feel suicidal. They talk to you and bring you out of your desperation, and then maybe take you on for further counselling. No layman is qualified to know whether the person sitting next to him is feeling suicidal or not, and the same applies to a member of his or her family. The person who takes his life is does so in momentary madness; and if courage accompanies the momentary madness, the suicide attempt is successful (other things being conducive). He is no longer in a position to think in a sane manner, either about the repercussions the others would face, or the way the family would handle the issue. So he cannot be blamed, unless it is for lack of courage to live. But once he is away and gone, and then the blame game starts.
The immediate family starts questioning – why ? where did we go wrong ?
The extended family dons the mantle of a moral judge – You are to blame. The closer you are to the deceased, the better the chances that you are made responsible for the act.
What prompts them I wonder, to take this stance of passing judgments, without knowing what had happened? This gentleman decides to die, and his family is shell-shocked. They are running around, hoping that they would not have ugly scenes, and so avoid talking about it totally. The immediate family wanted him to at least have the dignity of his going not being ripped threadbare. He had decided to go, so he went. But the ones left behind decided to do a postmortem – of the man’s life, of his relationships, and of his motives. So they decided to make him the subject of dinner table conversations, and family meetings were arranged to discuss the issue threadbare — discuss without having any facts on hand. They decided that because they were not included into the dastardly secret of his death, they were ‘terribly hurt’. And so they decided that they would no longer be available as a family to the trauma-ridden son.
Their hurt of being kept out of the secret was apparently more than that the utter horror and trauma of the daughter-in-law, who was the sole witness to the act. They decided that they did not want to have anything to do with this family, where the father goes ahead and ends his life, without a thought about what would follow. They did not want to think that they could have, in any way contributed to the depression that may have set off this man to do what he did. When he had, in one of his weaker moments confessed to his son, how disappointed he was in the extended family – in his brother who refused to have him at his place for a couple of weeks; in his nephews who had become so busy in their lives they had no time for an old man like him; in his elder son, who had, without so much a thought, left him to fend for himself; the son never thought of passing the buck and letting them stew in the regret and in the aftermath of having failed to meet expectations of an aging man, whom they had respected – or so they claimed. The son only defended them saying they all had their own problems and their own lives. His failing health had been the last straw on the camel’s back; and he chose to go.
To come to the beginning of this piece, are there agencies that counsel families that indulge in this blame game, families that believe that the immediate family is guilty and responsible for the act, and to tell the extended families, how wrong they are when they feel that they have to don the mantle of a judge ?
I wonder how the moral judges would have reacted, if they only knew how much they too were responsible? They proclaimed that they were ‘very hurt because they were not let in on the details of the death, and held both the sons responsible for their father’s death.’ They also did not ‘want any explanations’. How presumptious to think that they would get one! I read somewhere, that there are no real targets in an emotional attack; it is usually a way for the attacker to redirect their uncomfortable feelings away from themselves. So, after a lot of self-talk and self-counselling, the son and his wife decided not to take this attack personally, and to be large-hearted enough to give the accusers the comfort that they had had an opportunity to shift their blame and ease their conscience…..
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