The hardest truth: how I told my kids about their father's suicide

When my husband killed himself, I couldn’t lie to our children – but wasn’t sure how or when to tell the truth, either

MY HUSBAND killed himself 3½ years ago, when our children were aged three and five. He had untreated depression and he hanged himself. We had been amicably separated for over a year before he died, and he saw the children every weekend – he was a totally devoted dad. So when the police came to tell me that they had found his body, I couldn’t believe it. Nobody kills themselves when they have small children. Except they do, and he just had.

Telling your small children that their father is dead is probably the hardest thing you could ever do – and that’s without even raising the subject of suicide. It was for me, anyway. It was done in a sunny garden, very quietly, with KitKats. I remember my daughter’s face crumpling as she shoved the chocolate in her mouth, and my little boy staring at me in disbelief. I’d had all day to think about what to say, and realised I couldn’t tell them a lie. I couldn’t say he’d had a heart attack, or been in a car crash, or any of the other things people tell children when they can’t bear to tell them the truth, because later, when I would eventually have to tell them the full truth, the heart attack or car crash would be exposed as a big fat lie and they would never trust me again.

So I told them very quietly that their dad had been in a park, and had become very ill and died, and now he was an angel, and was probably quite nearby, floating around the trees behind us. I didn’t get any more specific than that. Every ounce of strength went into not crying or screaming or freaking out, but in keeping my voice calm and normal. Had I lost it, they would have been terrified. As it was, they were just heartbroken.

There were autopsies and coroner’s reports and legal things and a funeral, weeks of awful stuff that passes in a blur. While everyone else was grief-stricken, all I could feel was rage, which alienated people, and made me feel even angrier. It was probably my anger that kept me going. I raged that he had hurt his children like this, that he had made me a single parent, that he had left decades too soon. It took more than a year for any compassion to kick in.

In the immediate aftermath of his death, the children made a “dad book” of photos and drawings. They made “dad tables” in their rooms, and we talked about him constantly. How he had been ill, where he was now. I found myself talking about a fluffy-clouds heaven in which I didn’t believe, because I wanted to give them something positive to visualise. Friends and family stayed close; the local Steiner school, where they had been pupils since toddlerhood, gave constant quiet support. We muddled along, the wind knocked out of us. When I tried to reassure them that they would feel better, my daughter used to ask, “When, Mum? When?” I couldn’t tell her that I didn’t know.

As time passed, the secrecy became like an unexploded bomb. Everyone knew their dad had died by suicide. Their teachers, the parents at school, our own close friends, their older kids – everyone except them. But what do you do? Children are not daft. They can sense things that are unsaid, they can feel things that are not quite right. Already my daughter was asking about what exactly had happened. My line of “he became very ill” was starting to sound patchy and unconvincing.

Yet if I told them what had really happened, how would they take it? Wrapped entirely in self as small children are, would they conclude that they had somehow caused his death? That they were not lovable enough for him to stay alive? I was at a loss. If I didn’t tell them properly what had happened, they would do what children always do when information is withheld – they would fill in the gaps themselves, with God-knows-what. Or worse, they would hear it the wrong way, accidentally blurted out.

SOMEONE TOLD MEabout a children's bereavement charity called Winston's Wish. Tell them, the charity advised. Tell them the truth. Don't let them fill in the gaps with their own make-believe. But shouldn't I wait, I wondered, until they are older? Maybe around 12, or 21, or 45? Or never? No, they said. Tell them now, because if you tell them later, it will affect their trust in you. They will not be able to reconcile that you kept such a huge thing from them for years and years. They need the information now, when they are still forming, so they can assimilate it into their being, and grow with it, rather than have it dumped on them like a toxic sledgehammer when they are older and more formed. Let them grow with it, until it becomes a simple fact within them, a part of them.

I was actually hugely relieved. Having grown up in a culture of secrecy and denial, I hated the idea of keeping such a gigantic fact from my children. They deserved the truth, provided it was revealed to them in a way that they could process. It had been almost a year since their dad had died. They were healing up a bit. They had had their fourth and seventh birthdays, and we had moved house. Thanks to the love and consistency of everyone around them, they were doing okay – my daughter’s confidence was coming back, my boy was calming down a bit. It was time to let them have the information.

The thing is, in children's culture, the good guys never die. Only wicked witches and evil stepmothers, or ogres, monsters and beasts. Thank god then for The Lion King. We watched it over and over, my son clinging to it as some kind of validation that he was not the only one whose dad had died.

But how do you go beyond ordinary death – that distant thing that until recently happened only to hamsters and great-grandmothers – and get in ideas of depression and suicide?

Van Gogh came in handy. We looked at a children's book, Camille and the Sunflowers, which tells Van Gogh's story from the perspective of the young boy he befriended in the south of France. The children enjoyed the detail – the poverty, the wandering, the absinthe drinking, the ear-cutting. Kids love a bit of gore. They accepted the ending – the pistol, the early death – the way children accept the endings of all stories. I told them that he died because he had been ill, not in his body, but in his mind. How he had been depressed.

We live near the place where Virginia Woolf died. One Sunday we went for a walk along the river where she drowned. I told them the story of how she loaded her pockets with stones and waded in, because she was so unwell within her mind. How she had been depressed. We had a discussion about what it must be like to be depressed, and how it makes your thinking go funny, so that you are not thinking straight, and can’t make proper decisions. I kept comparing the mind to other parts of the body – the heart, the lungs, the liver – and telling them that it too can become unwell.

IT CAME OUTone evening after bedtime stories. The conversation about depression, about how ordinary it is to be depressed sometimes, but how occasionally people become very unwell with it, and can no longer think straight. Sometimes, if they have serious depression for a long time and have never gone to the doctor about it, they may kill themselves. There was a pause. Then my daughter said, "Is that what happened to Dad?"

The relief was indescribable. It was the most serious conversation we had ever had. There were no lies, no whitewash, no fakery. They took the information and asked a million questions. I told them everything – the when, the where, the how. All the details, dates and places. I emphasised the depression over and over, and told them that he had loved them more than anyone else in the world, which was entirely true. They said – small children though they were – that they were glad I had told them, that they had never felt quite sure about what exactly had happened. The feelings of trust, unity and acceptance were huge between the three of us, solidifying our bond.

But obviously, with my son still being only four, his knowledge had some grimly funny repercussions. He began bringing hanging into his play at school, so that soon he and his classmates were using wool to hang dollies from doorknobs. His teacher was horrified, while his classmates took it in their stride. But it passed. Everything levelled out, as the child psychologists had said it would. My daughter was now ready to go on a weekend retreat with the children’s bereavement charity, to workshop her way through a specially designed programme to give children affected by suicide some emotional tools. She loved it. My son, now finally old enough, is going on the same retreat this summer.

Today my children are six and nine. They are happy, normal kids. We scream at each other like a normal family, and are always open and honest with each other. They talk about their dad fondly and matter-of-factly, and have big pictures of him in their rooms. He is not forgotten, despite him being dead for half of my son’s life. I doubt they’ll ever forget him. My son feels the man-sized gap more acutely.

Maybe there will be some kind of backlash when they hit adolescence, but at least they will have had most of their lives to assimilate the information. Who knows? Meanwhile, they retain a familiarity with death from which their peers are still decades away. When there is a pet bereavement and we have to bury a cat or a hamster or a guinea pig, they do so with a kind of stoicism and acceptance that simultaneously makes me swell with pride and weep for their loss. But I will never, ever regret being upfront with them. It was the least I could do.

winstonswish.org.uk