“Mum, I could write to you for days, but I know nothing would actually make a difference to you,” the note begins. “You are much too ignorant and self concerned to even attempt to listen or understand, everyone knows that.”
More hateful words follow, culminating with, “You are a waste of space, ignorant, and a rotten c***.”
A 17-year-old girl wrote this note shortly before she and her boyfriend reportedly killed a police officer and then took their own lives. Such a letter would be hurtful under any circumstances, but as an adolescent’s last words to her mother, it seems especially cruel.
I know nothing about this mother and daughter’s relationship. Perhaps the mother truly hurt her daughter in devastating ways. Perhaps, instead, the daughter’s hatred toward her mother was typical of so many strained relationships between mothers and their adolescent daughters.
Regardless, a hateful suicide note can provoke feelings of embarrassment and guilt, generate intense anger toward the deceased, and complicate the grieving process for the intended target of the note.
Blame and Revenge in Suicide Notes
The adolescent daughter’s suicide note is one of several anger-laced notes that have made the headlines recently. Another is the note of a father who was in a bitter, years-long custody dispute with his ex-wife.
In the father’s long suicide note, which he posted online, he calls his ex-wife a psychopath, states she bullied and emotionally abused him, and blames her father for his “murder by suicide.” (The ex-wife was awarded the copyright for the suicide note and has successfully required many websites to remove it, but other sites have refused to take it down.)
The actress Julia Roberts’ half-sister Nancy Motes died by suicide in February. Reportedly, she left a long suicide note blaming Julia Roberts for her death.
Most spiteful suicide notes simply go unreported. They may remain a family secret (or a secret from the family), a source of shame, anger or sadness, whether those emotions are directed at the deceased or at the target of the note.
A Painful Goodbye
I first wrote about suicide notes (“Unwritten Goodbyes: When There is No Suicide Note”) because of the pain those left behind can experience when there is no note – no final expression of love, no goodbye, no explanation for why the person died by suicide. I neglected to say that while the absence of a suicide note can hurt, the presence of a spiteful suicide note can hurt even more.
If you were targeted in a spiteful suicide note, then you might experience a complex barrage of emotions, depending on the nature of your relationship with the person who died. Two reactions are especially common: Anger toward the deceased, and feelings of guilt.
Anger is understandable, even instinctive. If a person’s suicide note blamed you, then you are under attack. The letter writer, serving as judge and jury, convicted you of wrongdoing without giving you any chance to present a defense. The verdict stands.
At least, it can feel that way. In reality, the suicide note captures the writer’s thoughts and feelings during only one moment in time, a moment that often is clouded by distorted thinking, mental illness, addiction, or other forces of suicide.
Recovering from a Spiteful Suicide Note
You also might feel terribly hurt by the suicide note’s indictment of you, even more so if you were close to the person who died. The pain of your loss, the intense grief, is compounded by the expression of raw anger. Feelings of guilt often follow, especially if you wish desperately that you could relive events and prevent your loved one from dying.
To place the suicide note in perspective, it can help to ask yourself the following questions:
Do the person’s criticisms accurately reflect the whole of you and your relationship with that person? (Doubtful, but if so, please be sure to read further below.)
Are the person’s criticisms of you highly selective, focusing only on regrettable incidents in your relationship while ignoring the many other aspects of your relationship that were benign or actually happy?
Are you buying into the person’s accusations without defending yourself?
Was suicide a rational response to whatever shortcomings or misdeeds that you are accused of?
It is also important to consider whether you, too, blame yourself for the person’s suicide. As I discuss elsewhere (“If Only: Self-Blame After a Loved One’s Suicide”), many people undeservedly blame themselves after the suicide of a loved one. Sadly, an angry suicide note can feed into your own fears that you failed the person who died.
But What If the Angry Suicide Note is True?
Perhaps the note accurately reports ways that you caused the person pain. Whatever hurtful things you said or did may be justifiable to you, or they may break your heart.
It is impossible not to hurt people from time to time, whether by ending a relationship, saying “no” when a person wants to hear “yes,” loving someone else, expressing needs that a loved one cannot meet, saying words in anger, fighting for what is right, or something else that upsets another person. Causing a person’s pain is not the same as causing a person’s suicide.
If you inflicted harm in ways that go beyond the normal hurts of life, consider ways to change your actions with others moving forward, to make amends, and to forgive yourself. At the same time, be careful to distinguish between guilt for your wrongdoings and guilt for the person’s suicide. Short of handing a loaded gun to a psychotic person who you know hears voices commanding him or her to die by suicide, it is extremely difficult, perhaps even impossible, to directly cause another person’s suicide.
No one person, no one act, and no one event causes suicide. Emotional pain interacts with other forces, such as genetic influences, learned behaviors, coping skills, mental illness, hopelessness, and distorted thoughts.
Keeping in mind the many forces of suicide can help soothe your anger toward the person who lashed out at you. Above all, this awareness can help you heal.
© Copyright 2014 Stacey Freedenthal, PhD, LCSW, All Rights Reserved. Written for Speaking of Suicide. Photo purchased from Fotolia.
The love of my life, the father of my 9 year old son, sent me a text that said “If you don’t call me back in 5 minutes, tell (our son) it’s all your fault because you don’t care.” I had spent 30 minutes earlier telling him how much I loved him. He was extremely drunk (at 10 a.m. on Christmas Eve). He had pancreatitis, his kidneys and liver were failing, and we had been dealing with constant hospitalization for 2 years. There was a new company changing his job around and he was struggling with that, the constant pain from pancreatitis, and the inability to quit drinking. Things were so bad a few years earlier I moved out with our son, because it wasn’t a safe place for anyone because he was a terrible alcoholic who was very cruel and verbally abusive. My older son who he raised since he was 2 stayed with him, because he was 17 at the time, and if he would have left, he would have gotten his car taken away, and money would have been tight because I was working a minimum wage job, struggling to survive. I didn’t blame myself for his death. I was at the store when he sent the text, and I had forgotten my phone at home. I tried to reach him when I saw the text but it was too late. I loved him so much, his death devastated me and I will never recover from it. But I loved him and did everything I could to help him. Now, my older son is suicidal. He lives across the country and is ruining his life on a daily basis. I have never been so afraid in my life. I’m sure that he is using my pain to get me to send him money and probably just to hurt me because he knows how hard this has been for me. But what if I quit helping him or quit taking his phone calls at 4 am blaming me for everything that is wrong in his life, and he kills himself? How will I live with that? I love him so much and I blame myself already for loving a man who killed himself and letting him near my children. No one understands how hard this is for me. I am 100% alone and in fear every second of every day. The father of my younger child killed himself because he was a severe alcoholic who was dying because of it. But just the thought that at the moment he pulled the trigger he blamed me is devastating. I don’t think me or my younger son can handle losing my older son. My boys are best friends. They play video games together every night online, and it’s hurting my younger son on a daily basis worrying about his brother. I can’t handle another suicide note blaming me. I just can’t do it.
Tracy,
That sounds absolutely devastating. I’m grateful you don’t blame yourself for your son’s father’s death, though I recognize how hurtful it was that he blamed you. And to now have to worry about your older son — so painful! Life can be so unfair.
I hope you’ll check out the Alliance of Hope online support groups, for people who have lost a loved one to suicide. I’m certain there are many people there who, sadly, can relate all too well to your pain and fear.
In case self-blame does creep in, maybe this post will be helpful: “If Only”: Self-Blame After a Loved One’s Suicide.
I emailed you privately after you submitted this comment but just realized I hadn’t published it. I’d set it aside to remove some identifying details, to protect your sons’ details. I’m sorry for my delay in doing so.
No. If someone killed themselves and blamed you. Then you are responsible. In the process of writing mine i blame the people who made me feel so isolated that i want to kill myself. It is their fault. Wholeheartedly.
Well you are wrong, it will be your fault and I’m sorry for you as it is clear to me that you will probably do the same stupid thing. You do not know anything about me, what balls judging me. My sister was angry with everyone but herself and she blamed everyone not just me. She would not take responsibility for her own life. She was mean and vindictive to the end with people who had gone above and beyond to help her. If you feel isolated from people, it’s probably because you have done things to push people away on purpose. Probably so you could blame them in the end. Maybe you start fights on purpose, put them down, call them names, make them feel guilty because their life is better than yours, you try to control them, blame them for everything. Sound about right? You are headed down the same road, but you don’t have to, it is your life, make a decision to fix it. Quit blaming everyone else. If you can’t get along with some people, don’t see them if it affects you badly. You, You have to make your own life better. Quit wallowing.
Wallowing Meaning: to remain in an unhappy emotional state without trying to get out of it, as if you are enjoying it or trying to get sympathy from other people
I hope you get help, but do not contact me again as clearly we will never agree on this
I believe my suicide note would be spiteful towards my mother as well. In fact, I’ve actually written one years back to address the abuse she denies to this day. I don’t think it’s cruel. I think it’s a final goodbye full of sincerity and reciprocity.
Death is much more merciful than life. Parents never understand that we didn’t asked to be born and we don’t want to exist. But because they are so selfish, they make us suffer by bringing us into this life for their own Happiness.
[This comment was edited in accordance with the Comments Policy. – SF]
I agree. People are selfish! They don’t think “I want to give life to this person a boy or a girl so they can live a wonderful life and I will help them, teach them and guide them”!
All of these people that have kids they selfishly got pregnant or just wanted to have a baby. They didn’t think n about that baby and how she/he will be growing up etc.
I don’t think I was terribly abused (maybe amnesia) but I have a lot of trauma, neglect and bullying coming from my parents and older siblings. It’s been all my life like this and of course I’m upset, disappointed and traumatised by their behaviour towards me all my life. I’m 40 now and ever since being a small child, maybe since I was 4-5 years old I always wanted to die. Most of the time I always wanted to write a blaming letter to my family. 😔 It’s super sad, but this is how I feel. I didn’t ask to be born. I am sad I have to exist in this difficult world. Now as I’m still alive, but as always contemplating suicide almost daily, I think maybe I should just leave no note so there is no goodbye. In some ways I feel they hurt me so much that I want to hurt them in this way, I mean not giving them exact reasons or saying good bye, or showing some gratitude for good stuff they did for me. I want them to probably wonder forever after I die. Maybe occasionally question and blame themselves.