Writing a Tribute for Someone Who Died by Suicide

There is a particular silence that settles over a family after a suicide. It is not the silence of peace. It is the silence of people choosing each word as if it might break something, of relatives who cannot quite finish a sentence, of the neighbour who brings a casserole and leaves without saying the name.

And then someone, often you, has to write something. An obituary. A few words for the service. A memorial page. And the blank page looks back at you and asks the question no one else will say out loud: what do I do with how it ended?

Here is the short answer, the one I wish someone had handed me on an index card: you write about the person. The way they died is part of the story. It is not the story.

Families make different choices here, and all of them can be right. Some say it directly: she died by suicide in March. Some write he died suddenly and leave it there. Some wait a year and add a sentence later, when they are ready.

If you do name it, use the plain phrase died by suicide. Avoid the older verbs borrowed from courtrooms and sermons; your person was neither a criminal nor a sinner. Not took the easy way out, because there was nothing easy about any of it. Not a description of what happened, because how it happened is not something anyone reading needs to carry.

What you are doing, when you write it simply, is refusing to let a whisper become the loudest thing about them. That is a quiet kind of courage. It is also a kindness to the next person who reads it and recognises their own family in your words.

You are not imagining the strangeness in the room. In 2016, researchers at University College London led by Alexandra Pitman published a study in the Journal of Psychosomatic Research surveying 3,432 young adults in the UK who had lost someone suddenly. People bereaved by suicide reported noticeably more stigma, shame and sense of responsibility than those who had lost someone to a sudden natural death — and this was true for friends as well as family.

I tell you this not to add a statistic to your pile, but so you know: the awkwardness is not about you, and it is not about them. It is a cultural habit, and a memorial is one small place where you get to break it.

When the end is this hard, your mind will keep dragging you back to it. That's normal. Let it go there, and then gently walk it back to an ordinary Tuesday.

What did they cook when they couldn't be bothered to cook? What song did they ruin by singing the wrong words, confidently, for years? Who did they text first when something funny happened? What was their handwriting like?

Try making a list with three columns: things they loved, things they were terrible at, things only I know. The third column is where the tribute lives. It might be something as small as:

"He always saved me the corner piece of the lasagne. He pretended it was an accident."

That sentence says more about who he was than any paragraph about his last year could.

There is a temptation, especially for people who want the loss to mean something, to turn a tribute into a warning or a message. Please resist it. Your person was not a public service announcement. They were someone who hated olives and loved thunderstorms and once drove four hours to return a borrowed jacket.

Equally, avoid writing as if the ending were inevitable, or as if it brought them peace. We don't know that, and words like these can land hard on someone reading in a dark place. Suicide is complicated; it is rarely one thing. You don't have to explain it. A memorial is not a verdict. It is a portrait.

If they struggled with their mental health, you can say so, with the same plainness you would use for any illness: she lived with depression for many years, and she also taught half the street's children to ride a bike. Both halves of that sentence are true. Keep both.

One of the gentlest things you can do is invite others to contribute. Friends from school, colleagues, the cousin who lives abroad. People who knew them in rooms you never entered.

You may worry about what they'll write. It helps to give a small prompt: share a memory that makes you smile, or tell us about the first time you met. Most people are grateful for the permission. Many have been carrying a story for weeks, waiting for somewhere to put it.

You will likely receive things you didn't know. A friend from their twenties who writes, "She talked me out of a terrible haircut and a worse boyfriend in the same afternoon." These are gifts. They remind you that this person was held by more hands than you could see.

Anger. Guilt. Love. Confusion. A kind of exhausted tenderness. The dozen questions starting with why didn't I. All of it can live in you at the same time, and none of it has to go in the tribute unless you want it to.

Write what you can bear to write today. A memorial page can grow. You can add the photo from the beach next spring, the voice note you found on your phone in June, the story you weren't ready to tell at the funeral. Nothing has to be finished this week.

And please look after yourself while you do this. If you are struggling yourself, you can reach a crisis line — in the US, call or text 988; elsewhere, you can find a local helpline at findahelpline.com. Asking for help is not a failure of strength. It is what strength looks like on a hard day.

Stella Memoria was built for exactly this kind of remembering: the full, specific, contradictory version of a person, in your own words and in the voices of those who loved them. A memorial page can hold the photographs, the songs, a recording of their laugh, and the stories people send you months from now, when they finally find the words. It stays, quietly, for as long as you need it to. If you'd like to make one, you can create a lasting memorial here.

— Alina Irene

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