100 Tips for Surviving the Suicide of Someone You Love: A Practical Handbook for the People Left Behind - Softcover

Inhaltsangabe

Most books on this subject begin with a description of a death.

Readers say so, over and over, in the same shaken words: they could not get past the opening pages. This book contains no description of how anybody died. No scene, no method, no note. Nothing here will return you to the worst hours of your life without warning.

It is also not a memoir. There is no chapter in which somebody else's story is offered to you instead of help.

It is a handbook for the person who now has to do things.

Answer a phone that will not stop. Tell a child. Sit in front of a coroner's officer. Decide what to say when a stranger asks how they died. Go back to work. Get through a Tuesday in the second year, when everybody else has moved on.

One hundred practical tips. Each one ends with a single thing to do.

• The first week – the phone, the door, the funeral, and the decisions to refuse
• Police, coroners, reports, insurers, and the paperwork nobody warned you about
• Telling people, including children, and the one sentence that ends the how question
• The question why, the note or the absence of one, and what to do at four in the morning
• Guilt, the last conversation, and the signs you are told you should have seen
• Anger, relief, numbness – and the plain sadness nobody writes about
• Family who grieve on a different clock, and friends who go quiet at six months
• Keeping the living safe, including yourself, without mounting a permanent watch
• Work, sleep, money, the body, the anniversaries, and the belongings

Written for whoever you lost. A child, a partner, a parent, a brother or sister, a friend, an ex, somebody you had not spoken to in years. Every chapter says who it is for and where to skip to, and there is a section at the front that tells you where to start depending on which of those you are.

No faith position. No stages. No timetable you are behind on. No claim to know how you feel, and no suggestion that you should be further along than you are.

Crisis numbers for the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland and Australia are in the front, together with the organisations that exist specifically for people bereaved this way.

If what you need is not another account of somebody else's loss but a plain list of things you can do this week, this is that book.

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