“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.
I don’t think leaving a spiteful suicide note necessarily means a person had a thing wrong with them. Sometimes it really is that bad. What are they supposed to lie about why it is they chose to die?
Exactly. Why should I have to lie about the cause of my pain or go silently?
The very fact they took their own life shows that they are not thinking clearly. Mental illness …. Mental illness…. They always had choices other than taking their own life. Please research facts before you write your unsubstantiated claims.
What abuser-loving bullshit. Just because some people survive being beaten doesn’t mean it’s not murder when someone else dies from being beaten. Likewise, the fact that some people survive abuse doesn’t mean you’re blameless when the person you abused doesn’t survive. You’re not, and you deserve to carry that guilt forever.
Yes. Thank you.
“Even in the case of a vicious ex-spouse, a sadistic bully, or a mother who may have harmed her adolescent daughter, there is no “murder by suicide,” in my opinion. Legions of others have been hurt in the same way, or worse, without ending their life.”
Even if I am driving along at 40 mph when the speed limit is 20 mph, I am not to blame if I strike and kill a pedestrian. Plenty of people speed much worse than that all the time- and nobody chooses to walk out in front of them to get killed.
So no blame for the death, only blame for the speeding lol.
Thank you. I noticed that too. I’m sorry but even wild animals have been known to commit suicide to try and escape a situation. You can indeed be responsible for suicide and it strains credulity to think you cannot. In fact, I think this is the first time I’ve read that you cannot.
Agreed, Olufemi. Some of the most noxious behavior is condoned because it’s common, thus accepted, results-be-damned.
Befrienders looks really cool: https://www.befrienders.org/our-members. I hadn’t heard of them before.
What a disgusting load of bullshit. Every narcissistic parent whose child has commited suicide is FULLY RESPONSIBLE for it. But instead you’re like “ohh mental illness did this” and blah blah blah, when those parents ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR THAT MENTAL ILLNESS. And same for every narcissist/psychopath who ruins anyone’s life. And instead you want to pretend the mental illness came out of nowhere and that it was no one’s fault, disrespecting the memory of anyone who has been a victim of these monsters.
You disgust me.
In many cases the accuser was, as the article points out, I’ll or acting irrationally. However, there are many cases in which such notes are not only justified but should be investigated. You blanket the entire thing with words of comfort for the accused, and are incredibly irresponsible for that. By the same logic any woman raped by her husband who makes the accusation is a whiner and we should comfort the husband. Do you have neither regard nor respect for accountability? Do you not understand the human instinct to survive – something so strong one should always take pause to wonder what kind of anguish must the dead have undergone to have short circuited that instinct? I myself struggle every day to find reason to go through yet another in which my life is on hold as I dangle on the thread of someone’s promises – promises that continually are broken. I am disabled. I cannot survive without at least a bare min of things in constant threat of being taken from me, as if it were a game. My only upside is that person needs my help with a few things. I have cried for help to doctors, friends and written my fingers bloody trying to reason a way that I can survive (I want to live – I just can’t bare the abuse and threats anymore) or at least take my exit without blaming, because everyone says “don’t be a blamer – straighten up man”. But how can I simply vanish knowing that person will get off emotionally Scott free (the person is a narcissist) and will get lots of sympathy for how mean I was by doing this… Seriously!? And they’re delusional enough they’ll be thinking that without any help. Let’s give all the kids gold stars, let’s remove winning or losing from their sports and on and on – it sickens me the culture of zero responsibility we’re engendering, and this is yet one more example. If you slap the dog, you damn well expect to get bit.
This entire website is an exercise in covering up and whitewashing. A stark refusal to acknowledge the ugly reality at any cost.
We really should not expect anything else. I’m sure Stacey is a fine therapist – even if she isn’t a psychiatrist – and she deserves credit for at least talking about these issues openly.
However, she is also out of her depth. Who is to blame, whether the action was justified or not, and what it means are questions of philosophy, not psychology.
I agree with the above. I am very sick as a result of parental abuse and they use this to FURTHER SCAPEGOAT. I have been very suicidal the last few years and if I do kill Myself it won’t be THEIR FAULT per se but it will be absolutely, because of them. And they are very well aware of this because I have warned them about what is happening and guess what? whatever i tell them they use to further harass. Unless you know the dynamic, intimately, you may not be aware that this does happen. In these cases the victim is the victim, the one who is dead. Not the perpetrator.
Agreed, Nisha. I hope you are doing well.
Thank you so much for this post. I was the victim of a revenge suicide just four weeks ago. It is the most difficult thing I have had to endure in my adult life. At this point I am struggling both mentally and physically each and every day. I hope I get through this…
My husband also left a very brief message “for me” which he knew the cops would find first. He killed himself while I was out of town. It made it very clear that his suicide was my fault. The cops even asked me about “the circumstances behind the note.”
Like the writer above, I hope and pray I’ll survive this. Tonight, I have my doubts. The suicide was horrible enough. The last note has done serious damage.
I relate with you. I am in a similar situation and am desperate to deal and understand. My husband ended his life very shortly after our divorce in march 2018. The guilt is consuming me. If you are willing to talk or direct me to some resources I would appreciate it. Thank you!
Hi Catherine. I am the original poster on this thread (Lili). It has now been six years and I am so much better. I was diagnosed with PTSD approximately 3 months after the event and I was in a very bad way. It took me a good four years to get to the point where I could function relatively normally again. I felt like my entire life had been ripped away from me. Two years on from those four and I am as close to the person I was before, as I’ll get. I still have PTSD and my world has become a lot smaller than it was prior to that day..however, I am doing pretty well and I’m happy. I no longer hold onto any guilt and realise that while what was done to me was cruel, I am stronger than the punishment he tried to sentence me with..I hope you are doing much better too. Sending love.
Lili, it’s very kind of you to update us about how you’re doing. So often, readers of this site never get to hear how people are doing after they’ve moved through their trauma or other crisis. It sounds like you have experienced growth and healing, though of course pain remains. It reminds me of an analogy I once read about trauma that I like: trauma is like a big rock that’s blocking the path of tree roots. The roots must grow around and over and under the rock, integrating the it into their life. Perhaps that’s not as hopeful as it could be, but life goes on, and it’s good your roots — and your tree — continue to grow. You are bigger than what happened to you. Thank you for sharing here and, in doing so, giving others hope.