40 Sympathy Messages After a Suicide: What to Write When Everyone Else Is Sending Nothing

Say his name, and one ordinary thing about him

The most useful card a family gets after a suicide is the one that names the person and then says something ordinary and true about him. Not a summary of a life. One thing. He parked badly. He sent you a photo of every dog he passed. He was the only person who would help you move a sofa on a Sunday.

There is nothing sentimental about why that works. From the first day, the family is managing everybody else's discomfort. They watch people decide what to say in real time, and they end up doing the reassuring. On top of that there is the stigma, which is still there whatever anyone tells you, and often an inquest sitting months down the calendar, and a version of the death going round the town that they cannot correct and are not always told about. In the middle of all that, a card that mentions him and says nothing whatsoever about how he died buys them a few seconds in which he is a man who parked badly. It hands the person back.

So, the rule, and it is a firm one. Do not refer to how he died. Not directly, not obliquely, not once. You are not writing around a hole in the page. You are writing about him. If you want the general shape of a condolence note first, what to write in a sympathy card covers the basic moves, and everything on this page sits on top of them.

What to call it, and what never to ask

Write "died by suicide", or "took his own life", or just "died". Do not write "committed suicide". That word comes from the years when it was a criminal offence, and a family hears the whole of that history in it. That is the entire lesson on wording. Take it and move on.

Two more, briefly. There is no successful or failed attempt, so keep both words out of your mouth as well as your card. And do not offer a reason. You will feel a pull to explain it, because an unexplained death is unbearable to sit next to, but the family have been through every explanation there is, several times a night, and yours will not be new to them.

To a parent who lost a child

"Did you have any idea?"

Parents get asked that more than anyone. Sometimes it arrives dressed as concern. Were there signs. Had he been low. Did you notice anything different that summer. Whatever the phrasing, the parent hears one question underneath it, and the question is: could you have stopped this. Never ask it. Not in the card, not in the follow-up call, not in eight months when you have decided enough time has gone by. There is no gentle version of it.

What a parent needs from a card is roughly the opposite of an investigation. Somebody to write the child's name without flinching. Somebody to say one thing they liked about him. Somebody to make a small commitment and keep it. And then, months later, to still be there, which is the part that separates the cards that mattered from the ones that were posted.

Three or four sentences is plenty. If you can only manage one, send one.

• I am so sorry about Michael.
• I keep thinking about Michael standing in your kitchen eating cereal at four in the afternoon. I loved him. I am so sorry.
• There is nothing to say. I am saying it anyway, because you should not be sitting in a quiet house.
• I will ring you Thursday evening. You do not have to pick up. I will ring again the Thursday after that.
• I am not going to ask you anything.
• I am so sorry. I am not going to pretend I understand any of it, and I am not going to hand you a reason, because I do not have one and you have already turned over every reason there is.
• You were a good mother to him. I watched you do it for twenty-two years, and I am not writing that to be kind, I am writing it because it is true and because I have a fair idea what you are doing to yourself at three in the morning.
• His name is Michael and I am going to keep saying it.

Put a day in the card, then turn up on that day

One thing worth knowing plainly, and then I will leave it alone. People bereaved by suicide are at raised risk themselves, parents and partners most of all, and the danger does not sit in the first fortnight when the house is full. It sits later, once everyone has gone home. Proper support exists and they may well need it, and a card is not it. What a card can do is be evidence that somebody is still there. So put a specific day in it. "I will ring you Thursday" is worth more than every sentence ever written about strength or peace, on the single condition that you ring on Thursday.

Neil lives two doors down from Karen. He is not a close friend, he had no idea what to write, so he put a note through the door saying he would do the grass on Sunday, and then on Sunday he did the grass, and he did not knock. He kept that up for two years. It is still the first thing Karen mentions.

To a partner

A partner is answering the practical questions nobody else is being asked. The bank. The tenancy. The coroner's officer. Their card should take something off the list rather than add a conversation to it, and it should never require a reply.

• I am so sorry. I loved him too.
• You will never have to explain anything to me. Not now, not later.
• I am coming Saturday to take the bins out and change the beds. I will not stay long unless you want me to.
• The pair of you at that awful barbecue in the rain, both refusing to go inside. That is what I keep seeing. I am so sorry.
• I do not know what the next few months look like for you and I am not going to guess at it. What I can tell you is that I am not going anywhere, including in October, when the calls have stopped coming and the house is still full of his things.

To a sibling

Siblings get skipped. Everyone asks them how their parents are holding up, and by the fourth week they have become the family's press office. Write to them about them.

• I am so sorry about your brother.
• You had a whole life with him that nobody else was in. I would like to hear about it whenever you want, and never if you don't.
• People keep asking you how your mum and dad are doing. I am asking about you.
• I am so sorry. I am free Sunday if you want the pub, and free Sunday if you want to sit in the car outside the pub.

To an adult child whose parent died

This grief comes with anger in it more often than people admit, and the anger frightens them, because they think it means they loved the person less. A card that makes room for both at once does more work than any amount of comfort. The wider ground is covered in condolence messages for the loss of a parent, and most of it holds here, minus anything that treats the death as the end of a long illness.

• I am so sorry about your dad.
• She was funny. Properly funny, not just nice. I am not letting that get lost.
• You are allowed to be furious with him and to miss him inside the same hour. Both of those are grief and neither one cancels the other.
• I have been trying to write this for nine days and every version was worse than the one before, so here is the plain one. Your dad died. I am so sorry. I am not asking you anything, and I will be at yours at seven on Wednesday with dinner.

To a close friend

The second line here breaks the rule I gave you at the top. "I know how he died and it has not changed one thing about how I think of him, or about you." I have watched that land better than anything else I have written to somebody in this position, because a good deal of the fear underneath suicide grief is that the death has quietly rewritten the person, and the family with him. Naming it and refusing it in the same sentence takes that away. I still tell people not to mention it. I still write that line to close friends. I have stopped trying to make the two of them agree.

• I love you. I am so sorry.
• I know how he died and it has not changed one thing about how I think of him, or about you.
• Don't tidy up. I am bringing food, I am putting it in the fridge, and then I am going home.
• You do not have to be all right when I turn up. You do not have to talk about him, and you do not have to avoid talking about him, and if you want to say the same six sentences to me every week for a year then I will listen to them every week for a year.

To a colleague, and when you never met the person who died

You may know almost nothing. You may not know the name, the relationship, or anything beyond a line in an email from HR. That is fine. Short and slightly formal beats warm and speculative, and a colleague card should say the work is handled and ask for nothing back. There is more on that register in a sympathy card for someone you only know through work.

I wrote to a woman at my office called Fiona whose husband had died, and I got the tense wrong in the second sentence, present where it should have been past. I spotted it after I had sealed the envelope and I posted it anyway, mostly out of cowardice about writing the whole thing again. She brought the card up about eighteen months later, in a lift, and told me she still had it. She did not mention the tense.

• I am so sorry for your loss. Take whatever time you need, and don't think about work.
• Thinking of you. No reply needed.
• I was very sorry to hear about your wife. Nothing here is urgent and nothing here is waiting on you.
• I did not know your son, but I know you, and I am so sorry.
• I never met her. I am sorry that I didn't, and I am sorry that I never will.
• I only knew your husband through you, from the photo on your desk and from the fact that you left at half four on Fridays to meet him, and I am very sorry.

A card from a workplace or a team

A team card after a suicide is harder to run than any other kind, and it goes wrong in a specific way. People leave it blank. They pick it up, read the two entries above theirs, decide they cannot match the tone, and put it down again, and a card with five signatures out of thirty reads worse than no card at all.

If you are the one organising it, write the first message yourself so nobody has to go first. Tell people in one sentence what to write. Let anyone opt out with no explanation asked for. Keep it out of a public channel, and do not add a photo of the person who died unless the family has already put one out themselves.

• We are all so sorry. There is no deadline on anything, including this card.
• Sorry doesn't cover it. Sending it anyway.
• Your desk will be here whenever you want it, and not a day before.
• We are so sorry. Nobody here expects you to answer this, or the emails, and we have taken your name off the rota until you tell us to put it back on.

Week six, the anniversary, and the birthday

Condolence traffic stops at about week three. The family's fourth month is usually harder than their first, and by then the phone has gone quiet, so a card in November for a death in July is not late. It arrives in the gap. If you missed the first round entirely, say so in the opening line and send it anyway. "This is months late and I was a coward about it" is a perfectly good first sentence.

Then there are the two dates. The death anniversary is difficult in an obvious way. The birthday is often worse, because a birthday used to be a thing the family organised, and now there is nothing to organise and the day still turns up. Put both in your calendar the week you send the first card. What to say on the anniversary of a death goes further into those two days.

• Six weeks. I know everyone has gone quiet. I haven't.
• It's the eleventh today. I remembered.
• Thinking of you today, and of him.
• Happy birthday to Michael. I hope somebody has already said it to you today, and if nobody has, I am saying it.
• A year today. I am not going to ask how you are doing. I am going to tell you that I still think about him on the train, most weeks, which surprises me every time.

The lines to cross out

Start with the peace lines, because they are the most common cards a family receives after a suicide and among the most wounding. "At peace now." "No longer suffering." "Free from his pain." "In a better place." Read them flatly, the way a mother at a kitchen table reads them at two in the morning, and they say the death worked. They say he is better off. She is being told, in a sympathy card, that her son made the right call. Nobody who sends one means that. It lands that way every time.

Then the rest of them.

"Everything happens for a reason" and "God has a plan." Both ask the family to accept that this was meant. Even inside a shared faith, save it for a conversation they start.

"Be strong." An instruction, and one they are already failing at in private.

"Time heals." They are three weeks in. Time is the thing there is too much of.

Anything beginning "at least." Whatever follows it is a comparison, and comparisons are not wanted here.

"I know how you feel." You don't, and if you do, that is yours to offer quietly and later, not a claim to make on a card.

"Let me know if you need anything." It hands the work back to them. Swap it for something closed and small. The grass on Sunday. The dog walked. The phone answered on Thursday.

"What a waste" and "how could he do that to you." The first reduces him to a wasted resource. The second makes the death an act done to the family, and they have already had that thought and hated themselves for it. Neither goes on paper.

And none of the framings underneath those phrases either. Not selfish. Not cowardly. Not a choice he made. Not a solution to anything.

Turn it into a group card

An office, a team, a running club or a school year group usually ends up sending one thing between them, which is right as long as somebody takes charge of the tone. A group sympathy card works here because people write separately and nobody has to hold a clipboard next to a grieving colleague's desk. You can create a card, send the link round, and brief the signers in one line: his name, one ordinary true thing, nothing about how he died, no questions. Set the delivery two or three weeks out rather than the day after the funeral, when the hall table is already covered.

Very short entries are the hardest to write without sounding like a form, and there is a whole file of them at short condolence messages if the box is open and you are stuck in it.

If you are still sitting there with the pen, do this. Write his name. Write one ordinary true thing about him. Say which day you are going to ring. Post it, and ring on that day.

Karen still has the nine. She can tell you who sent each one.