Someone I Love Died by Suicide. Do I Have the Right to Be Angry?

Last winter, my friend died. It was a Friday. The email came Sunday. If anything, the weather was a harbinger of the news. Dark skies and rain.

Anyone who has experienced loss is probably familiar with the five stages of grief. Denial came first, heavy handed, constricting my lungs. Somehow, my body knew that even breathing was a limp acceptance of a new reality that I didn’t want to acknowledge. In the span of five minutes, I felt like I had experienced the whole cycle: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. Over and over as if I were stuck in a barrel rolling down a rocky cliffside. In the months that have followed, they come in spurts, mostly denial, late at night during bouts of insomnia. Why did you do this? Why did you leave me? But what has stayed, selfishly, constantly, though all other emotions, is anger.

I remember the first time a mutual friend voiced the sentiment. It was earlier this year, winter dancing on the cusp of spring. We were walking by Central Park when he asked how I was feeling. Confused, mostly. We reminisced on a piece of advice our friend liked to hand out: “Discipline is more important than motivation”, I recited. The sentence is on a sticky note near my desk, a reminder to keep writing when I don’t want to. “Yeah,” the mutual friend replied, bitterly. “Says the guy who quit life.”

Those words stopped me in the middle of the sidewalk. “Yes, but also, can we say that?” I yelped. Privately, I was relieved that someone else was thinking the same thing I was thinking. Because, while the sadness and depression and denial and acceptance came in bouts, anger had refused to leave me. It was the first emotion I felt every time I thought about everything. But I was also wondering—did I have the right to be? My friend, my mentor, was dead. Shouldn’t I just keep my memories close and be grateful? I wanted to be, but I couldn’t. I was reeling, feeling the pain of losing someone—the only person, I felt—who had believed I could be a novelist. I felt like when my friend died, that dream died, too. And then I’d start to feel shame—over my anger and my selfishness. It shouldn’t be all about me and my silly little ambitions. But in the end, isn’t it always about us, in relation to who we’ve lost? However, the gnawing feeling of unjustified anger has persisted, so I decided to tap a handful of experts to ask them: Do I have the right to be angry when someone I love dies by suicide?

In daily life, anger is a common emotion—road rage, for example. The feeling when a large group line hops at the Met. Someone accidentally spilling coffee on your new sweater and not offering to clean or replace it. But when faced with something so incomprehensible, so violent, so tragic, anger feels out of place. However, David Kessler, grief expert and best-selling author of the forthcoming workbook, Finding Meaning, reassures me that my rage isn’t out of place.

“Anger is such a natural response to loss,” he says. “And yet we somehow feel it’s not an appropriate emotion. I often call anger pain’s bodyguard—we understand there’s pain, but the expression of anger [often comes when] we don’t know how to deal with it.”

Dr. Catherine Nobile, a New York-based psychologist and director of Nobile Psychology, adds, “Anger might be directed towards the deceased, oneself, other people involved, or even a higher power, and it helps individuals grapple with feelings of unfairness and helplessness.” As I’m sure many can relate, there’s nothing worse than the feeling helpless. I like to fix things, and the inability to fix this keeps the rage simmering.

Anger, Kessler explains, is simply another expression of pain. In grief, there are two extremes: sadness and anger. He notes that those who fall into sadness tend to receive more support, while we wait for someone to “deal with” their anger before extending comfort.

“Part of the reason I don’t think we deal with anger so well [is because] many of us have seen anger modeled dangerously in bad ways, not in healthy ways. We don’t often know what healthy looks like. And we are talking about healthy anger when someone dies,” he tells me.

Acknowledging and confronting the feeling is key to the grieving process, and does help in reaching the state of acceptance, Nobile says. But if you still have this sentiment that experiencing anger feels inappropriate, Laura Walton, a licensed marriage and family therapist and founder of lovelew, a platform to support women impacted by grief, death or dying, puts it this way.

“People label things as good emotions or bad emotions. Really, emotions are just emotions. If you understand the context in which the emotions live, they make sense.” Nobile adds, “Two things can be true at the same time. We can feel angry at the deceased and hold negative feelings towards them while still acknowledging the impact they had on our lives.”

Months on from the incident, the biggest thing that has surprised me is that I didn’t seem to pass through the stages of grief in the order. I experienced them all in the span of days, and then only a few have come to haunt me. But, Walton tells me that the original framework for the five stages of grief, as developed by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, was designed for people who were dying. Today, we’ve repurposed them as tools for those processing death of loved ones. Personally, I was hoping that the framework would function as a guide of sorts, injecting structure into a life event that is totally, completely upending. That’s not always the case.

“[There’s a faulty] expectation around that,” Walton explains. “We do experience those stages at different points. But it’s not a clear roadmap the way a lot of people understand it, like, OK, I can check off denial and move on to the next one; then, when I get to the bottom of the list, I’m done and I’m never going to grieve again. Because you can’t predict it, it’s impossible to do it wrong. You’re not going to mess it up. You can’t do it wrong because there’s no one way to do it.”

One of my favorite Wes Anderson films is Asteroid City. While the overarching plot involves, well, asteroids and aliens, grief is a pertinent theme, too—one of the protagonists has just lost his wife. He tells his children, “Time heals all wounds. No. Maybe it can be a band-aid.” That stuck with me because I believe it’s true. As time moves forward, the pain hurts less—but it always aches, and I’m just trying to find a way to keep it in. Kessler, though, offers a bit of hope.

“I often say, how long will the person be dead? Because if they’re going to be dead for a long time, it means you’re going to grieve for a long time. But it doesn’t mean we’ll always grieve with pain. Hopefully, in time, we’ll grieve with more love than pain.”

Ultimately, you’re not on anyone’s timeline with regards to how you experience the swath of emotions that come. And you shouldn’t feel the need to repress them, either. “The emotional journey of grief is often non-linear, with feelings of intense sorrow or anger resurfacing periodically, especially around anniversaries or significant events,” Nobile notes. “It’s crucial to recognize that grieving is a deeply personal process, with no set timeline or ‘correct’ way to navigate it. Allowing oneself the freedom to experience and work through these emotions at their own pace is an important part of adapting to the loss and eventually finding a sense of resolution. What we do know is ignoring feelings of grief prolongs the process. Research shows that unresolved grief increases suffering, both physically and mentally.”

As the mental health experts I consulted have reiterated, there’s no “right” way to grieve. But being the INFJ personality type that I am, I’m fighting for some structure, some playbook, some way to problem-solve out of this fog. If that’s you, too, Walton shares a handy strategy for channeling all the feelings.

“I always find it really helpful to think of emotions as, you know, the word emotion itself. Emotion is an energy in motion,” she explains. “So whether it’s anger or any other emotion we might be talking about, we experienced that emotion as energy in our bodies. That energy is going to want to move at some point.” For example, Walton says, maybe you watch a sad movie—the energy of that emotion might move through tears. Often, we try to bottle up emotions—swallow back the tears, ball the firsts, repress the feelings. There’s a time and place for that, but keeping emotions pent-up in the long run isn’t healthy. When you’re angry, Walton suggests observing how it manifests physically in your body. Maybe you clench your fists or grit your teeth.

“If you can notice [where the angry energy lives], [ask yourself what your body wants to do with it]. I might want to punch something, so maybe I go to a boxing class or punch a pillow on my bed.”

It’s impossible to say how long I’ll keep feeling angry. Maybe after I write this, I’ll go punch a pillow or scream into the dead of night. But smoldering in the angry flames is also a profound love, appreciation and gratefulness. They’re destined, I guess, to forever exist in tandem.