The Secret My Mother Kept: When We Tell the Truth About Suicide
By Lisa Sugarman
Telling the truth about suicide can feel impossible. Lisa Sugarman shares how honesty reshaped her grief and healing.
For most of my life, I believed my father died of a heart attack.
That’s what my mother told me when I was ten, on the day our life changed forever. That’s what our family told people; that’s what was printed; that’s what we lived with.
It wasn’t until I was in my mid-forties that I accidentally learned the truth that my father died by suicide.
And when I say the truth changed everything, I mean everything.
Not just my understanding of how he died, but my understanding of myself. Of my grief. Of my mother. And of the silence that had wrapped itself around our family for decades.
Secrets don’t just sit quietly in the background. They shape the air in the room. They influence what gets said and what doesn’t. They create invisible boundaries around the truth. And when the secret involves suicide, the silence can feel too heavy to bear.
What Happens when You Change the Story
My mother didn’t keep the truth from me to hurt me. She kept it to protect me. And she did.
She was a single parent, newly widowed, raising a ten-year-old daughter in a time when suicide wasn’t something people talked about openly. Because at that time, in the late 1970s, it was whispered, stigmatized, or buried altogether.
So she did what she thought she had to do: She changed the story and carried the truth alone.
And I carried a version of my grief that never quite made sense.
Because here’s the thing about grief: Your body knows when something doesn’t add up—even if your mind doesn’t. And I had a quiet knowing that there was always something unresolved inside me. Something unfinished that I just didn’t have the language to explain.
When the truth of his suicide finally came out decades later, my world imploded. I had already grieved him once. Now I had to grieve him all over again, only this time with the full weight of how he died.
I often say I lost my father twice. Because I did. Once when he died, and again when I learned the truth.
But here’s what I didn’t expect: The truth, as painful as it was, also set something free.
Truth Frees You from Guessing the Narrative
For years, I lived inside a version of my father’s story that was incomplete. I couldn’t fully process his death because I didn’t fully understand it. But once I knew the truth, I could finally ask the hard questions. I could explore my anger. My confusion. My compassion. I could look at his pain through an adult’s lens instead of a child’s.
Now I could start grieving the real story instead of the one I’d been given.
That’s one of the quiet dangers of secrecy after suicide: When kids aren’t told the truth, they often create their own narratives. They fill in the blanks with self-blame, fear, guilt, and “what ifs.”
But when we finally say the word suicide out loud, we stop fighting reality. We stop dancing around it. We stop pretending it didn’t happen the way it did. And that honesty, as raw as it feels, opens the door to real healing. That’s because silence protects stigma while truth dismantles it.
Truth doesn’t eliminate pain. But it does eliminate guessing. And guessing can be its own kind of torment.
Survival Isn’t Healing
When my mother finally shared what really happened, it wasn’t easy for her. It meant revisiting one of the most traumatic moments of her life. It meant admitting she’d been carrying something alone. And it meant trusting that I was strong enough to hold it.
That conversation didn’t just change how I saw my father, it changed how I saw my mother. I understood her fear and her instinct to shield me. I also better understood her grief and her need to protect her child from that thick extra layer of trauma from suicide loss.
I came to understand that the secret wasn’t about deception. It was about survival. But survival isn’t the same thing as healing.
Healing requires air and light and honesty.
So, if you’re someone who’s living with a secret around suicide, whether it’s your own attempt, the loss of someone you love, or a truth that’s never been spoken, I want you to know that you’re not weak for telling the truth. And you’re not disloyal for naming what happened.
When we talk openly about suicide, we make it possible for others to do the same. We give them permission to say, “Me too.” We make room for support, for resources, for real conversations about mental health instead of whispered ones.
Now, that doesn’t mean every truth has to be public. Timing and safety matter just as much as honesty. But hiding the truth forever doesn’t protect us from pain—it just isolates us inside it.
And over time, I’ve come to learn that secrets don’t preserve love—they only complicate it.
Truth Makes Space for Compassion
For decades, I had loved a version of my father that was incomplete. The secret that had protected me as a child left my grief tangled in unanswered questions as an adult.
When my mother finally told me, thirty-five years later, that my father had died by suicide, I felt the ground shift. Not because I loved him less but because I suddenly understood him more.
The truth about my father didn’t diminish my love for him. It deepened it. Over time, it allowed me to see him not as a myth or a mystery, but as a human being who was struggling. It helped me hold both truths at once: that he loved me and that he was in pain.
Both of which can exist in tandem.
And when we allow both to exist, we make space for compassion instead of confusion.
When to Tell the Truth About Suicide Loss
If you’re navigating suicide loss and are unsure whether to tell your children the truth, or when, here are three things I’ve learned along the way:
First, children deserve honesty that matches their developmental level. They don’t need graphic details, but they do need clarity. Avoiding the word suicide doesn’t protect them from grief; it just makes things more confusing.
Second, telling the truth doesn’t mean telling it all at once. It can unfold over time. It can be revisited. And it can grow as your kids grow.
And third, make sure you’re not carrying it alone. Whether it’s a therapist, a support group, a trusted friend, or a crisis resource, support matters. You deserve space to process your own grief too.
When my mother finally told me the truth, she couldn’t have known what it would lead to. She couldn’t have predicted that I’d one day speak openly about suicide loss, that I’d write about it, that I’d build my life’s work around breaking the silence that once defined ours.
But that one conversation changed the entire trajectory of my healing.
The secret didn’t disappear overnight, and the pain didn’t magically resolve. But the isolation did. And that was the beginning of something new.
There’s power in telling the truth about suicide, not because it’s easy but because it’s honest. Because it honors the complexity of the person we lost; because it allows us to grieve the real story instead of a softened version of it.
Because sometimes, the truth is what finally gives us permission to heal.
Healing Begins with Honesty
My new book, Surviving: Finding Hope After Suicide Loss, tells the full story of what happened when my family told the truth. It talks in depth about the silence, the revelation, the unraveling, and the rebuilding. It’s the story of losing my father twice. And it’s the story of how we healed once we stopped hiding behind the secret of his suicide.
So, if you’ve ever lived inside a secret, if you’ve ever wondered whether speaking the truth might free you instead of break you, know this: Telling the truth didn’t destroy me. It gave me back my footing. Because healing doesn’t begin with perfection—it begins with honesty.