The question arrives at the edge of small talk, and there is no neutral way to answer it. A year after her partner died, a reader writing to Lori Gottlieb’s “Ask the Therapist” column in The Times still doesn’t know what to say when someone asks “What happened to your partner?” or “How did your last relationship end?” She wants to reply “without tears, oversharing or expressing anger toward his family.”
He died by suicide with no warning, while she was abroad on a business trip. She learned the shape of his last days only afterwards: what she describes as undiagnosed mental illness inside a family that had chosen “avoiding small-town stigma” over naming a multi-generational history rooted in abuse and neglect. Because the couple were not married, his family controlled the funeral — ashes buried quietly, no service, no obituary, a brief death notice. She has spent the year since reading about adult autism, borderline personality disorder, genetics and childhood trauma, trying to assemble an explanation. Her letter asks Gottlieb how to give an account of his death to other people.
A different kind of loss
Gottlieb’s first move is to name what makes the question unanswerable rather than merely awkward. Suicide is “a particular kind of loss,” she writes, unlike a car crash or a heart attack or cancer — full of “unanswered and often unanswerable questions, along with ongoing societal stigma, which makes both the grieving and the telling all the more complicated.”
Which means the year of research, however understandable, cannot produce the thing the reader is looking for. “Allow for the possibility that there’s a gap between what you learned and what you can fully know,” Gottlieb writes. “Human beings are complicated, and it’s difficult to be certain of all the reasons someone dies by suicide.” The practical payoff of that uncertainty is relief: the less you feel obliged to explain, the more room you have for what the reader says matters most, which is honouring his memory. Tell the truth, but “in a way that prioritizes your comfort and allows for him to be remembered as a whole person, rather than reduced to the circumstances of his death.”
Nobody is owed the details
Gottlieb’s answer to the original question is not one script but a set of them, keyed to who is asking, prepared in advance so the reader isn’t improvising in the moment.
For someone she doesn’t know well, the test is counterfactual: what would she say if he had died of a heart attack? If the cause would be named in any other death, name it now — “Last year, he died by suicide. I miss him so much and I’m working through this.” If it wouldn’t, leaving it at “he died unexpectedly” is also a complete answer.
Follow-up questions get the same latitude. Was he depressed? Did you know? How did it happen? “You don’t owe anyone every detail,” Gottlieb writes, and offers a usable sentence for the refusal: “This has been hard and I’d rather not go into that, but thank you for asking about him.” With people who are closer, the option runs the other way, toward the longer conversation about grief, about what she loved about him, about the sadness of learning afterwards what he had been carrying.
How people actually respond
The column’s most useful passage is a story from Gottlieb’s practice. A patient whose brother died by suicide found that the colleagues she felt closest to said a compassionate “I’m sorry for your loss” and then never mentioned it again — and she wondered whether they would have behaved that way had he died differently. The person who did ask was a quiet older man in IT she had barely spoken to: “What was your brother like? Tell me about him. How are you doing? How’s your family managing?” He didn’t fire the questions off at once. He followed her cues, and eventually mentioned his own suicidal thoughts as a young man.
Then there is the reason the silence happens at all. One patient feared that naming her son’s suicide would lead people to conclude she had been “an awful parent”; others worry about upsetting the person who asked. But awkwardness is only part of it: suicide feels radioactive, Gottlieb suggests, precisely because it touches something familiar — how many people know what it is to feel hopeless, or love someone who does.
Two corrections
Gottlieb closes with two reframings that are really the substance of the advice. The first is about tears: crying is not oversharing, and being able to describe a death without emotion should not be the goal. “The goal is to be able to choose what you disclose without having to pretend that a profound loss doesn’t make you feel sad.”
The second is about who holds the story. His family decided how he was buried; they don’t decide how he is remembered. The reader can hold her own memorial, gather the people who loved him, tell stories about who he was and who they were together. “Their silence doesn’t dictate yours.” And if she wants a single sentence that carries all of it, Gottlieb offers one: “Someone I loved died by suicide. His death was tragic. My life with him was not. Would you like to hear about us?”