You might be angry at them. Not just sad. Not just lost. Angry.
Angry that they left. Angry at what they left behind — the family pulled apart, the children without a parent, the bills and the funeral and the explaining to people who don't know what to say.
Maybe angry that they were planning your birthday present and planning to die at the same time. That they hugged you goodbye and it might have been a real goodbye and you didn't know. That anger is real. And it doesn't cancel out your love.
Anger at someone who died by suicide is one of the most common parts of this grief — and one of the least talked about. Because how can you be angry at someone who was suffering? How can you rage at someone who was in so much pain that death seemed like the only way out?
You can. Because both things are true. They were suffering. And what they did caused enormous damage to the people who loved them. Both of those facts exist at the same time, and neither erases the other.
The anger might take different shapes. Sometimes it's hot — a flash of rage when you find something they left behind, or when someone mentions their name at the wrong moment, or when you're up at 3am doing the paperwork they'll never have to deal with.
Sometimes it's cold. A bitterness that they got to leave and you have to stay. An anger at the unfairness of it — that they chose this, and you didn't get a choice.
Sometimes the anger isn't even directed at them specifically. It's directed at the universe, at God, at the mental health system, at the friend who didn't call, at yourself.
What almost always follows anger is guilt. "How can I be angry at someone I love? At someone who was ill? At someone who's dead?" The guilt tries to talk you out of the anger, as if anger and love can't coexist.
They can. They do. You can love someone completely and be angry at them for what they did. You can grieve them desperately and still want to throw something across the room. The anger isn't a betrayal of the relationship. It's part of it — part of what it means to love someone who left in the worst possible way.
The anger may change over time. For some people it gets louder before it gets quieter. For some it never fully goes away — it just settles into something more manageable, like background noise. One person described it as a room in the house they've learned to live around.
You don't have to resolve the anger. You don't have to forgive anyone — not them, not yourself, not the world. If forgiveness comes, it comes. If it doesn't, you can still live a full life with anger in it. The anger just needs to be acknowledged, not fixed.