Anna Edgeworth sensed something was wrong when she could not contact her partner, Michael Moran, all day, so she went straight home after work before collecting their only child from creche.
She was totally unprepared and devastated to discover he had died by suicide at their house in Enfield, Co Meath.
“It was completely out of the blue. He was only 37,” she says, nearly seven years on from that October day in 2017. The initial hours after the discovery are a blur, but she remembers knocking on a neighbour’s door seeking help and they, and others across the road, started handling things. One of them went to the creche to collect their daughter, Sophie, who had just turned four, and kept her playing with their children. That night, mother and daughter went to stay with Anna’s parents in Co Dublin, where they were to live for the next six months.
It was two days after Michael’s death before Anna sat down with their daughter to break the news. At that stage, Sophie had started to ask why there was a big “party” going on in her grandparents’ house, as visitors were coming and going, some bringing her presents.
To have to tell a small child their beloved father is dead is hard enough, without the added layer of complication that suicide brings to the conversation. Anna, a member of the Defence Forces at the time, had been advised by a counsellor on words to use. “Only for her, I don’t know how I would have told Sophie or what I would have said.”
It was important that the language was simple and factual. “So, ‘Daddy is dead; he’s not coming back; he looks like he’s asleep’.”
She was conscious she had to prepare Sophie for seeing him in the coffin before the funeral. “I was warned not to use things like, ‘he’s an angel now’, or ‘he’s gone to heaven’, because they think they’re going to come back.
“She didn’t really get it, because she was only four.”
On seeing her father in the coffin, she did ask could she put in a teddy bear because she didn’t want him to be there on his own. About a week after the funeral, the small girl began to ask “how?” and “why?”
“I have the benefit of a child who’s very question-focused and very chatty,” says Anna, recalling her own struggle to phrase responses. “She was asking, ‘well, how did he die?’ and I was like, ‘well, he did it to himself, he stopped himself from living’.”
That of course prompted the question, why would he do that?
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She explained they would never properly know, but he had big problems in his head, which he was not able to say out loud to somebody, and they took over and made him think a certain way. That his brain became sick.
“For a long time I couldn’t say the word ‘suicide’ to her because I couldn’t watch the word come out of her mouth. So I used to say, ‘he made himself die’, ‘he made himself not let live any more’.”
In hindsight, she says she could have used the direct term. “I just felt that word was too big for her at the time. It probably wasn’t.”
But Anna did not have the benefit of “Safe Harbour”, a set of resources for parents in her predicament, recently launched by the Health Service Executive (HSE). The materials revolve around a beautiful, picture storybook that does not hold back on using the word suicide, albeit it is wrapped in child-friendly metaphors. “Beautiful” might sound like an incongruous description, but as child bereavement counsellor Gina Cantillon says, illustrator Bronagh Lee “has managed to make something really beautiful out of something very destructive. That is an incredible feat.”
Cantillon is project leader of Barnardos bereavement services, which includes a helpline (01 473 2110, Mon-Thurs, 10am to 12pm). About 25 per cent of the children and families they work with have been bereaved by suicide. “On our helpline, we would get calls frequently from people that are feeling really afraid to tell their children the cause of death, which is understandable. But I think children don’t have the same sort of understanding or implications of suicide as adults.
“It’s a fact like any other fact. As they get older, they understand the significance of that fact differently. But, right now, what’s actually important is that they’re allowed to grieve their person fully and honestly. If we tell them a different story, they’re grieving something that didn’t happen. Then at some other point, we have to go back and say, ‘okay, I didn’t tell you all the truth at that point’. That’s where the issue of trust can arise.”
In 16 years working with children’s bereavement services, Cantillon says “what families have taught me over and over again is that actually sharing information creates the trust and the security that’s invaluable over the next few years”. Otherwise, you’re running a huge risk, and it happens all the time, she says, that children find out elsewhere – they’ll overhear a conversation, another child will tease them about it, “and it will come out in a way that is not contained”. The child may not even tell anybody they now know and are left on their own with it.
“If you tell them at six that he died of a heart attack,” says Oliver Skehan, national suicide bereavement support co-ordinator with the National Office for Suicide Prevention (NOSP), “and they find out in the schoolyard at 12 that actually he didn’t die of a heart attack, Daddy took his own life, they’re literally back to square one again in their grieving process.”
However, he acknowledges it is incredibly challenging for a newly bereaved parent to have these honest conversations with a child, as there are no answers. “There are so many ‘what ifs’ and ‘whys’ and ‘maybes’ and there’s a stigma associated with suicide bereavement as well.”
If you imagine how difficult it is for an adult to comprehend suicide, he adds, then how much harder it is for a child to understand “why the person that they loved, that they wanted to bring them to the playground or give them pancakes in the morning … is no longer around”.
Niamh Crudden, resource officer for suicide prevention in the HSE Community Dublin South, Kildare and West Wicklow, was getting calls from parents and other family members trying to support children. One of the most requested resources was for a storybook and, while they had a list of children’s books dealing with death, there was nothing she was really comfortable about recommending.
“I felt like we were sending them off into the ether not equipped enough.” Having identified this gap, she collaborated with other bereavement organisations working in their area and headed a project team that was funded by the NOSP to produce an appropriate storybook. They had five key messages to be conveyed: what death is and what it means; what suicide means; suicide is nobody’s fault (because children are very “egocentric” and think maybe it has happened because of something they did); a range of emotions in the aftermath is normal and it is important to look for support; and that the person may be gone, but their love lives on.
Children’s writer Patricia Forde took on the challenge, before she became Laureate na nÓg 2023-2026. “I knew nothing about the subject matter, thankfully. So it was a tough ask in a way because I particularly like writing lyrical stuff,” she says.
She looked for a metaphor that would carry the story. “It had to be visual, so I had this idea about the family being a ship, because I thought that would give me lots of options for rough weather and rocks – and safe harbour.”
Yet, being told she had to use the word “suicide” and say that the father was never coming back, “it goes against every instinct you have as a picture book writer”.
Normally, she holds a child in her mind for whom she is writing a book. In this case, “I really found, in the first days of writing it, I couldn’t look at the child. I just thought, this is so sad and so upsetting. By the end of the book, I’d become a lot closer to her.”
Forde was buoyed by the sense of optimism conveyed by the team that “the child can ride this out and the family can recover”.
Picture books are safe places for children, she points out. “I had hoped that the story wouldn’t frighten them in anyway, but then, you know, the worst had already happened by the time I’m writing the story.”
Left to her own devices, “it would have been a much softer book”, with no mention of the S word. “But they were so right. It was important that the truth be told in the book.”
Forde’s text spins images such as, “for Dad it seems that huge waves of sad thoughts got stuck in his head – stuck like barnacles to rocks”, to facilitate a child’s understanding.
In addition to the picture book, Safe Harbour encompasses an essential guide to its use that includes helpful advice for support of older children and teens too; an audio version of the book; a podcast series about various aspects of child bereavement by suicide, and worksheets for children. Three years in development, as every word in every piece of material was scrutinised, Safe Harbour is possibly a world first in its comprehensiveness for this specific purpose. It is attracting international attention, according to the project team, as well as excellent national feedback since its launch in the summer.
There is now significant international evidence of what’s called transgenerational transmission of suicidal behaviour, says Prof Philip Dodd, mental health policy and clinical specialist in the Department of Health and clinical adviser to NOSP. A large 2022 Danish study, looking at more than 150,000 people who had been exposed to parental suicide between 1980 and 2016, illustrates their heightened risk of following suit and makes them an important target for suicide-prevention measures.
There is emerging evidence too that interventions with suicide-bereaved children, such as group-based therapy, are effective. A community response to this type of loss is also really important. All the significant adults in a child’s life, from extended family and neighbours to teachers and sports coaches, need to rally around in support. The Safe Harbour resources can help them to do this in an appropriate and consistent way.
“What’s important in supporting a young suicide-bereaved child is to confront the reality of the situation but also to ensure that message of hope and recovery is always provided to counterbalance the very negative fact of what has taken place,” he adds.
Life must, and does, go on. “If anybody’s proof of that, it’s definitely me,” agrees Anna, “I’m out the other side.”
She now works with CIE, in a role more compatible with prioritising Sophie. About a year after Michael’s death, she was very worried as her daughter seemed to become very upset over the slightest things. “Her small mind was probably clicking into gear,” says Anna, who rang Barnardos’ helpline, and they advised a play therapist. Due to a waiting list, Anna paid privately for one who, she says, was brilliant not only in supporting Sophie, but reassuring her too.
She had had to talk to her daughter about ways to handle questions from peers about not having a visible father. She gave her words to use, while suggesting “you don’t have to tell everybody everything all at once”. But Sophie came back to her, saying “Mummy, they keep asking me”.
“She ended up having to tell them everything,” says Anna, who points out, “I can’t tell her not to either. You [would] create a taboo. And it’s her story to tell.”
But, occasionally, another parent would complain because Sophie had mentioned her father’s suicide to their child.
As a bereaved mother doing her best, she was greatly upset the first time such a complaint was relayed by a teacher. Later on, she would offer to advise a parent on language she found helpful in explaining suicide to a child. Now, she is very pleased that Safe Harbour is there to do that job.
- See childhoodbereavement.ie/safeharbour for links to materials
- HSE - 1800 700 700
- The Samaritans - 116 123, jo@samaritans.ie
- Pieta House - 1800 247 247, Text HELP to 51444
- Suicide Or Survive - 1890 577 577, info@suicideorsurvive.ie
