Hello Jt and welcome.
I feel a post that was made years ago that struck a cord with many here might help you too.
It was written by a priest and is quite long and also goes into the religious side of a suicide, but because I respect peoples own beliefs I have edited that part out.
I do hope it helps you too, take care Dave.
<<Suicide is most misunderstood of all deaths
There is perhaps nothing more painful in the world than for us to lose a loved one to suicide. A couple of months ago, I received a letter from a woman, a mother, who had recently lost her 28-year-old son in this manner. The young man had been suffering from clinical depression for nearly eight years when he took his own life.
Her letter to me betrayed a healthy understanding (at some deep level) of what had happened as well as all the unhealthy fear and second-guessing we all do when we are confronted with the suicide of a loved one.
She recognized that his death was, in the end, due to illness (not to malice or weakness), that he had a gentle soul and that God is understanding. She shared the intuition that her son is now in heaven. At the same time, she worried, as we all do, whether her son had now found peace and where, if anywhere, she had failed him. She also worried that her faith was not strong enough because it was not giving her the type of consolation that she felt it should. Her pain is deep - but it is also wide.
Thousands of parents and families and friends of suicide victims around the world are enduring similar pain.
What's to be said about suicide? What can be helpful to us when we lose a loved one in this way? There are, as for all the great mysteries of life, no definitive answers that dissolve all pain and questioning. But there are some important perspectives of which we must never lose sight.
First of all, at this time in our history, for all kinds of reasons, is still perhaps the most misunderstood of all deaths. We still tend to think that because it is self-inflicted it is voluntary in a way that death through physical illness or accident is not. For most suicides, this is not true. A person dying of suicide, dies, as does the victim of physical illness or accident, against his or her will. People die from physical heart attacks, strokes, cancer, AIDS and accidents. Death by suicide is the same, except that we are dealing with an emotional heart attack, an emotional stroke, emotional AIDS, emotional cancer and an emotional fatality. This comparison is not an analogy. The two kinds of heart attacks, strokes, cancers and accidents are indeed identical. In neither case is the person responsible for his or her own death and in neither case does the person leave this world of his or her own will. >>