My sister doesn’t know the gruesome story about how our mom died. I’m worried she’ll find out online.

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Dear Care and Feeding,

My mother had severe psychiatric issues that blew up when my sister “Ren” was 6 months old, and I was 10. Ultimately, my mother’s mental health issues resulted in her suicide when Ren was just under a year old. She knows our mother died when she was a baby, but it’s the circumstances she is not aware of.

The truth is that our mother (unbeknownst to my dad) had been off her medications for over a month when she took Ren to the roof of a building and threatened to jump with her in her arms. A hostage negotiator was able to convince her to put my sister down, but my mother jumped off the roof immediately after and did not survive the fall.

Ren is now 11. Our dad remarried when she was 3, and our stepmom adopted her.  She considers her to be her mother and has no memory of our mom. My concern is that she is getting to an age where she will have increasing internet access and will discover what happened before our dad can prepare her for it. I have been asking him to address this for over a year. He says he knows Ren should hear the truth, but he doesn’t know how to tell her. Is it my place to say something before she has a terrible shock?

—Mom Is Gone, The Past Isn’t

Dear Past,

Learning that her mother’s death was a suicide, and learning the particular, horrifying details around it, is going to be a terrible shock, no matter how she finds out. You can’t protect her from that. I agree that hearing it from her father would be better than learning it through an internet search—both because the ancillary shock (and sense of betrayal) of finding out that something of this enormity has been kept secret from her would be awful, and because if he tells her, in the moment of the revelation, he would be able to offer her comfort, even if only in the form of holding her tight while she cries.

The question is whether she’s ready for this news now. My instinct is that 11 may be too young, and that if she has not asked any questions about the circumstances of her mother’s death, she is unlikely to turn to Google to try to find out. Still, if you really think there’s a chance she’s going to go looking, perhaps you could suggest to your dad that he ask her if she has questions about her mother’s death. If he can’t bring himself to do that much—if he fears that she’ll say, “Why? Should I have questions?” and he won’t know how to respond—it’s worth talking to him about whether you should be the one to raise this matter with her. But if you do, proceed carefully, putting the ball in her court. My answer, if she were to respond in the way I’ve noted, would be to say, gently, “There’s nothing you ‘should’ be doing or thinking. But if you ever want to know more about what happened—because the fact is, it’s a hard thing to talk about or even think about—you just have to ask me. When and if you’re ready.”

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If she says she’s ready now, I’d begin with the least amount of information: “Mom’s death was a suicide.” Let her questions lead the way further. But I see no reason to tell an 11-year-old the whole horrific story all at once. If Ren asks, “How did she do it?” you can say, “Are you sure you want to know? You don’t have to hear this right now—you can wait till you’re older. It’s up to you.” And if she says she is sure, I would still leave out the details for now. “She jumped off a roof. We were all devastated.” Ren is more likely to ask why she did that—and you can talk about her mom’s mental health and her failure to take her prescribed medications—than to ask for a detailed report on the event itself. If she does go internet-searching for details and learns of her presence at the scene of the suicide, whether that happens soon or when she’s 14, 15, or 17—you and your dad can tell her honestly that you just didn’t know how to tell her that part of the story, and that you’d hoped she wouldn’t be forced to grapple with it until she was older and perhaps better able to process it.

—Michelle

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