My mother died by suicide when I was twenty. Two years earlier, she told me my grandfather, her father, had hanged himself nine days after I was born. I realised over time my relationship with my mother whilst she was alive had been sandwiched between two suicides. Two generations of suicide, two generations bereaved by suicide. My earlier master’s research, which explored the lived experience of losing a mother to suicide (Stewart and Thomas 2018), left me with an intriguing and difficult-to-sit-with finding. That suicide appeared to run in families. Something intergenerational happening. Indigestible feelings passed on to the next generation(s), along with a big dose of suicide risk. How might we understand this? Herein lies the foundation of my PhD, which explores the intergenerational trauma of suicide in families. And when I arrived at the crucial (and rather exciting) stage of recruiting participants, I encountered a surprising and deafening silence to my advert, for several months, causing me to pause and wonder what might be getting enacted or played out here.
