My husband, Joe, had gathered the girls in the kitchen of our Toronto house. After living in renovations for five years, the room had finally become a space for family time: we cooked and ate, joked and teased each other, and sometimes discussed difficult topics without anyone stomping off in a rage of teenage (or perimenopausal) hormones.
Joe was perched on a stool at the head of the table, flanked by afternoon sun and our daughters. He reached over and held my hand, a gesture he has made often through our two-decade relationship.
Struggling To Keep A Secret
Joe had known about my brother’s disappearance and suicide since before I moved from England to Australia to be with him. I had told him after work one evening while we ate dinner at Spitalfields Markets, near my London flat. I wasn’t always calm when I talked about my little brother.
One evening in Sydney, after too much red wine, I wept ferociously, clinging to Joe as we sat on a harbour bench overlooking the twinkling lights of the Opera House. Like many things to do with my younger brother, I didn’t mention it afterwards. I was embarrassed. I wasn’t someone who crumbled with grief. And I rarely shared this part of my life. Since 1987 when my 16-year-old brother, Russ, went missing for several weeks and was found dead, I hadn’t talked openly about him. So even thinking about the conversation I was going to have with my daughters spiked my anxiety.
A False Start
In the kitchen, I inhaled and willed myself to stop shaking. Elsa and Aria leaned on the table, thumbing their way through TikTok and cute bunny reels on their mobile phones. The wood tabletop felt hard and unyielding under my forearms, and I let it take my weight. I needed all the support I could get.
Joe raised his eyebrows at me as if to say, are you ready?
Long before this family meeting, I’d asked my daughters’ counsellors for advice. Both our girls were Queenslanders with the accents to prove it and leaving behind our Australian home and friends to move to Canada in 2017 had been destabilising for them. I didn’t want to add to their anxiety or depression. Be honest, the counsellors had said, and emailed me a couple of articles. One outlined reactions children may have after learning about “family secrets.” There is no family secret, I thought to myself. I hadn’t hidden my brother’s death.
My daughters knew I grew up in between two brothers, hunting for tadpoles and turtles. A photo of Russ — caught mid-movement on his dirt bike with his legs sprawled, head back laughing — hung with pictures of our ancestors on what we call “the family wall.” When the girls said grace before dinner, we ended with “God bless Grampa John, Uncle Nigel, and Uncle Russ,” because I wanted them to feel close to relatives who had died before they were born.
As Elsa and Aria matured, they asked more questions. How did they die?
“Grampa John was very old, and Uncle Nigel was 23 when he was killed in Italy near the end of the Second World War,” I’d tell them, hoping they wouldn’t press me further. “What about Uncle Russ?” they wanted to know. “How old was he?”
“He was 16, almost 17,” I said.
“How did he die?”
“I’m not ready to talk about it,” I said. “It makes me too sad.”
So they knew a lot about Russ, but they didn’t know everything.
The Context
Back in our kitchen, Joe cleared his throat and asked the girls to put down their phones.
“Mama has something to tell you,” he said, squeezing my hand. I was still shaking but the time had come.
A few months earlier, Elsa had been on the phone with my father and had asked him how Uncle Russ had died. My father, caught off-guard, said it was a hunting accident. When I found out, I told Elsa it was a terrible accident, but not a hunting one.
For years, I’d thought my children were too young to digest the complicated nature of suicide. Intellectually, I knew talking wasn’t a gateway to action, that discussing suicide did not make people consider it for themselves. My emotions, however, were another thing.
I was frightened. My daughters were living with their own mental health issues and I worried that learning about my brother’s suicide would cause them to hurt themselves, or even make them think there was something flawed in my family, and by extension, in them. In my head, I just needed to get them past the age when my brother died and then maybe they would be ok.
My daughters were born in 2006 and 2008, a handful of years after the first World Suicide Prevention Day launched in Sweden (2003). Few were speaking openly about suicide and the World Health Organization and the International Association for Suicide Prevention wanted to raise awareness and convince leaders to prioritize suicide prevention. Change is slow. Even though media guidelines for reporting suicide existed as far back as the late 1980s, many countries didn’t implement them for decades.
My Struggle
My own journey to understanding the impact of Russ’s suicide was filled with guilt, shame and stigma. When Russ died in the late 1980s, suicide loss wasn’t considered traumatic. Post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) was for soldiers and war reporters, not people like me. I was just supposed to get over it. I quickly learned that silence was the best way to protect myself. I carried on as best as I could. I was honest, but only to a certain point.
It’s difficult to be honest with the people we love when we don’t know or understand the impact suicide loss has had on us. I was 20 when my brother died. His suicide became my coming-of-age story and my default understanding of death and grieving. While I had access to limited free counselling sessions, there were few supports and I felt largely on my own.
It took decades before I realized I carried trauma associated with Russ’s death and it was only when I began writing a memoir for my MFA in 2020 that I allowed myself to tentatively start unboxing the emotions surrounding his suicide. After Covid, as people talked more openly about mental health, I began to think I was strong enough to face the past. This is how I ended up in the kitchen with my family.
The Hard Conversation
“I need to have a serious conversation with you,” I said, my heart thumping. “You know Uncle Russ?”
The girls nodded.
“I want to talk with you about how he died.”
The conversation ended up being much shorter than I expected and much less dramatic. No one was angry at me for keeping a family secret.
“I thought it was something like that,” Elsa said. “I’m really sorry Mama.” She got off her stool, came around the table and hugged me. Aria joined her and then Joe.
Aria later told me that she had overheard a comment from one of my friends and she already knew. Even before that, constantly brushing off her questions about Russ’s death had made her feel like I didn’t trust her.
I had underestimated our children. I never intended for my brother’s suicide to become a secret, yet I can’t help thinking that society had helped me along the way. None of the cultures or countries I lived in — France, England, Australia, Canada — seemed to value open communication about suicide over silence and stigma.
Society Has Made Progress
Today there are ample guidelines about how to talk to children about suicide in an age-appropriate manner, and these talks, like mine, tend to be held in quiet, intimate settings. In public, most people are still afraid to mention the word suicide, which is why Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) launched a 2020 campaign “to normalize talking about suicide openly and honestly.” When I tell people I meet that I write about suicide prevention and awareness, I can see from the way many of them pull back, that we still have work to do.
In the end, my daughters took the knowledge of Russ’s suicide in their stride. Now they support me in my work to write and become a public speaker on suicide prevention and awareness. So in many ways, talking about Russ’s suicide has brought us closer and, even opened the door to other difficult conversations. I just wish it hadn’t taken so long.
I found these resources helpful:
Communicating With Suicide Bereaved Children
Supporting Children and Teens after a Suicide Death
988 Suicide Crisis Hotline – Talk to Someone You’re Worried About
If you or someone you know is in crisis or you’re concerned about them, call or text 988 (Canada’s new Suicide Crisis Helpline). Kids Help Phone call 1-800-668-6868 or text CONNECT. Indigenous Peoples call 1-855-242-3310. If you’re in imminent danger call 911 or go to Emergency.
Eli’s Place will be a rural, residential treatment program for young adults with serious mental illness. To learn more about our mission and our proven-effective model click here.
Kirsten Fogg | Friend of Eli’s Place
Kirsten Fogg is an Australian-Canadian award-winning essayist, journalist, and public speaker who has been shaped by living in France, England, Australia and Canada and by the suicide of her 16-year-old brother. Her Tiny Love Story appeared in The New York Times Modern Love column (2024). Her essays have been published in literary journals including Creative Nonfiction and The Malahat Review and produced by ABC Radio National Australia.
Her articles have been published in The Chicago Tribune, The Washington Times, The Globe and Mail, The Toronto Star, Chatelaine among others. She holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction (2022) from the University of King’s College. Kirsten is working on her first book.
Website: https://writeroutofresidence.com
Instagram: @writer.out.of.residence
LinkedIn: @KirstenFogg
