Nice People Aren’t Supposed to be Angry at the Dead

Angry at someone who died by suicide? It's okay.

CW: suicide loss, grief, anger

There's an emotion that shows up after suicide loss that no one really talks about. Not sadness — everyone expects that. Not shock or confusion or even guilt. Those get airtime.

I'm talking about anger. At them.

The person you lost. The person you loved. The person who left.

I was immediately furious at my dad after he died. It scared me. My brother can attest to hearing it as soon as he called to tell me about Pop's death. "That @%&hole!" I blurted out my first reaction to the news. It was unadulterated, unfiltered anger. And if you've felt this too, good news: it's allowed.

Unsplash/Simran Sood

The Anger No One Mentions

In the months after my dad's death, I cycled through a lot of emotions. Grief, obviously. Shock. That eerie feeling where nothing seems real. Guilt. So much guilt.

But underneath all of that, rising up at unexpected moments, was fury.

How could you do this?

How could you leave without saying goodbye?

How could you make this choice and not give me a chance to help?

How could you do this to mom? To me? To everyone who loved you?

I didn't want to feel that way. It seemed wrong — disloyal, even. You're not supposed to be angry at dead people. You're especially not supposed to be angry at people who were suffering so much they couldn't stay alive. "Nice" people, "good" people like me aren't supposed to be mad at the deceased. What kind of person rages at someone who was in that much pain?

Me, apparently. And maybe you too, if you're reading this. I immediately judged myself for feeling this way, and this was long before the hard-earned lesson that judging my own feelings is not the move.

Why We Get Angry

Here's the thing about anger after suicide loss: it makes sense.

Anger is a protest emotion. It shows up when something is wrong, when a boundary has been crossed, when something profoundly unfair has happened. And suicide? Suicide is profoundly unfair.

You didn't get a say. You didn't get to intervene, to argue, to offer alternatives. The person you loved made a unilateral decision that changed your life forever, and you had no voice in it. That is infuriating. It's supposed to be infuriating.

Anger also shows up when we're hurt. It's often easier to feel than sadness — it has energy, direction, heat. When the grief gets too heavy, anger can feel like a relief. Like finally being able to do something with all this pain, even if the something is just raging at the universe.

And sometimes the anger is covering fear. Fear that they didn't love you enough to stay. Fear that you didn't matter. Fear that if they could leave like that, anyone could. The anger is easier to sit with than those questions.

The Guilt About the Anger

Of course, most of us don't just feel the anger. We feel terrible about feeling it.

They were suffering. They weren't thinking clearly. It wasn't a choice made against you — it was a choice made from a place of unbearable pain. How can you be angry at someone who was drowning?

I've had this argument with myself a thousand times. And here's where I've landed:

Both things can be true.

I can understand that my dad was in tremendous pain. I can have compassion for what he must have been going through because that remains the most sorrowful part about it for me. I can know, intellectually, that his death wasn't about me — that he wasn't trying to hurt me, that he probably thought we'd be better off, that his brain was lying to him about what was possible.

And I can be angry that he left. I can be angry at the way he left. I can be angry that I didn't get to say goodbye, that I'll never get answers, that I have to live the rest of my life with him gone too soon.

Compassion and anger can coexist. Understanding and fury can share the same heart. You don't have to choose. And I'll tell you, even after the anger at him loosened its grip, I still felt angry! Angry about the mess left in the wake of his death. Anger at what it was doing to my family and those who loved him. Anger at all the effort my brother and I would have to expend learning what we were too young to have to learn. It felt so burdensome, all of it.

What Happens When We Don't Let Ourselves Feel It

I've seen what happens when survivors try to shove the anger down. When they decide it's not acceptable, not allowed, not compatible with loving the person they lost. You know what happens if you've ever stuffed your feelings before. I certainly have, and I FAFO'ed.

It doesn't go away. It just goes underground. It turns into depression, or anxiety, or numbness. It leaks out sideways. At partners or at kids. Even at strangers in traffic. It hardens into resentment that never gets named.

Or it turns inward. It becomes self-blame. If you can't be angry at them, you'll find someone else to be angry at. And that someone is usually you.

The anger needs somewhere to go. It needs to be felt, acknowledged, allowed. Not acted on destructively. You don't have to burn anything down. But it needs to be felt and witnessed. Given room to exist.

Letting Yourself Be Angry

If you've been pushing away your anger because it feels wrong, I want to give you this explicit permission, as someone gave me a long time ago: you're allowed to be angry.

You're allowed to be furious at someone you love deeply.

You're allowed to feel abandoned, even if they didn't mean to abandon you.

You're allowed to think it was unfair, because it was.

You're allowed to rage at them, at the universe, at whatever higher power you do or don't believe in.

You're allowed to say, out loud or just in your own heart: I am so angry at you for leaving.

Feeling this doesn't make you a bad person. It doesn't mean you didn't love them. It doesn't mean you don't have compassion for their pain.

It just means you're human. And you lost someone in a way that no human should have to metabolize.

Where the Anger Goes

As of next month, I'm fifteen years out from my dad's death. The anger isn't as hot as it used to be. It's not gone. Nope. I don't think it ever fully goes, but it's softer. More like a scar than an open wound.

What helped was learning to let myself feel it without judgment. Saying the ugly things out loud, at least to myself and to people I trusted. Writing furious letters I never sent. Crying angry tears instead of just sad ones.

The anger, it turns out, was part of my grief. Not a detour from it, not a sign I was doing it wrong. Just another expression of love. I think of it as love that had nowhere to go, love that got thwarted and that just...wanted more time.

When I stopped fighting the anger, it stopped fighting me. It became just another thing I carried, alongside the sadness and the missing and the gratitude for the years we did have.

You can carry it too. It won't break you. <3

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If you're holding anger alongside your grief and don't know what to do with it, you're not alone. Befriend Your Grief is a 3-month companioning program for survivors of suicide loss. Learn more here.