Three Feet of Air
On what suicide-loss does to touch, and care that's touch-optional every time.
Content warning: suicide loss
A few months after my friend died by suicide, I realized I hadn't had a hug in a while.
People were around and they were kind. Somebody sent me a sweet card in the mail. A few friends texted to offer their support. Someone dropped off a hand-picked bouquet of wildflowers and waved at me from the car.
This particular grief makes people cautious, and cautious people keep about three feet of air between themselves and whatever they're afraid of saying wrong.
What happens with suicide loss
Any grief costs you some level of closeness. The casseroles stop. The check-ins thin out.
But suicide loss adds something on top: people don't know what to say. And because they don't know what to say, they don't come close enough to say...well, nothing.
You can watch it happen. Somebody starts toward you at the reception and recalculates mid-step. They land on your forearm instead of your shoulders. A hand, briefly, then gone.
So you end up surrounded by people who love you, and held by none of them. This isn’t only my experience. Researchers have measured it. People bereaved by suicide report receiving less support from family and friends than people bereaved by any other kind of sudden death — and they report getting it later, too. One study of bereaved spouses found that survivors of suicide loss confided in the people around them no more than people who hadn’t been bereaved at all. One of the reasons they name is the social awkwardness of friends and colleagues. Three feet of air, in a journal. (Harvard Health)
And then there's the other half
Here's another element to this that we're (also) not talking about. You may not want to be touched either.
After this kind of loss, a lot of survivors find their own body has become an unreliable place to live. Sleep goes sideways. You startle at things that never startled you. In a crowd, you might make yourself smaller without consciously deciding to do that. And for many people the body is where the worst of it is stored — the phone call, the doorway, whatever you saw or were told. And those things sit in your muscles rather than in your reasonable, verbal mind.
When your body is essentially the room where that lives, you may not be eager to be in it, let alone have someone else's hands on it. (Or touch might actually feel like it hurts.)
These things can both be true. Touch-starved and flinching.
So when somebody finally hugs you the way you'd wanted for moths, you go stiff, and then you feel like a jerk about it.
Nothing is wrong with you. That's a nervous system doing what nervous systems do when the world has recently proven itself unsafe.
Some of us learned this in 2020
If any of that sounds familiar from somewhere other than grief, it might be because a lot of us already went through a version of it.
During COVID, whole populations found out what it's like to be cared about from a distance. People waved through windows. Funerals happened on screens. Some of us went months without being touched by another person at all, and then, when it was finally allowed again, discovered we'd gotten strange about it — wanting the hug and bracing against it in the same motion.
I was in that. And what surprised me was how long the bracing outlasted the reason for it.
So if you're reading this and you haven't lost someone to suicide, you may still know this feeling. That's the overlap. The body learns caution faster than it unlearns it, and grief of any kind can put you right back there.
What most support assumes
A group is words, in chairs. Therapy is words, in chairs. Both are valuable. Befriend Your Grief takes place in a group setting, so I'd better think so! But both ask you to speak, and speaking means narrating, and narrating means managing how much truth the room can hold.
Massage assumes you want hands on you, firmly, for an hour, on terms set before you got on the table. Acupuncture uses touch and needles. That's not criticism. I love both modes and I'm a nerd for many forms of therapeutic care. But, there's just not much out there for the person who wants care and doesn't want to be handled, and can't predict which one they'll be today. (Or for the next hour, sometimes.)
Where Reiki for suicide loss comes in
I'm a Reiki practitioner writing about Reiki, so feel free to be a little suspicious of me on principle.
I can't tell you what Reiki will do to your grief but I'll tell you how a session is built.
It works with light contact, or hands hovering a few inches off, or entirely at a distance with you at home on your own couch. You are clothed. You aren't asked to talk, but because of how trauma gets stored in the body, I encourage people to tell me if anything feels bad or weird. You certainly don't have to explain how they died, or whether you're doing better, or any of the other questions you've been fielding since it happened. And you're free to cry if the tears begin to surface during your treatment.
Also, it is important to note that the contact isn’t decided once and locked in. If you say you’re okay with touch before we start and then decide a few minutes in that you’re not, just tell me. No explanation needed, and that’s not an accommodation I’m making for anyone. Touch is optional for every session, every time.
For many people, that's simply a preference. For someone whose body has become contested territory, it might be closer to the whole point.
My perspective comes from sitting with survivors, using reiki for suicide loss, and also from being a survivor myself. Nobody's measured whether suicide loss survivors get touched less than other grievers, as far as I know. Yet, more than a few people have shared this noticing with me.
Reiki won't answer why or shorten the pain of this, but what it might offer is an hour where nothing is required of you and nobody needs managing. In a season where you may feel like a communications department for other people's discomfort, that's truly something. It's your choice how close, and it's your say.
If this is your grief
I offer Reiki sessions in person and at a distance, touch-optional always. And Befriend Your Grief is a 12-week companioning program for survivors of suicide loss — for when you do want the words, with people who don't need them explained. Learn more.
If you're in crisis right now, call or text 988 in the US, or text HOME to 741741.
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