
❤Jim, I'm so sorry for the loss you've gone through. It hurt to read your words. I can feel how deep your grief is, along with the self‑blame and guilt from your son leaving without warning.
I'm in my early twenties. I know people our age may have a limited view of the world, but that doesn't mean our thoughts are automatically shallow or unreasonable.
Many of us struggle inside for a very long time. We are well aware how deeply our leaving would wound the people we love, and we carry heavy guilt over that. This is not about wanting to get back at anyone, to punish others, or to intentionally cause pain. For some people, even after long‑term treatment, there is no real improvement — simply staying alive becomes an unbearable burden.
"Don't kill yourself because it will hurt your family" cannot be treated as an absolute rule. Even with a supportive family, some people still cannot go on. For others, family itself is where much of their suffering comes from. What family means to each person is shaped by their own lived experience and trauma history; it is very hard to truly understand across different lives.
It means so much that you wish your son had spoken up sooner, so you could have helped. Still, we have to accept that family support is not a cure‑all.
We are coming from very different emotional places. You are someone who has lost a loved one, looking back at a tragedy that already happened. Many of us have stood for a long time right at the edge of that difficult choice. Both sides can easily have blind spots shaped only by their own experiences. There are no easy answers here. This is a deeply grey, complicated space to talk about. It cannot be reduced to "you are too young to know better" or "you should keep living as long as someone loves you."
I don't see this in black‑and‑white terms. I just hope these different realities can be seen.