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我们翻译这篇文章的理由 对于自杀者而言，时间凝固在解脱的刹那，但对亲人却可能是永远难以释怀。当我们传达“自杀”时，我们不仅对逝者有不理解甚至是怨恨，也对这一行为本身有了想法与立场。但是在telling的过程中，重点不应是judge，而是explain，形式不应是indictment，而是story。然而这些故事讲不完，讲不好，甚至讲不出，只因讲述“自杀故事”这一主题本身就是一个寻求治愈与陷入抑郁并进的过程；不仅是因为故事过于痛苦，也因为讲故事的人因复杂的情绪而不知所措，对于听故事的人则也许花一生也无法真正理解。本文从儿童面对父母自杀悲剧这一角度切入，对于孩子而言，失去的不仅仅是最为依赖的人，亦是生死观的刷新与重建。创伤需要漫长的一生来疗愈，迟到的究竟是谅解还是释怀呢？ ——佳宁 👇 讲述 作者：Jesse Bering 译者：佳宁 校对：小康 策划：佳宁 & 禹琦 When a parent dies by suicide, how the children are told casts a permanent shadow on their understanding of life and loss 父母自杀身亡，孩子如何了解？面对猝然的离开，孩子的生死观或将永远笼罩在阴霾之下 A frayed leather wallet. A broken watch. Some coins. A ballpoint pen missing a screw. For 11-year-old Maddy Reid, this was all that remained of her soft-spoken accountant father … an assortment of 59-year-old George Reid’s meagre belongings emptied onto the kitchen table. ‘It’s gruesome, I know, but I think they still had his blood on them.’ 一个磨损的皮夹、一块坏掉的手表、几枚旧硬币和一支少了个螺丝的圆珠笔——对11岁的马蒂·里德而言，这就是她的父亲，59岁的乔治·里德，一个总是低声细语的会计，留给她的所有东西。这些各种各样的劣质小玩意儿最终被清理到了厨房的桌子上，“我知道这挺可怕的，但我猜上面可能还沾着他的血。” And then there was the music; those hauntingly familiar tunes. ‘For years growing up, there were songs that immediately made me think of him,’ said Maddy, now a 49-year-old artist living in Cornwall. ‘Like, this is going to sound ridiculous, but you know that old song Big John? It’s such an old one, a Western. Dad grew up in Belfast but he was born in Georgia, and he seemed to have an American influence in his musical taste.’ 然后响起了音乐，是那种令人难以忘怀、似曾相识的曲调。“长大的这些年里，总是有些曲子能让我马上想起他，”49岁的马蒂告诉我们；现在她住在康沃尔（英格兰西南部一郡），是一位艺术家，“也许有些可笑，但你听过那首老歌《Big John》吗？这是一首很老的西部（描写19世纪美国西部，尤指有关牛仔生活的）歌曲。爸爸出生在美国佐治亚州，却在北爱尔兰的贝尔法斯特长大，他的音乐品味里似乎也掺杂了美式风格。” On 25 March 1980, Maddy and her brother, Philip, 14, had just got home from school when there was an unexpected knock at the door. There, were two policemen, solemn-looking, hats removed, asking to speak with their mother. ‘You just think, what’s going on? What’s this about?’ said Maddy. ‘Mum goes into another room with them. They leave, she comes back into the kitchen, sits down at the table and – I’ll never forget this – she has that clear plastic bag with my dad’s stuff in it. “Right,” she tells us. “Your father’s dead. He’s killed himself. He jumped in front of a train. Here’s what he had on him.” 1980年3月25日，马蒂和她14岁的哥哥菲利普刚放学回到家，门外却来了不速之客。那是两位面容严肃的警官，他们脱了帽，询问能否和他们的母亲聊聊。“你只会想，‘发生什么了？’‘这是怎么了？’”马蒂说道，“于是妈妈和他们进了另一间房间。他们离开后，她回到了厨房，坐在餐桌旁——我永远忘不了她怀抱着的那个透明塑料袋，里面装着爸爸的随身物品。然后妈妈告诉我们：‘是的。你们的爸爸死了，是跳轨自杀的。这是他身上所有的东西。’” It was the only time her mother would ever speak openly of her father’s suicide. 这是唯一一次她的母亲如此直白地谈论父亲的自杀。 Globally, close to a million people a year kill themselves, and many times that number attempt to do so but fail. That’s a conservative estimate, too; for reasons such as stigma and prohibitive insurance claims, suicides and attempts are notoriously underreported when it comes to the official statistics. Roughly, though, these figures translate to the fact that someone takes their own life every 40 seconds. Between now and the time you finish reading the next paragraph, someone, somewhere, will decide that death is a more welcoming prospect than another breath in this world, and will permanently remove themselves from the population. 全球每年有近百万人选择自杀，还有数百万人自杀未遂。当然这还只是个保守估计，出于不齿以及防止骗保的原因，众所周知官方数据中的自杀事件与自杀未遂往往远少于实际情况。简单来说，这些数据意味着每40秒就有一个人选择自杀。从现在起到你读完下一段的时间里，在这个世界上的某个角落，就会有人对生活彻底心灰意冷，决定了结自己的生命，最终抹去自己在世间的存在。 The specific issues leading any given person to become suicidal are as different, of course, as their DNA – involving chains of events that one expert calls ‘dizzying in their variety’. But one sobering fact never varies: many of these people are parents. Some, to young children. For a vulnerable kid trying to make sense of such a catastrophic loss, it can be devastating. 导致人们选择自杀的最后一根稻草往往不尽相同，毕竟如专家所说，每个人的DNA中包含着一连串“令人眼花缭乱”的不同事件。然而有一个不变的事实时时警醒着我们：他们中有许多已经为人父母，甚至有一些才初为父母。对一个脆弱的孩子而言，试图去理解这种仿佛天塌了一般的现实，足以将他们彻底击溃。 Compared with those who’ve lost a parent to other forms of sudden death, children bereaved by suicide are more likely to suffer adverse outcomes. Many of these, such as drug addiction, relationship problems and their own suicidality, are lifelong issues. The prognosis is especially dire for those who aren’t provided appropriate support, or for whom a conspiracy of familial silence hangs over the suicide, as though it is something to be ashamed about. 比起那些双亲因意外去世的孩子，父母死于自杀的孩子们更有可能因打击而走上悲剧的道路，许多后果都将纠缠他们一生：诸如毒瘾、人际关系问题以及他们自己的自杀倾向。没能得到适当支持与关心的人，还有那些家人对自杀事件避而不谈的人，他们往往耻于倾诉这些伤疤，因而对他们的预后通常尤不乐观。 This sense of being judged about suicide isn’t just the imagination of oversensitive survivors, either. It’s empirically real. Back in the 1960s, the American psychologist Richard Kalish administered a ‘social distance scale’ to measure college students’ prejudicial attitudes towards a real hodgepodge of stigmatised communities. One of the questions in the scale was: ‘Would you willingly go out on a date with [this type of person]?’ Participants were more willing to date someone dying from cancer, or members of a marginalised ethnic or religious group (in this old study, black people, Mexicans and Jews), than they were to date someone who’d attempted suicide. On the other hand – and I’m not sure if this qualifies as good news, exactly – they were more willing to go out on a date with a suicide-attempter than a Nazi. 这种因自杀而被谴责的感觉并非过于敏感的遗属的妄想，而是有据可循的事实。20世纪60年代，美国心理学家理查德·卡里什设计了一个“社交距离量表”来测量大学生对现实中被污名化群体的偏见态度。量表中的一个问题是：“你愿意和【以下类型的人】约会吗？”结果显示，相较于有过自杀意图的人，调查参与者宁愿和濒死的癌症病人、或者来自边缘种族或宗教群体的人（在那个时代指的是黑人、墨西哥人和犹太人）约会。另一方面，我也不确定这是不是个好消息，比起和纳粹约会，参与者还是会选择自杀倾向者。 And when Kalish’s study was replicated 25 years later by the psychologist and suicide expert David Lester in New Jersey, the trends were identical. Furthermore, when asked: ‘If you really loved him/her, would you marry someone who had attempted suicide in the past year?’ only 33 per cent of people said yes. 25年后，新泽西的心理学家与自杀研究专家大卫·莱斯特复现了卡里什的研究，结果呈现的趋势还是一样的。另外，在真爱的前提下，仅有33%的调查参与者表示愿意与曾经有过自杀企图的人步入婚姻。 Such findings might sound reasonable for pragmatic romantics (after all, the best predictor of suicide is a previous attempt and, all else being equal, giving one’s heart to someone at significant risk of suicide is a high-stakes emotional wager). However, since such prejudice can extend to the close family members of those who actually die by suicide, it’s easy to see why so many are wary of acknowledging the suicide of a parent. One woman who’d lost her father to suicide six years prior wondered aloud: ‘Will the stigma be attached to the children, to the children’s children, and to their children in turn?’ 这些发现对于务实的浪漫关系而言也许还是可以理解的（毕竟，预测自杀的最好办法就是参考是否有先例；而当其他条件相当，爱一个有着高自杀风险的人无疑是非常冒险的情感赌注）。然而，由于这类偏见同样会针对自杀者的近亲，也就不难理解为什么许多人在是否承认父母自杀时总是格外谨慎。一个父亲于六年前自杀的女性说出了内心的疑惑：“自杀的污名也会被钉在孩子的身上吗？甚至是孩子的孩子，一代又一代人的身上吗？” Yet such silence, no matter the intention, comes at a cost for children scrambling to repair the sudden rift left by a parent’s unexpected, and deliberate, exit from everything they know. In the bereavement literature, suicides are often linked to symptoms of ‘complicated grief’: a medical term that refers to grief and mourning that lasts longer than six months and significantly impairs the individual’s daily functioning. 无论这种噤声出于什么原因，它都让孩子们付出了惨痛的代价——面对父母陡然且蓄意的彻底离开，他们只能艰难地试图修补这一突如其来的生命裂痕。在有关丧亲的文学当中，自杀通常属于“复杂性哀伤”的一种症状；“复杂性哀伤”是一个医学术语，指的是严重影响了患者的日常生活功能、并且持续时间超过六个月的悲痛与哀悼。 ‘She didn’t come out and say we’re not allowed to talk about your father,’ explained Maddy about her mother’s handling of the situation. ‘But it was made clear that it was a taboo subject, and we were to build a wall around ourselves and forget about it. It was horrendous, because the support just wasn’t there … She went through and burned all the old photos. She just wanted “it” gone.’ “她没有直截了当地禁止我们再谈论父亲，”马蒂描述了母亲处理父亲自杀的方式，“但显而易见，父亲的自杀是个禁忌，我们应该彻底忘记这件事，就像在自己周围建一堵与世隔绝的高墙。这真的很可怕，因为完全没有任何安慰与来自家人的支撑……而妈妈把所有老照片都翻出来烧掉了。她以为这样就能让‘这件事’随着灰烬彻底消失。她只想尽快‘解决’这件事。 Maddy’s experience as a shellshocked young girl attempting to come to terms with her beloved father’s suicide, yet deprived of a healthy conversational outlet to do so, appears to be common among those who lose a parent this way. Research on the emotional impact of parental suicide is surprisingly slim, with much of the literature tending to focus on suicide bereavement in the opposite direction (parents grieving the suicides of their children). But one researcher, the American psychologist Albert Cain, has studied parental suicides extensively. And he’s identified recurring themes surrounding what he calls ‘the telling’, which is essentially the story given to the child by the surviving parent or guardian. 一个花季少女在震惊之余只能妥协于父亲自杀的现实，还被剥夺了健康、正常的倾诉渠道——马蒂的经历在父母自杀的人当中并不少见。我们很少研究父母自杀对孩子造成的影响，大部分文献关注的恰恰是其反面（即孩子自杀为父母带来的悲痛与影响）。但是美国心理学家阿尔伯特·凯恩对父母自杀做了相当深入的研究，并发现了围绕着他所谓的“讲述”而反复出现的主题，即丧偶的父母一方或监护人所讲给孩子们的故事。 Most clinical resources stress the importance of being direct and honest with children about a parent’s suicide, but Cain argues that there’s no one-size-fits-all approach. In contrast to Maddy, who learned the basic facts about her father’s death, the overwhelming majority of children are led to believe, at least initially, that the death was by some means other than suicide. 大部分临床资料都强调要直接并且诚实地告知孩子们父母自杀的事实。但凯恩认为并不存在万能的普适方法。马蒂了解了父亲自杀的基本事实；但是绝大多数孩子与之相反，大人们会引导他们去相信，至少在根源上，父母的死是无关自杀的。 The reasons for this are many. Sometimes the child is simply too young to understand what suicide means, or perhaps the child’s immediate worries and thoughts are more practical – ‘Who will walk me to school? Who will make dinner? Will we have to sell the house and move?’ and so on. ‘At times, knowing the exact nature of a parent’s death is well down the list of bereaved children’s felt needs and concerns,’ explains Cain. 大人们这样做的原因有很多。有时只是因为孩子还太小，无法理解自杀的意义；有时也有可能是因为孩子的第一反应太过现实，比如“那以后谁送我去上学呢？”“以后谁来做晚饭呢？”“我们是不是得卖掉房子然后搬家呢？”等等。凯恩解释说，“有时候，对于丧亲儿童的情感需求和关注重点而言，知晓父母死亡的确切性质并不是当务之急。” It’s easy, of course, to say that it’s always best to tell the child that it was suicide. But every family dynamic is different. Sometimes, the surviving parent must come to terms with the suicide in their own right before communicating it in a healthy fashion. 最好还是告诉孩子父母就是自杀而亡——这说起来很简单，但事实是家家有本难念的经。有时，丧偶的父母一方必须先靠自己的意志来接受另一半的自杀，接着才能以一种健康的方式与孩子沟通。 ‘Much as I and the kids loved her,’ said one widower justifying his delay in telling his children that their mother had killed herself, ‘I hated her guts that much, maybe more, doing that just a day before our oldest’s birthday. [If] I’d have told the kids back then what she really died of, what she did to us, I’d have wiped her out – they’d either hate her forever, or me, or both.’ “尽管我和孩子们都是如此爱她，”一个鳏夫辩解他为什么迟迟不愿意告诉孩子们他们的母亲自杀的事实，“我早已对她恨之入骨，因为她下定的决心竟然就是在我们老大生日的前一天自杀。如果我在当时就告诉孩子们她是怎么死的，告诉他们她对我们做了什么，我就必须在孩子面前彻底否定她——因为孩子们至少会恨我们当中的一个。” From interviews with adult survivors such as Maddy, it’s clear that the telling casts a permanent shadow on the child’s understanding and interpretation of the loss. When a caregiver, seething with anger, curses and blames the deceased, the narrative communicated to the child implies the suicide’s deep moral failure, an archetypal tale of cowardice, selfishness and weakness. It’s a toxic message, especially for children who continue to identify closely with the dead parent. Although often understandable, says Cain, such barbed tellings are ‘less an explanation than an indictment, a bill of particulars against the deceased’. 我们从曾经丧亲的儿童在成年后（诸如马蒂）接受的采访当中可以清楚地发现，对孩子们讲述父母的自杀，给他们对丧亲的理解与阐释蒙上了一层永久的阴影。当监护人强压着愤怒、诅咒以及苛责逝者的冲动，其与孩子的沟通必然充斥着对自杀行为的道德贬斥，并将之暗示为一种源于懦弱、自私以及脆弱的典型行径。这样的讯息无疑是有害的，对于那些坚持对去世亲人抱有同情的子女尤为如此。凯恩认为，尽管通常来说上述情况可以理解，但是这种挖苦伤人的讲述“更多的是一种控诉而非解释，是对逝者的一纸诉状。” Not infrequently, this occurs in the guise of religion, with the grief-stricken spouse committing the other to hell for the ‘sin’ of suicide. ‘No, your mother’s not an angel in heaven now,’ one father told his kids. ‘She’s just dead. If she loved us, she would have stayed with us, not copped out. God didn’t do it, Mom did.’ Young children, of course, cannot interrogate such wobbly theological claims. They cannot ask, for instance, why a God who doesn’t give us anything we can’t handle apparently did just that to their mom or dad. 而这种情形常常会以宗教的名义出现，比如悲痛欲绝的配偶控诉另一半会因自杀之“罪”下地狱。“不，你的妈妈现在不再是天堂里的天使了，”一个父亲这样告诉他的孩子们，“她死了。如果她爱我们，她会和我们在一起，而不是就这么离开。不是上帝带走的她，而是妈妈她自己的选择。”年幼的孩子们当然不会质疑这种本身就存疑的宗教神学主张。举例来说，他们不会问，为什么上帝不会给我们任何我们显然处理不了的东西，却要对妈妈或者爸爸做那种事呢？ Even when such moralistic blame isn’t a factor, however, a sense of dismissiveness might creep in, whereby the event is minimised or discounted as something beyond human purchase. When the telling isn’t elaborated with an ongoing effort to understand the suicide, the information alone, just dropped on the child, can fester. The telling must involve retelling, incorporating developmental changes and life experiences that enable the child to process it again and again, to make new meaning in light of new understanding. It’s a process, not an event. In Maddy’s case, her mother was blunt and forthright, but there was no story. Cain writes: 即便没有道德谴责，另一种轻蔑又会悄然出现，将自杀贬斥为非人行径。如果我们没有努力去理解自杀，而是仅仅把信息甩给孩子们，那么问题只会越演愈烈。讲述的过程本身也必须包括复述，将不断发展着的变化与人生经历相结合，来让孩子们能够以动态的方式反复处理这些信息，在每一次全新的理解中感悟新的意义。这是一个过程，而不是一次性的事件。在马蒂的案例当中，她的母亲很直接，却没有讲清前因后果。凯恩写道： [Some] are relatively quick and clear in letting their children know the death was a suicide, yet … refuse any further discussion. They reported that they met questions from their children with stern if not angry rebuffs: ‘I don’t know, I wasn’t in her head…’ ‘Don’t ask me, we’ll never know,’ ‘There’s no use thinking about it, we have to go on with our lives,’ ‘He’s dead, and he has all the answers.’ Ordinarily a few brief, charged exchanges like these put an end to overt questions, leaving the child to his or her own constructions, patching together fragments of information and fantasy or joining an alliance of suppression. “（有些人）相对头脑清晰，立刻就决定让孩子们知道这是一起自杀事件，然而……他们拒绝任何深入的讨论。他们辩称，孩子们会不依不饶地提问，他们要么生气，要么回绝说：‘我不知道，我又不知道她是怎么想的……’、‘别问我了，我们永远都没法知道了’、‘再怎么想也没意义，我们的生活还是得继续啊’、‘他已经死了，只有他知道这些问题的答案’。问题的终结通常就是靠类似的几个简短且情绪紧张的来回对话，让孩子自己去把信息碎片和自己的想象拼凑在一起，构成足以说服自己的理由；或者干脆陷入相同的压抑。” One of the more heartbreaking outcomes in young children are re-enactments of the parent’s suicide in spontaneous play. One team of clinicians writes about a little boy who, in the wake of his father’s suicide by hanging, plays a game in which he hangs all of his teddy bears from the banisters. In older children and teenagers, such outward signs might be less apparent, but their ruminative visions are disruptively dark and unnerving. ‘Even now,’ Maddy told me, ‘I can’t help but picture the event. You can’t stop it. You’re picturing him jumping. You’re picturing the aftermath.’ 更为令人心碎的是，年幼的孩子会在自发的游戏中试图再现父母的自杀。一组临床医师记录了一个案例：一个小男孩的父亲死于上吊自杀，他在玩的时候把所有的泰迪熊都吊在了楼梯扶手上。在年长些的大孩子和青少年当中，尽管可能不会再有这类如此外显的行为标志，他们所沉湎的幻象却真真切切地充斥着黑暗与破坏，令人不安。“即使到了现在，”马蒂告诉我说，“我依旧会情不自禁地去想象整个事件。你没办法停下来。你就是会想象他如何跳下火车，想象他的死状。” By age 13, Maddy would find herself battling those dark impulses herself. Identifying more with her quiet and contemplative father than her matter-of-fact mother, for years she was secretly riven with guilt over his death. Her parents’ marriage had fallen apart two years before the suicide; in desperate straits, her dad had taken out a room at the YMCA, 10 miles up the road. ‘I’d spoken to him a few days before he killed himself. I’d said to him – not understanding how bad off he was – “Daddy, I want a pony for my birthday. Do you think you’d be able to?” That’s all I remember about that phone call. So it’s a guilt thing. I think: Jesus, did I push him over the edge, pressuring him to get me a bloody pony?’ 马蒂13岁的时候，感觉自己一直在与内心的黑暗冲动相斗争。多年来，比起现实得近乎冷漠的母亲，她更认同安静而深思熟虑的父亲，也因此内疚于他的死。其实在父亲自杀的前两年，她父母的婚姻就已经分崩离析；绝望之下，她的父亲只能在10英里外的基督教青年会里找了间房容身。“在他自杀的前几天我还和他说过话，但并不是告诉他我能理解他有多痛苦，我只是说，‘爸爸，我想要一个小马驹当生日礼物，你可以买给我吗？’这就是最后那通电话的全部内容了，而它如今让我如此内疚——上帝啊，也许就是我将他逼到了绝境，逼他给我买个该死的小马。” In fact, many children attribute the suicide to something they’d recently done to upset the parent. A bad report card, coming home late, ‘costing too much’, ‘getting another bad cold’ … such last-straw explanations feature prominently in children’s accounts. On the morning of her mother’s suicide, one eight-year-old girl had shouted that she hated her mother. ‘The ferocity of their guilt [is] fully attested by their absolute insistence, in the face of therapists’ interpretations and reality confrontations, that it was their fault,’ writes Cain. 事实上，许多孩子都会把父母的自杀归咎于自己近期惹恼父母的行为。比如一张糟糕的成绩单、一次晚归、“花了好多钱”、“又感冒了”……在孩子们的眼里，这些就是所谓的“最后一根稻草”。比如一个八岁的女孩曾在母亲自杀那天的早晨对她大喊大叫说恨她。凯恩写道：“面对治疗师的解释与现实的冲突，他们坚持认为是自己的恶劣行径导致了那些悲剧，认为都是自己的错。” Particularly guilt-inducing are cases in which the child had been tasked with monitoring the suicidal parent when it happened – ‘Call Daddy right away at the office if Mamma seems real upset’ – or discovered the parent while he or she was still alive but couldn’t get help quickly enough to save them. Some actually bear witness to the parent’s suicide, or at least to some aspect of it. Rather astonishingly, in about a quarter of even these cases the child is told that the death was due to an accident or illness. ‘A boy who watched his father kill himself with a shotgun was told later that night by his mother that his father died of a heart attack,’ notes Cain. ‘Two brothers who found their mother with her wrists slit were told she had drowned while swimming.’ 还有些孩子，被布置过“监视”有自杀倾向的父母一方的任务，他们所承受的罪恶感尤为深重——“一旦妈妈看上去很焦虑记得马上打电话到爸爸的办公室”；或者是发现了自杀的父母一方还活着，却没有办法及时施救。有些孩子不得不目睹父亲或母亲自杀的全过程，即便不是，也至少被迫“旁观”了某些环节。令人震惊的是，这类案例中竟有约25%的孩子还是被告知他们父母是死于意外或疾病。“一个男孩目睹了父亲用枪自杀，但晚些时候他的母亲却告诉他，父亲是死于心脏病，”凯恩给出了几个例子，“而发现母亲割腕的两兄弟最终被告知，他们的母亲死于游泳时溺水。” In other situations, the child is spared from exposure to the act itself, but the living parent is adamant that the child not be told of the suicide. Still, children are surprisingly adept at puzzling it together. A seven-year-old girl told her therapist: ‘You know, my daddy killed himself,’ before sharing with him more detailed information about the suicide than even the mother had given him. She leaned forward, fingers to her lips. ‘Shhh,’ she whispered. ‘Don’t tell Mommy, because she thinks Daddy died in a car accident.’ 在其他的情况中，孩子没有出现在自杀现场，但活着的父母一方坚信不能告诉他们自杀的事实。然而令人意外的是，孩子们却能相当熟练地借线索与想象拼凑出一个完整的现实。一个七岁的小女孩告诉她的治疗师说：“你知道的，我爸爸自杀了。”接着她甚至给出了其中的细节，比她母亲所说的还要详细得多。然后小女孩倾身向前，手指抵着嘴唇，示意安静并小声说道：“嘘～不要告诉妈妈哦，她觉得爸爸是因为车祸去世的。” Of course, it’s complicated. Occasionally, it’s the child who refuses to accept that it was a suicide, to grapple with the implications. ‘You don’t know he didn’t fall asleep in the car,’ said one teenager whose father died of carbon-monoxide poisoning. ‘They broke into his hotel room to rob him. They shot him,’ said another. 当然，这也无法一概而论。有时候是孩子拒绝接受自杀的事实，甚至努力去“解释”其中真正的缘由。一个父亲死于一氧化碳中毒的少年就曾说：“你怎么知道他不是在车里睡着了呢？”另一个父亲自杀的孩子也曾说：“是有人闯进了他开的房间打劫了他，然后一枪杀了他。” ‘Children’s refusal or inability to hear can exist quite independently of parents’ refusal or inability to tell,’ writes Cain. 凯恩写道：“孩子们对自杀事实的否认或置若罔闻，其实与家长的态度是没有必然关联的。” Avoidance of the truth is often motivated by the surviving parent’s difficulty in providing an age-appropriate reason for the suicide. And who can blame them? Explaining to a young child, or even a teenager, why the parent ‘chose’ to die in such a jarring fashion is daunting. Many rely inventively on sickness metaphors to guard against the child’s powerful sense of rejection and abandonment. Likening mental illness to a flu, one mother told her small daughter that her daddy didn’t want to kill himself but, like vomiting, he just couldn’t keep it from happening. ‘Another,’ writes Cain, ‘reminds her son of his chicken pox, and how at its worst he scratched even when he was trying so hard not to.’ In other words, the message being imparted is that mommy or daddy didn’t want to leave you – this wasn’t a conscious rejection, but a bodysnatching presence driving a splitting wedge. 回避真相往往是因为父母中的一方找不到适合孩子当时年纪与理解力的方式来说明自杀理由。那么他们又有什么错呢？向一个年幼的孩子，甚至是一个青少年，去解释为什么他的父亲或母亲选择以这种可怕的方式了结生命，难道不同样令人不安且痛苦吗？许多人都创造性地以疾病为喻来解释自杀，以保护孩子们敏感的心绪，避免让他们产生自己被拒绝、被抛弃的感觉。一个母亲就将精神疾病比作流感，告诉她的小女儿，她的父亲并不想杀死自己，但是就像得了流感会呕吐，他只是控制不住自己了。“而另一个例子中，”凯恩写道，“一个母亲则以儿子的水痘为喻，告诉他那就像他得水痘一样，虽然知道不能去抓，但是实在太难过了根本控制不住自己去抓，结果抓得一塌糊涂。”换言之，这些信息透露的是，爸爸或妈妈并不是真的想要离开你——这不是他/她故意要抛弃你，而是占据他们身体的“坏东西”逼死了他们。 But at some point, elaboration becomes critical. Although preserving the deceased parent’s loving image in the child’s mind is admirable, simply attributing the suicide to depression, a fatal psychological or psychiatric flaw, or the person’s inability to manage stress, runs the risk of the child worrying that such problems will ultimately befall them too. The mirror offers each of us unavoidable glimpses of our parents slowly creeping into our own self-image; if we’re lucky, this means sometimes grimacing at the sight of an all-too-familiar receding hairline, the knowing insincerity of a smile, or maybe some deepening troughs of wrinkles. I think we all use brutal yardsticks to compare ourselves to our parents when they were our age. But for one whose mother or father has taken their own life, every year closer to the age of the parent’s last act can bring more self-reckoning with demons. ‘That’s it then, I guess I’m next,’ said a 16-year-old boy after his father’s suicide. ‘I feel tainted,’ said another, ‘as if I have inherited bad blood.’ 但从某些方面来说，详尽的描述也会变得具有危害性。尽管保留死去的父母亲在孩子们脑海中的敬爱形象是值得肯定的，但仅仅将自杀归咎于诸如抑郁症的不健康心理状态或精神问题，又或是某人面对压力时的无力与逃避，都会让孩子们担心这些问题是否最终也会落在他们的头上。照镜子时，我们不可避免地会发现，父母潜移默化地影响着我们的自我形象；我们如果足够幸运，可以从自己的行为中看到父母的一生：或许是年轻时扮鬼脸奚落熟人不断后移的发际线，或许是人到中年能够理解一个微笑背后的虚伪，亦或是饱经沧桑后闪烁在皱纹中的沉思与睿智。我想我们都会用残酷的标准去比较自己和在我们这个年纪时的父母。但对于丧亲的儿童，当他们随着成长，愈发接近逝者永远定格的那个年纪时，内心的恶魔只会愈演愈烈，最终变成宿命般的自我审判。“我想就是这样了，我就是下一个。”一个16岁的少年在父亲自杀后这样说道；而另一个则说，“我感觉自己被污染了，仿佛继承了劣质的血脉。” It’s not an altogether irrational thought, either. Tragic examples of suicide running in families abound. Researchers in the 1940s wrote of a Spanish family in which the male descendants across five successive generations each killed themselves at the age of 45. And in 2009, 46 years after his mother, the poet Sylvia Plath, stuck her head in the oven after sealing the windows and doors to keep the gas from seeping into the children’s rooms, her son Nicholas Hughes, a fisheries biologist, hanged himself in Alaska. 然而这也不是完全不理智的想法；家族自杀的案例实际上比比皆是。20世纪40年代的研究者曾记录过，在一个西班牙家庭当中，连续5代男性后裔都在45岁选择了自杀。2009年，渔业生物学家尼古拉斯·休斯在阿拉斯加上吊身亡；而46年前，他的母亲，诗人西尔维娅·普拉斯同样选择了自杀；在把门窗都封死以避免气体泄漏至孩子们的房间后，她把头伸进了壁炉里。 Given the tendency for traumatised human beings to fall prey to their own self-fulfilling prophecies, experts say that it’s vital to unpack readymade explanations of genetic susceptibility with more nuanced language so that older children and teens aren’t left to their own fatalistic reasoning. Suicide, in fact, isn’t inevitable – there’s no ‘suicide gene’. The hereditability of mental illness isn’t so straightforward. And help is out there for those who seek it. 受创伤的人们总是逃不开成为自己预言的牺牲品的命运，因此专家们认为，用更细致的语言来解读现有的遗传易感性至关重要，这样大一些的孩子和青少年才不会陷入宿命论中。事实上，自杀并非不可避免，世界上也并不存在什么“自杀基因”；精神疾病的遗传也不是件简单的事。而对于需要情感支撑的人，我们所提供的帮助也不该仅限于这些主题。 Maddy, for her part, wrestled alone with the many unknowns surrounding her father’s suicide. She also had to deal with what it meant for her, as a wife, as a mother, as a human being. She has an 11-year-old daughter now. ‘That’s what would stop me,’ she said. ‘I could never do that to her.’ (For women, in fact, having children has long been a well-known protective buffer against suicide, but more recent findings indicate that this applies only to mothers whose kids still live at home with them.) 就马蒂而言，她曾独自一人面对并抗争着父亲自杀所带来的陌生情境；而当她成为妻子、为人母亲，她同样得处理不同身份下那场悲剧带给她的意义；甚至是她作为一个人，要如何去面对。现在她有一个11岁的女儿。“这就是我不会自杀的理由。”她说道，“我永远无法对她做出那样的事。”（事实上，对女性来说，有了孩子就极大地降低了她们自杀的可能性；但最近的研究表明，这种自杀保护仅对那些与孩子生活在同一屋檐下的母亲有效。） Some of the so-called sleeper effects of parental suicide might not emerge until the child is on the verge of becoming a parent in their own right. ‘For adult children of suicide,’ writes Cain, ‘the most salient precipitate in their relationship with their offspring is the fear-laden expectation that their youngsters will also commit suicide … especially if a particular child [is] perceived as resembling the suicided grandparent in some significant respect – looks, temperament, talents, or interests.’ Because many such adult children of suicides keep the information assiduously hidden as a family secret, the third generation might be completely unaware of why their parent treats them the way they do. 父母自杀所带来的一些所谓的睡眠效应（指在态度改变过程中，说服效果随着时间的推移不降低反而提高的一种现象）可能会在孩子们自己为人父母后逐渐显现出来。凯恩写道：“当父母自杀的孩子成家立业，他们对亲子关系最为恐惧的是子女们是否也会选择自杀……特别是当这个孩子与自杀的祖辈在各方面都尤为相似的时候，比如有着相似的外貌、性格、天赋或兴趣。”正因为许多父母自杀的孩子们长大后竭尽全力保守“祖辈自杀”的秘密，第三代往往就完全不知道为什么他们的父母会这样对待他们。 Maddy knew the starkest of details from that terrible afternoon in her mother’s kitchen all those years ago. But that was it. Her parents had split up. He was down on his luck. She’d asked a man who could barely afford a shave to buy her a pony. 在多年前的那个可怕下午，马蒂就从母亲的口中知道了父亲自杀的每个细节，但也仅此而已。她的父母早已分开，而她的父亲是如此不幸。她甚至要求这样一个可能连胡子都刮不起的男人给她买一匹小马驹。 ‘Because that,’ I reminded her, ‘is simply what 11-year-olds do.’ “因为11岁的孩子只能想到这些。”我说。 ‘I never did feel any anger toward him,’ she said. ‘I’ve always had a sort of – oh god, maybe I’ve always been a sort of morose child myself, I don’t know – but I’ve always had an understanding. I felt sorry for him. Just … sad.’ “我从来没有对他生过一丁点气，”她说，“我一直都有种——天哪，也许我自己一直就是那种阴郁的小孩，我也不知道——但是我一直都能理解，我也真的很替他难过……就是那种，悲伤的感觉。” Still, Maddy longed for that lost connection with her dad. In her 30s, uncertainty gnawing, she took a bold leap by reaching out to the coroner’s office in Watford, the town near London in which her father had ended his life. ‘I remembered that somebody had mentioned there’d been a note,’ she said. ‘Whether my mother had intercepted it and not let us have it or not, I don’t know.’ 马蒂依旧渴望维系与父亲之间的情感纽带，尽管这种联系早已消失。在她30多岁的时候，内心的迷茫几乎要吞噬她；于是她做了个大胆的决定，直接飞到了伦敦附近的沃特福德找到了当时的验尸官，她的父亲就是在那里结束了自己的生命。“我记得有人提到过那里留了张便条，”她说，“也许是妈妈把它藏了起来不给我们看，我也不知道。” The coroner still had a copy of her father’s suicide note, all those years later. 尽管过去了这么多年，验尸官依旧保留着一份马蒂父亲自杀遗书的副本。 His letter arrived much later than it was meant to, but Maddy and her siblings are lucky in at least now knowing their dad’s final thoughts. The fact that only about 30 per cent of those who take their own lives leave a note, an astonishingly low figure given the impact on those left behind, is revealing in itself of the altered state of consciousness of the suicidal mind. In my book on the subject, Suicidal: Why We Kill Ourselves (2018), I show how the very capacity for empathy is often severely constricted when one is in the throes of self-destructive thought. 这份遗书比原计划来得晚了太多，但是对马蒂和她的兄弟姐妹而言这已经是不幸中的万幸，至少他们还能知道父亲在生命最后时刻的想法。事实上，仅有30%的自杀者会留下遗书，相较于他们对遗属所造成的打击，这个数字却是低得惊人；而这个事实本身也揭示了自杀者内心状态的改变。我在《自杀：我们为什么要杀死自己》（2018）一书中表明，当一个人挣扎于自毁念头的巨大痛苦之中，他的移情能力往往也受到了极大的限制。 But that wasn’t the case for George Reid. Maddy shared her dad’s letter with me. Addressed to her, her brother Philip, and their sister Nicky, it spoke of existential despair, of his love for his children, of how he knew that this would undo them… and of music. On ponies, not a word: 但乔治·里德并没有如此。马蒂与我分享了她父亲的遗书，是他写给马蒂，马蒂的哥哥菲利普还有他们的妹妹尼基的。他在信中写出了他对生存的绝望，他对孩子们的爱，以及他知道他的死会对他们带来多大的影响……还有音乐；尽管他没有提到小马驹： I know this will be painful and bewildering but, for obvious reasons, I will not be there to comfort you … It has taken long and careful thought before I decided that the spark which enables one to carry on in the face of what seems an almost meaningless existence, coupled with constant financial problems, was not strong enough to see me through. Please take solace from the knowledge that I loved, and love, you all as much as anyone could, and I know that you will think of me often – I hope with tenderness – chiefly because we all love music and I hope that there will be many times when a tune will remind you of me. “我知道，这一定很让你们痛苦，也很困惑。但是，由于显而易见的原因，我已经没办法再在你们身边安慰你们了……我花了很长时间仔细考虑，终于发现，曾经支撑着我活下去的那簇花火，在毫无意义的生存与无解的经济困难面前，已经不足以再让我渡过难关。请从我所爱的知识当中寻找慰藉,并且尽可能地去爱这个世界。我想你们会时常想起我——这也是我的愿望——主要是因为我们都热爱音乐；我也希望，有那么一个曲调能让你们时时想起我。” 👇 参考阅读 📜艾斯林·贝亚：父亲的离世不仅带给我悲伤和怨恨，还有别样的人生感悟 喜剧演员艾斯林·贝亚 （Aisling Bea）在文章中回忆了父亲自杀后她与母亲的生活以及心路历程。从儿童时期的朦胧崇拜，到逐渐长大后既怀念又怨恨的复杂情绪，贝亚曾是与妹妹一起努力想要在父亲遗书中寻找自己名字的孩子，也一度痛恨被他人评价“你和你的父亲长得真像”。而当30年后，父亲的遗物意外回到了她们的手中，她承认了父亲之死所带给她的别样人生体悟，亦能够提笔面对往事，以鼓励有着相同遭遇的人们。 https://www./lifeandstyle/2017/nov/04/aisling-bea-my-fathers-death-has-given-me-a-love-of-men-of-their-vulnerability-and-tenderness?CMP=fb_gu 📔英剧：《去他*的世界》 自杀的母亲，沉浸悲伤的父亲，男主James的17年一直生活在死亡的阴影和家人的疏离之下，于是他开始相信自己是一个精神变态。而另一边，面对猥琐的继父，懦弱的母亲和缺位的父亲，少女Alyssa选择以叛逆和倔强对抗生活。当Alyssa成为James的杀人实验对象，两个背负沉重阴影、各怀心事的人却开启了一段互相治愈的公路之旅。 https://movie.douban.com/subject/27031389/ ✨
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