I’m Sorry I Took My Life

A Letter to Family and Friends from a Spirit Who Died from Suicide

Bob Olson is the host of Afterlife TV, author of two books, Answers About The Afterlife and The Magic Mala, and creator of the reputable directory of psychics and mediums, BestPsychicDirectory.com.

Photo by Debby Hudson on Unsplash

Suicide loss is an important topic to me for a couple of reasons. One, I suffered from suicidal ideation for most of my life into my early thirties due to depression. During the worst of my depressive years, Melissa constantly wondered if she might arrive home from work to discover I had died. I’m glad I resisted those suicidal thoughts thirty years ago, but many do not.

Two, suicide loss survivors deal with a host of challenges that include grief and mourning but extend beyond that as well. I’ve learned that what I’ve discovered about life after death in my investigation can be exceptionally comforting to people dealing with loss due to suicide.

A few months ago, after learning about yet another suicide, I was inspired to write a letter. I imagined that this letter was written by a person in spirit who had taken his life and was writing to his family and friends left behind. Like many of my articles, I wrote this for myself and then set it aside. This weekend, I came across the writing and, with Melissa's help, edited it for our audience.

If you have known someone who took their own life, I believe this may be helpful to you. I think it could help anyone who has experienced loss of any sort, even if they have not known the sting of suicide.

I have applied everything I have learned from my work with the afterlife to write this letter. This includes what I’ve learned from people who have had near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences, and dream visitations. Most importantly, I have taken from my experiences witnessing suicide loss survivors getting readings with mediums. Those readings are truly unforgettable.

Here is the letter I wrote from someone who took his own life to his surviving loved ones.

Dear Loved One,

This is a difficult letter to write. I’m unsure where to begin, so let me start by saying I’m sorry. Sorry is a small word for such a big wound, but there’s no better way to say it. I know I’ve hurt you deeply, and I sincerely regret this. I also know you have many questions, so I will try to answer them in this letter.

I know that you’re angry with me. I deserve your anger. I also understand that you’re hurt and possibly even feel as if I did this TO you. That was never my intention. I was not trying to hurt you, and my act of taking my life was not a message to you or about you. Shamefully, I’ll admit that I was not thinking about everyone who would suffer from my suicide. I was irrationally focused on escaping something I felt inside, and I didn’t believe anyone could help me.

I also know that you are confused. You might even feel that I deceived you. This was not my intent. I can think clearly now as a spiritual being, and part of the clarity is that I was not thinking clearly in the last days of my life.

I am aware of the shame you might be feeling about how I died. I know about the stigma that accompanies suicide. That stigma affects the support surviving loved ones receive from others. I apologize that you have had to know the depth of that stigma while attempting to process my loss.

Above all else, I want to make it clear to you that you are not responsible for my death. You did not miss the signs. You did not say or do the wrong thing. You did not fail in your relationship with me. I am responsible for taking my life. I made the choice. I did not come to you for help. I certainly didn’t make it clear to you how desperate I had been feeling. Most importantly, I did not end my life because of you or to hurt you, and there was nothing you could have said or done to prevent it.

Right now, I need you to know that I love you. I have always loved you. Even when I wasn’t being myself for reasons that are not important anymore, I loved you. Even when we both said hurtful things to one another, I loved you. Even when I kept secrets from you, my love never diminished. My problem at the end was that I didn’t love myself, and I wouldn’t allow anyone to help me.

I’m aware that some people have beliefs about suicide and the afterlife (some that are religious-based), and I want you to know that the reality is that I’m fine. If you are worried about me, worry no more. The spiritual dimension is beyond words, even for suicides, yet I will do my best to describe what it’s been like since my passing.

At its core, the afterlife is pure love. It is a love you can feel, smell, taste, and hear. In other words, the love surrounding us all is multisensory and all-encompassing. Within this love is a sense of peace that does not exist on the physical plane. It is harmony, relaxation, and ease. It’s like a day at the beach. Yes, that’s it, because a day at the beach is filled with joy, and the love that oozes through my pores here is like the sun warming your skin on a beautiful afternoon on the sandy coastline.

You might be wondering how someone who has taken their life can be experiencing love, peace, and joy in the afterlife, but I’m telling you now that it is so. After I died, I first found myself looking at my body, trying to make sense of what I was seeing. That was weird, to say the least. Once I knew it was my body I was seeing before me, I realized that I had died, and then I remembered why I had died.

I was like, “Oh crap, I just killed myself!” I got fearful of what was next. After all, I’ve heard all the rumors about what happens to people in the afterlife who take their own lives. However, the second I began to feel that fear, a beautiful spiritual being appeared beside me. And just being near this being took all my fears away. I was comforted by... hmm, I can’t say if it was a him or a her. To keep things simple, I’ll call it a him, but he had female qualities as much as male qualities.

As I was saying, a comforting sense of love and peace emanated from this beautiful being, and the closer I got to him, the more I could feel it. He was mostly made of light, but he had the shape and form of a human. He took that shape for my sake to ease my fears. And when he spoke, he communicated telepathically.

I realized we both communicated telepathically because I had questions, and he answered them before I spoke them out loud. I enjoyed that he read my mind. It was freeing because all I could do was be myself.

He told me to follow him. So I followed this spiritual being of love, and he brought me to my homecoming celebration. Everyone I had ever known in my human life who had died was there to greet me and welcome me back home. That’s right, the spirit world is our true home. I knew it the moment I died and was looking at my dead body. I remember thinking, “I’m home again.” It was a remembering more than a learning. I could feel that I had been here before, and boy, it felt like home, much more than life on earth ever felt to me.

I was reunited with family and friends, mentors, favorite teachers, coaches, parents, and grandparents of my friends whom I had known, everyone I could imagine wanting to see again. It was a joyous celebration. There was so much love in that gathering that I never wanted it to end. I wish I could describe the exchange of love that I felt with every loved one in spirit. It was a potent dose of affection. But then I was told that it was time to go. I didn’t want to leave all these lovely beings, but I didn’t argue. I knew it wasn’t an option to stay in this welcome-home reunion forever.

I realize now that the spiritual being who initially greeted me is a spirit guide of mine. You might call him a guardian angel. He watched over me my entire human lifetime. He even helped me plan my human life before I was born. That’s right; we plan our lives in the spirit world before birth, and then our spirit guide watches over us and guides us throughout our day-to-day lives.

It’s funny because we sometimes feel so alone as human beings, yet we are never alone. Our spirit guides are always with us, watching, guiding, and loving us. If I only knew this when I was alive, I’m sure I would not have taken my own life. But that’s part of the human condition, thinking and feeling as though we are separate, yet we are constantly connected to our spirit guides and loved ones on the other side. I wish I could prove this to you because it would make your life easier.

You might be wondering if my spirit guide or any of the spirits who showed up at my homecoming reunion were judging me for my suicide. The answer is no. Nobody judges you here. You tend to judge yourself, which, if I’m being honest, is much worse.

I don’t know how to say this, so I’ll say it the best I can. A human lifetime includes not just the time we spend in the physical world. That might only be about half of the experience. The other half of the human experience occurs here in the spiritual dimension after death. This makes sense when you think about it because you first live your life, and then you see how your words, choices, and actions affected other people and the world.

If you’re thinking to yourself, “Uh oh,” then you understand. For me, of course, the first experience I had after my homecoming reunion was to witness how much hurt and heartbreak I caused by taking my life. It’s part of an experience known as the Life Review.

It’s probably not a surprise to you that I wasn’t thinking about how much my suicide would hurt other people when I did it. Not that I wasn’t thinking about you; I was—I was thinking about how much I would miss you. I was just more focused on escaping my pain. I wasn’t thinking rationally. I wanted my mental anguish to stop more than anything else, and I didn’t realize that my suicide was a permanent solution to a temporary problem. I know it’s probably impossible for you to understand, but I didn’t consider my situation temporary. I didn’t realize there were people and organizations who could help me. I just wanted it to end, and I did what seemed like my best escape from my problems at the time.

I also thought that death was the end, like I would go to sleep and stay that way. I imagined there’d be nothing, so I thought I was escaping. I honestly didn’t believe I would be here now witnessing and experiencing the pain I have brought you. Naturally, I now know that my beliefs were in error. Not only because I could have found help if I had asked for it but because I now see the ripple effect of how suicide afflicts the lives of those left behind.

Please believe me when I tell you I didn’t intend to be cruel to you or anyone else. To me, death was a getaway from the problems in my mind. Yet, I soon realized how my escape negatively affected all my family members and friends who are still alive. I can truly feel your suffering as if I were inside of you myself, which is why I’m writing you this letter.

My life review also taught me how my suicide affected people beyond family and friends. There are people who I didn’t know when I was alive who I have negatively affected by taking my life. The person who found my body will never be able to erase that from her mind. The EMTs who tried to save me and the doctors and nurses in the emergency room will forever be haunted by the experience. Even people who simply heard about my suicide have been affected in ways that will remain with them for years. I feel the anguish of each of these people as they suffer because I am the spirit responsible for their pain.

This is the second half of the human lifetime experience. Half in the physical world. Half in the spirit world. But it’s not all bad. As difficult as it is to experience the pain I’ve caused due to my suicide, my life is not entirely made up of my final act. I also did a lot of wonderful, generous, and loving acts in my life, and I get to witness the ripple effect of those actions as well. I get to see the good I did in the world, the smiles I put on people’s faces, the joy I gave people, and the lives I positively affected in ways that continue to benefit people today. All this is part of the second half of the human experience, the half that we experience from the spiritual dimension.

The fact that I feel your grief due to my suicide is not a punishment. We are not punished here in the spiritual dimension. Instead, I feel your suffering so that I can learn and grow from the experience. I learn nothing if I become so attached to your suffering that I loathe my very existence.

The truth is that we, as humans, are flawed. It’s in the human design. We aren’t born with all the answers—all the wisdom and knowing we have as spiritual beings—because the human lifetime is about experiencing things we cannot experience here in the spirit world.

What are we unable to experience here in the spiritual dimension? We cannot experience suffering. We cannot experience hate. We cannot experience loneliness, sickness, poverty, pain, or fear. There is only love and peace here, so we experience a human lifetime because it teaches us the value of what we have in the spiritual dimension by knowing the opposite of it on the physical plane.

I might have confused you there. I have told you that I do experience your pain, yet I say that we cannot experience pain here. Let me clarify. I can only experience your pain to understand it, not to suffer from it. When I begin to feel attached to your pain too much—when I start to beat myself up emotionally for what I’ve done to hurt you—I am automatically pulled away so that I quickly feel detached. I honestly don’t know how it works. It just does. Because if I were to become so attached to how much I hurt you, I wouldn’t learn from it. And if I don’t learn from it, what’s to stop me from doing it again in another lifetime?

I’d also like to talk to you about your grief. Grief is an essential reaction to loss that allows human beings to process the emotions surrounding it mentally. Human beings never entirely stop grieving a significant loss. You merely learn how to live with it to function in daily life.

No one should expect you to rush your grief just because they think enough time has gone by since my death. You get to take as long as you need to make that happen. That said, I do want you to know that from my perspective here in the spirit world, prolonging your grief and mourning beyond what is needed for you does not honor me. Yet, some people feel the need to do this to demonstrate their love for their deceased loved one.

Notice that mourning is different from grief. Grief is the internal, emotional response to loss, while mourning is the external expression of that grief through behavior. Both can be emotionally painful, even though they are intended to release emotional suffering caused by loss. If you find yourself extending your grief or mourning because you think it somehow honors or benefits me, I’m permitting you to stop.

Extending your grief and mourning beyond what is needed by you only prolongs your suffering. This is not how I want you to show your love for me. I prefer to see you move forward in life. That honors me because you are not allowing my final act to delay your life any more than is necessary.

Every person in spirit here feels the same. Married spirits want their spouses to find love again. The spirits of children want their parents to have more children if that’s what the parents desire. Even the spirits of pets want their owners to get another pet if that will fill their hearts with love and joy. We do not know jealousy here. We are not possessive. We do not feel that your love for another will diminish your love for us. Those are human qualities that are not carried over into spirit life.

I took my own life, but it was never my intention to stop your life. I see now that it has seriously disrupted your life. Honestly, it would positively lift me to witness you getting back on your feet and living life again. You honor me with your love and your memories of me.

On the other hand, do not believe for one second that your grief negatively affects me in any way. There is nothing you can do to hold back my growth here in the spiritual dimension. Even feeling angry at me does not hold me back. It won't hold me back even if you don’t forgive me. Forgiving me releases you, not me. I am on my spiritual path now, and nothing any human being does will prevent me from learning and growing here in the spiritual dimension.

In conclusion, while I know it’s not the same as when I was in my body, I am still with you. I’m around you all the time. Whenever you think of me, I am right beside you. Please talk to me. I will respond. You might assume that you’re imagining my responses, but it’s me impressing my thoughts upon you.

My wish in writing this letter is that you won’t let my final act define my life or yours. I hope you can forgive me for the way I ended it. That said, I prefer that you remember the good memories because that is what I remember. We sure had some joyful times together. I recall the laughter, intimacy, and fun adventures. And I remember the love you showed me.

In the end, I hope you will include me in your conversations with others. Please do not focus on how I died, but rather, rejoice in how I lived.

I love you,

Me

Thanks for reading my fictional letter based on truth (based on my afterlife investigation). I genuinely believe that any spirit who has taken their own life would love to send this letter to their surviving loved ones. My best wishes to you.

With love,
Bob

Bob Olson is the host of Afterlife TV, author of Answers About The Afterlife and The Magic Mala, and creator of the reputable directory of psychics and mediums, BestPsychicDirectory.com. His latest venture is Bob Olson Connect, where you can read Bob’s articles before they become books.

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The psychic turned around when she heard Jag clear his throat, and she sat opposite him. She appeared about seventy years old, and he liked that she wasn’t dressed in fortune-teller garb like some others, even though they weren’t Romani. Behind her was a banner that read: Psychic Amethyst.

“Is your name really Amethyst?” he asked.

She looked at his face like she was trying to read it. “I’m getting that you’re at a crossroads in life. Is that true, dear?”

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