Nothing is After You
Warning
The following contains content about suicide.
Suicide remains one of the most taboo subjects in our society. It’s uncomfortable even in horror films because all too often our maniacs are the ones who are mentally ill, not our heroes. As this taboo is confronted more and more (Midsommar and Hereditary should come to mind), we don’t discuss the people who have to find a way to carry on after someone’s suicide much, and when we do, the conversations remain problematic.
The 2020 film The Night House centered its entire existence on someone in this very state. Rebecca Hall’s character, Beth, struggles in the aftermath of her husband’s suicide. She wants to keep it private but at one point bares her claws at a student’s parent for coming to her with a minor issue during her time of grief. Unlike some characters we will see later, Beth fully accepts the reality of her husband’s cause of death, even as she spends the movie uncovering secrets that lead to it.
Secrets and questions are the trap of those who experience a death by suicide in the immediate circles. We ask why and question how well we knew that person. We blame ourselves and, unfortunately, continue to blame the deceased when we say, “if only they’d come to me for help.” As with many of the big questions in life and death, narratives often find more answers than we ever get in real life.
Sometimes, the answers seem more clear. In the various iterations of Stephen King’s It, Stanley Uris’s suicide is a plot point. He can’t rejoin the adults in Derry and takes what he thinks is the only way out. The rest of the Losers Club has to find a way to defeat Pennywise again but without a valued member of their found family. None of the other Losers follow Stan’s actions.
That’s not always the case. We get multiple examples of suicides leading to more suicides. It’s the epitome of the line from Beth’s husband’s letter: “Nothing is after you.” The bleakness of the statement is grief itself. How can I live on without you? After you, there is nothing left in life worth living for.
When a disease or old age takes someone we love, we often — but not always — have some time to prepare. When someone we love dies via accident, we grieve heavily, but there is not the same weight of loss felt after a suicide. With suicide, I believe, we spend more time in the denial stage than in any other. The film Pulse, for example, keeps us locked in denial with one of the hardest things to accept. The central premise of “they would never do that” and the mystery to solve, the secrets to uncover, keep the bereaved from being able to accept the loss. We don’t want to believe that someone we loved could make such a final decision.
Neil Gaiman briefly addresses suicides in his novel The Graveyard Book. Eight-year-old Bod asks his guardian Silas if those to take their own lives are happier afterward. “Sometimes. Mostly, no. It’s like the people who believe they’ll be happier if they go and live somewhere else, but who learn it doesn’t work that way. Wherever you go, you take yourself with you,” Silas explains. This is not exactly comforting to survivors, but it is better than the notion that those who do commit suicide are damned for all eternity (or turn into vampires, in some mythologies).
In a way, it lends itself to the idea that the living can follow the dead. While not strictly a horror film, Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides doesn’t shy away from the contagiousness of suicide, nor does it make it fodder for dark comedy like Heathers. It’s treated seriously, and the questions that arise from the neighborhood boys about the Lisbon sisters encompass their lives. Ultimately, we do not know what happens after we die, and following in the path of one who already committed suicide doesn’t leave much hope for the living.
Survivor’s guilt is on full display in the 2007 adaptation of The Mist. Call it murder or assisted suicide, David Drayton is left alone in the car after the bullets are gone and everyone else is dead. He wants nothing — there’s that word again — more than to be able to join his son in death, but he can’t. And then, the fog lifts, the transports vehicles drive by full of other survivors, and we the audience have our own hearts ripped out. Perhaps that is the ultimate message of suicide. If “they” had waited just a minute longer, an hour longer, a day longer, it could have been prevented. We can’t know that for sure. We only know what is.
Beth from The Night House gets her answers as to why her husband not only took his own life but why he also took a few others beforehand. The answers are never pleasant, even when they are less destructive. But is it better to know or to also wonder, always question, always doubt the people you loved who can longer speak for themselves?
When we feel like nothing is left, when nothing is the only thing that matters, it doesn’t always help to remember that something is left. When we are the ones who are left, even in our grief, it becomes our duty to help ensure that no one ever has to feel like we do again.
There is something left…it is us…and death — natural, accidental, self-inflicted — does not destroy the love we’ve built for the people who are gone. 🩸
Resource
If you or a loved one are contemplating suicide, please call 9–8–8 for help.
About
T.J. Tranchell was born on Halloween and grew up in Utah. He has published the novella Cry Down Dark and the collections Asleep in the Nightmare Room and The Private Lives of Nightmares with Blysster Press and Tell No Man, a novella with Last Days Books. In October 2020, The New York Times called Cry Down Dark the scariest book set in Utah. He holds a Master’s degree in Literature from Central Washington University and attended the Borderlands Press Writers Boot Camp in 2017. He currently lives in Washington State with his wife and son. Follow him at www.tjtranchell.net or on Twitter @TJ_Tranchell.
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