PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS PIECE CONTAINS POTENTIALLY TRIGGERING AND SENSITIVE CONTENT.
5 January 2025. Suicide.
By Peter Jacobs **
I dreaded this day would come. Yet I refused to believe it ever would. Part of me held onto hope when it was already gone. And maybe that’s true for my Dad as well. He didn’t have any hope left to hold onto. Sometimes hope really is all we have. Protect it.
I’m not here to just tell you how the story ends. We already know the ending. In fact, there are many versions of it. Many roads to it. But the ending is already written.
What we don’t really talk about is what came before. And what comes after.
So, here’s the truth about suicide. The version no one speaks about. Because it’s not an isolated event that we simply need to work through and not look back on.
I
My father was aggressive. Bullying. Loud. Loudest in the room, not by volume, but by argument. Steamrolling people into submission. He thought it was a game he needed to win. Every argument — no, every human interaction — a challenge for him to end up on top.
He got fired from every job he had. Sometimes months or years without working. At 45, he was too old, and nobody was hiring old people. Same at 50. At 55. At 60. When his personality clashed with the interviewer, he was overqualified.
It was always someone else’s fault.
He enjoyed wine and whiskey socially. Then, around 2015, a routine procedure to place a stent in a narrowed artery went wrong, and the complication caused a heart attack.
He walked out of the ICU and into the bottle store.
He became an alcoholic the minute he left. He stole from his employer to fuel it, replacing what he took as he went. He was never caught because he covered it.
In 2021 or 2022, his appendix burst and he went into a coma. The doctors asked me about his lifestyle. I asked if what they meant was whether he was an alcoholic, and I told them yes.
For that, I was ridiculed and threatened by my family. Not with the kind of sanction an elder relative might think suitable. Threatened with my life — because I was wrong, and the doctors were looking for a scapegoat, and I’d handed them one.
He drinks just as much as the rest of the family.”
Two days later he was awake. He carried on drinking.
I thought if I helped now, maybe he would change. Maybe.
I got him a stable income that covered his costs. Rent, medical aid, the basics. I gave him the clients, the marketing, everything that built it sustainably so he could get back to a sound position. An air fryer, to cook better and more conveniently. A new microwave when his stopped working. A new fan when the summer got hot. Laptop repairs after he spilled red wine on it. A freezer stocked with proper food.
My bank card sat loaded on his Uber account, so he had complete freedom of movement, because he saw a car as status and freedom, and he had damaged the ones he borrowed from me.
Then I sold my car to move my son from online schooling into a private school. I phoned my father to tell him.
He had a fit — not about the school, but about the fact that he could extort more money from me if my son went to an Afrikaans government school – my English son. “Why didn’t I put him in an Afrikaans school?” he said. Because then I’d still have a car.
And then: “What am I going to do now without my car?” The sense of ownership was clear, claiming something I worked hard for as his own. Perhaps his approach was simple – a car meant freedom, status – and taking that away from me was another form of control, of punishment. Even if just by speaking those words.
Every year I sacrificed Christmas and New Year, inviting him over out of pity. We both knew that’s what it was. He kept accepting. It usually revolved around me buying everything, cooking, and generous amounts of alcohol. I think that’s what he actually showed up for. Not the company.
And there were the trying times, and he loved to be dramatic about those. “If I can’t get a job soon, I’ll have to swallow a lead pill”. I heard that line hundreds of times growing up, right through to the months before he took his life. The last time, I told him: “Stop with that already. It’s getting old, and you need to take responsibility, not threaten with the same story I’ve heard since I can remember”.
He said he wouldn’t really do it. I believed him.
II
He was behind on rent despite everything I was putting in. By the end of December 2024, his landlord had asked him to vacate. He committed to moving out on 6 January.
I told him to speak to the other people in his life. His brother. My brother. His ex-fiancée. He had a former girlfriend. He had friends. Any of them could have been asked.
He wouldn’t ask them. He preferred taking from me, because he knew exactly which buttons to press and how many times he could press them.
My mother asked me whether she should let him move back in with her? She turned to me for a decision, the one she couldn’t make without permission. I said no. His presence in that house would have destroyed her.
I was the last one still bending. I stopped a few days before Christmas.
The last thing I ever said to him was on WhatsApp on the afternoon of 1 January. “Happy New Year”.
III
At about half past three, my phone buzzed with a banking notification. My father had paid money into my account.
I assumed a deal had come through. He’d been waiting on one. I assumed he was starting to pay back some of what he’d taken.
I messaged him. Nothing. I called. Nothing. I waited and called again.
Then I started explaining it to myself. He’s drunk somewhere. His phone’s in another room. That’s all this is.
But I already knew. I said it to my wife, plainly and factually: “My dad’s paid money into my account. He probably shot himself”.
Nobody had told me anything. I had nothing to go on. I said the true thing at half past three, and then spent four and a half hours talking myself into a version that didn’t exist.
At about eight I stopped and asked myself straight. “Is he dead?” The answer came back immediately. Loud, definitive. “Yes”.
IV
I phoned his landlord and asked him to check on him. He came back to me: “Curtains drawn, door ajar, lights off, nobody answering”.
We were staying in the cottage at my mother’s house. She saw me leaving and rushed to find out why I was going out at that time of night. I told her what I suspected. She insisted on coming with me.
I was walking in front. She and the landlord followed at the sort of distance that said they knew what was coming.
At his door I knocked and called out — “Hello?” — a couple of times. What pierced the air wasn’t my voice. It was the silence where his answer should have been.
I phoned again and saw his phone ringing on his desk. He never left his phone anywhere. He was attached to it, in case his ex-fiancée called. He was obsessed — to the point where he built relationships with her children and their children that he never could with my brother and I.
I’d heard the landlord say the lights were off, so I brought a flashlight, knowing I didn’t want to disturb the scene by touching any light switches.
I pushed the door open, moved the curtains, and made entry. Slowly. Smoothly. Letting the light lead the way for my eyes.
He knew I would enter that room exactly the way I did. Scanning, fast, taking in every detail. He positioned himself to avoid anyone spotting him from the front door. It was going to take me getting sucked into the darkness of that night to find him. Just like he planned.
And that’s exactly what happened. As fast as I scanned the room, I saw the scene.
Slumped on the chair. As if still alive but ignoring my calls.
I guess I also felt ignored at that stage. The one person I’d call on a discovery like that was the person propped in the chair, on display for me to find, too still to be alive.
What I saw that day has no place in this world for a vivid description of the scene. It’s mine to carry. Because I must.
It seared into my mind. It’s still visible, overlaying any dark room I enter.
And that was his point.
In a split second, I turned and pushed my mother out. The landlord was still stuck by the door, as if waiting for the all-clear.
He’s dead. He shot himself. Call the police”.
Clear. Calm. Focused. She broke down at my words.
She didn’t want me to go back into the room. I’m not sure why. Perhaps an attempt to protect me. Perhaps an attempt to avoid reality. Probably a bit of both. It wasn’t going to change what was already seared into my mind.
I called for her to be fetched from the scene. Then I stayed for the next five or six hours, until the body was removed.
I couldn’t make myself watch them wheel him out. So I heard it instead. The gurney wheels running over the brickwork outside.
That’s the piece I kept.
A task handed to me by the moment. By being first through the door. By the very nature of my existence, I was bound to that chapter, cast in it as such.
V
I didn’t know about the file until I was sitting in the landlord’s kitchen and the Victim Support Unit told me there was one. She brought it to me. It had my name on it.
Keys. The will. The funeral policy. The practical tick-box things you expect to come across.
And a note. Who to contact. What music to play — Seasons in the Sun. Something about a trailer at his ex-fiancée’s house being his.
And a smiley face.
My brother has never got past the smiley face. It sits in him the way the room sits in me.
What was missing was an explanation. An apology. A reason. But that wasn’t going to drive the final message home — that he reserved for me to find. To carry.
A final departure note in the form of a seared image. The same inflictions he created when we were kids. The supposed lessons concealed in harmful sentiment.
This was exactly the thing that he did. His final act, handed to me as a scene, and fog. The fog he was really good at creating — knowing I would question myself more than anything else. More than his death.
Is this my fault? Is it the car? Is it the invite to Christmas or New Year he didn’t get this time round? Is it the boundary I set? Is it what I did or didn’t do?”
VI
“Do you think we can get the place cleared by tomorrow to re-let it?”
“I’m not sure; I can’t find a pulse. But it doesn’t look like he survived.”
“Why isn’t there a note? They usually leave a note.”
“I’ll tell the others it was a heart attack.”
“He promised me he sold the gun. Why did he lie to me? I knew that’s why you called me.”
“Was there a lot of blood?”
“Take me through it step by step. Exactly what you found. The position of the body. Where the gun was. Do you think this is how he sat when he did it? That would make more sense. I want answers, and my kids have questions.”
“Why are you letting them take it? I could have sold all those things and taken the money.”
“Next time, rather just say he ‘passed away’. Don’t say it was suicide.”
My uncle got a factual, evidence-based account. Aligned with my training, every observed detail as I entered the room. I think it gave him the picture he needed. Perhaps a vivid explanation is the particular form of closure he needed.
The last line was my brother’s. He lives in the Netherlands. He flew out to support me and to get his own closure, and I hadn’t seen him in ten or eleven years. That hit hard.
He said it while he was still here. We were out resolving some of his long-standing banking issues when I ran into a client I’m friendly with. She knew my father and asked after him. I told her he’d passed away. She asked what happened. I said he committed suicide.
I didn’t, and still don’t, see anything wrong with the truth.
The last time I’d seen my brother before that, I’d wanted to say goodbye. He was rushing and didn’t find the time. My last goodbye was: ”Have a safe flight”. — a WhatsApp that came out as so little when I wanted to say so much more.
He also wanted to view the body, and I went with him.
That’s when we saw the expression. Even in death, this smirk. “Now I’m chuffed with myself”. The one we knew as kids, when the fatherly lesson was a concealed weapon designed to pierce and harm, and it landed — and nobody could say it was weaponised, because he covered his tracks all too well.
VII
I got crime scene cleanup in. Then I donated everything so they could pack it and take it away.
The freezer I’d stocked was still there. A year later. Untouched. It never made the grade when cheap takeout and three or four bottles of cheap liquor were within reach. Perhaps he couldn’t bring himself to escape his own habits. His own fate, if he carried on living.
I had cleaned up so many of his messes. This one wasn’t going to be me cleaning up again. What he had wasn’t a lot, but it certainly wasn’t going to become my burden.
The guilt was there daily. It showed up in my dreams. I haven’t had a proper night’s sleep since.
Guilt for saying he couldn’t move in. For the car being sold. For putting my wife and son first. For not inviting him over. Especially the part where I said no to him moving in — that, in my view, was the trigger.
Although in isolation it can’t be read that way. But this isn’t a life in isolation. It’s pieces of a puzzle that got put together the way the puzzle fit, and the final piece was laid down with all the possibilities of what led to it being complete and done.
It wasn’t one thing. It was the money and the alcohol and the car and the landlord asking him to leave and being told to ask others for help. His pride and his ego. Access to a gun. Depression. Rejection. Failed relationships. Alienating his own children. His ex-wife and his son saying there was no chance of him moving back.
Years of decisions made by him.
Is there blame to be had, and guilt to be felt?
No. Because the story is written by his hand, with his pen. Even those chapters featuring other people.
VIII
I knew what it meant. I understood it. I saw it. I just never saw it happening to me. Every engineered sentence, every push-pull moment. I didn’t know that that’s what it really looks like when someone’s pulling the strings — I thought it would be more subtle, more movie-like.
And here’s the real noteworthy thing about strings being pulled. Each pull cuts deeper than the previous one. Until the self dissolves into the hands of the one pulling the strings.
The book he always meant to write and never finished was called The Puppet Master.
IX
It sat in my journal for weeks. I didn’t understand it until something clicked.
Until I realised that I couldn’t author his behaviours as a kid — no child can — and I certainly couldn’t do it in 2025. I tried. And it dawned on me. First, the slow formation of a complex and abstract idea, before the picture crystallised in my mind. And in that moment I knew I could drop the guilt and the outcome, because I never could have authored it.
There was a sigh of relief. A softening in my posture. Stillness settled in my mind. The noise was gone, and I could receive external input again.
I wasn’t searching for an explanation. I was searching for permission to put the guilt down.
And I found it in understanding that I was never the one who could author my dad’s actions and behaviours. Free will is the one thing that cannot be touched — although we often think that by over-giving and over-spending ourselves, we’ll control the actions and behaviours of others.
It won’t. And it never could to begin with.
The only thing that happens when we over-give is to deplete our ability to see clearly, to grasp that we cannot, and will not rewrite someone else’s story. Somewhere in all of this, we forget to live. We forget that we have to write our own stories.
X
We never could author that person’s actions. No matter what we did, no matter how hard we tried. We are not the author of, or authority on, anyone else’s experience. And that in itself absolves us of the guilt and the ‘what-ifs’ that arise when thinking we could have done something different. No time spent on ‘what-ifs’ will let us hold the pen to write the story that belongs to someone else.
Survivor guilt is not sadness. Sadness you can sit with. Guilt is effort. It’s a muscle still pulling.
You wake at two in the morning and pull it again.
The lever isn’t attached to anything.
It’s like flicking a light switch the whole time, hoping it works, but it was never connected. No matter how hard you tried, it was never going to work.
Not a broken switch. Broken invites the next question — “Who broke it, was it me?” Unconnected. Nothing to blame. Nobody to blame. Including yourself.
I found my father in a dark room, and I never turned on the light.
There was no light I could have turned on.
XI
The home we grew up in was unstable. Moving around a lot, churches and neighbours making sure we were fed and clothed. I didn’t understand it at the time. But I do remember the harsh days, and there were many.
There were, of course, the good days too. But hardship tends to punctuate one’s experience when it is so pronounced and persistent that anything beyond that seems suspicious.
Usually the warning came from my mother, although she too got swept up by the same fears, and it filtered down to those around her.
Sometimes there was no warning at all. Just the fast escalation from playing toy cars to being in trouble for things we didn’t even understand. The power games, as he called them, played against kids who wanted to be kids — but who were also too scared to experience the life of a child, because it pretty much wasn’t safe to do so. To express. To find ourselves, and our purpose, and meaning.
For a kid growing up in poverty, it was about avoiding the consequences. We couldn’t win. We never played. Yet somehow we certainly ended up losing every time.
So I built and refined a mechanism.
To read rooms. To predict behaviour and scan for threats. To detect lies, deception, fear, anger, pain. To step into the thoughts and emotions of another person — because knowing what they know and feeling what they feel was the mechanism to keep me safe from making the wrong move.
Perhaps it’s a natural talent I was given. More likely it’s a skill I developed to survive — the same mechanism my father had and used to win games of power against others.
For him, it was weaponised. The best weapon he had. Reliable, accurate, a guaranteed win. A Trojan Horse in his hands, wielded to defeat anyone who crossed his path.
He did it to gain power. And to a degree, he succeeded.
Those he took power over were never stronger than he was. Two little kids fighting for their place in society, poverty looming. Employees scared of losing their jobs. Employers, sometimes, who weren’t equipped to deal with the vicious and unseen attacks before it was too late and submission was their only option.
I’ve seen what happens when people play for power. There’s usually a clear victory for them — often temporary — and a clear loss for someone who wasn’t even playing.
What possible defence can a good person have against an unsolicited attack of such magnitude and aggression that they themselves feel like they’re in the wrong and deserve what comes to them? A tongue lashing. A guilt trip. A power play to remove them from something.
Mine brings a real gift to the door. Listening. Compassion.
Now I have this ability, and I put it to good use where it counts. Where it matters.
He used it to win. I use it to meet people. The difference isn’t the skill — it’s what you do when you can see straight into someone.
It means the responsibility to meet people where they are. To acknowledge the part of them that is saying something without speaking. It’s looking someone in the eyes and saying the thing that they need others to hear, because they cannot bear it themselves. It’s about holding two opposing ideas simultaneously and knowing both can be true.
It’s about winning friendships, not arguments.
And very often, it’s about listening more than anything else.
Whether it’s walking into the usual coffee shop and noticing something off. Asking the barista when he’s leaving. Shocked that I knew, glad that I said it — because it had been on his shoulders that morning like a weight that slowed him down, ground him down.
Or whether it’s creating the space for someone to talk and to listen. To really listen, attentively, without distraction. Because the gift of presence calls to the fore the truth that people hold. The things that burden them, that they want to share and feel there’s no one listening.
What was once a mechanism for survival for a little kid is now my gift, aligned with purpose. With what Robert Greene calls life’s task — the thing we each are here to do. Different for everyone, and equally meaningful for everyone.
Discovering life’s task takes immense work, and it has a quality that is undeniable when it is anchored in lived experience and directed outward to serve others.
That’s what I hope this does.
And what I want to make clear is this. I don’t for a second attribute this to what my father did or didn’t do.
I do, however, believe that trying times bring out something that was installed long before it awoke. And I truly believe that each of us is called upon to do something great, something of purpose, and we are equipped with the tools that help us to do it. Sometimes brought about by moments of great inspiration and victory. Sometimes by tragedy and trauma and turmoil.
But we cannot deny that each of us carries something of a unique purpose, and the tools to live it.
XII
The anger still surfaces, but as residue. Not as blind rage. And the guilt? It could be the same guilt that would have been present if the circumstances were different. I wouldn’t know now, and I never will.
You might think I’m holding onto resentment, anger, guilt. There’s probably some of that residue sitting with me still. Maybe it dissolves. Maybe it doesn’t.
But what’s important is to know that behind my words are meaningful opportunities to consider the possibility that I, and many of you, never could author the actions and behaviours of other people.
XIII
I stopped drinking. I wouldn’t say I was an alcoholic, but perhaps I was — because one became two, two became four. Every occasion earned a drink. Bad day, have a drink. Good day, celebrate with a drink. Nothing in the house to eat, but there’d be a beer or six. Payday, the whiskey’s calling.
I saw what’s at the end of that road.
I only saw all of it clearly when I became a father myself. An instant father at that. Meaning, I stepped into a loving home with my son already in it. His biological father passed away young, but that never changed our relationship — it’s a father-son bond that will outlive both of us; it’s the kind that will move through generations.
It stops with me. I’m not the person who inflicts on others a brand of pain and self-doubt. I will not allow that voice to continue.
XIV
For those who have lost someone, I have this to say. You couldn’t control their story. You never were the author. You didn’t hold the pen. It’s like flicking a light switch the whole time, hoping it works, but it was never connected. No matter how hard you tried, it was never going to work.
Put it down. It’s not yours to carry.
To those who are here to find support because they’re worried about someone — do the sufficient thing and then drop the outcome. You cannot author someone else’s story. And by the sufficient thing, I don’t mean tell them there’s help out there and walk away. What I am saying is don’t flick a switch that isn’t connected. Get professionals involved early on, but don’t bargain on the certainty that it will change the narrative.
Not to absolve us of the responsibilities that are sometimes thrust on us — but to know that it’s not us holding the pen, writing the ending. And that alone is enough to know that you can put down the guilt. It’s not yours to carry.
Over-preparing, over-giving, like what I did for so many years — it didn’t change the ending. And nothing I did could have.
And to everyone, I say this. Be kind. Always. It might just be the difference that changes the ending.
** Name of author has been changed
For any enquiries about this piece, or to pose a question to the author, please email the SA Federation for Mental Health at info@safmh.org, attention: Michel’le Donnely and Leon de Beer.
Please note that the views and opinions expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect those of the SA Federation for Mental Health, and that the piece is being published to highlight the deeply personal and unique experiences related to suicidal behaviour and the effects thereof on families and individuals.
