Suicide took my sister, we buried the answers with her

I was still a young boy when my sister took her own life, far too young to understand what had happened or why someone who had laughed with us, shared meals with us and carried so much promise could suddenly decide that life was no longer worth living.

Like many children confronted by death before they are old enough to understand it, I searched for answers in the conversations of adults. Some spoke in whispers. Others blamed witchcraft.

A few simply said she had lost her mind. None of those explanations ever satisfied me because they answered the question of how she died, but never why she had reached a place where death appeared to offer more comfort than life itself.

In 2024, many years after we buried her, I returned to her grave to erect a tombstone. Standing there, looking at her name carved into stone, I realised something that caught me by surprise – time had passed.

I became a journalist who interviewed presidents, ministers, business leaders and grieving families. Yet despite everything life had taught me, I still did not have an answer to the question that had haunted me since childhood. Why?

At one point, I raised that question with a doctor friend. His answer was immediate. People who die by suicide, he said, are often struggling with mental illness. I listened, but I found myself asking another question that had troubled me for years.

If that is true, why do some people who wander our streets with no homes, no food, no blankets, who sleep in the cold and live lives many of us cannot imagine, continue fighting to survive every single day? Why do they cling to life despite circumstances that seem unbearable?

He smiled gently before replying that mental illness is not one condition and does not affect every person in the same way. Two people can experience the same hardship and respond to it very differently. One may continue to carry the burden for years, while another reaches a point where despair overwhelms hope.

His explanation made medical sense, but it did not erase my questions.

The weight of living

As far as we knew, there was no history of mental illness in our family. My sister was not someone we regarded as mentally unwell. She was bright. She had a future. Like many families, we believed she would go to university and build a successful life. Then life became more complicated. She fell pregnant while she was still young. The relationship did not survive.

The father rejected both her and the child, a boy who has since grown into a man. Today, looking back, I often wonder what she was carrying inside that she never shared with those who loved her most.

Perhaps that is why I have become uncomfortable whenever society explains every suicide with a single phrase. Mental illness is undoubtedly part of many suicide stories and deserves far greater understanding than it often receives. But I also believe hopelessness has many faces.

Poverty has one face. Unemployment has another. Rejection, loneliness, humiliation, debt, abuse, broken relationships and the quiet collapse of dreams each leave their own scars. Sometimes they exist alongside mental illness. Sometimes they deepen it. Sometimes they simply become burdens that people carry in silence until they convince themselves there is no way back.

No answers, only silence

The older I become, the more I realise that my family was never alone. As a journalist, I have met mothers who still wake up wondering whether they missed the signs, fathers who replay their final conversations in their minds, and children who continue to ask questions nobody can answer.

The circumstances are always different, but the pain left behind is remarkably similar. Suicide does not end with the person who dies. It continues living inside the people left behind.

That is why I believe Africa needs a broader conversation. We must speak about mental health without shame, but we must also confront the poverty, unemployment, social isolation, addiction, domestic violence and loss of hope that weigh so heavily on millions of people.

Too often, we wait until someone has died before we ask what they were carrying. By then, the only people left searching for answers are the families.

Even today, when I think of my sister, I cannot say with certainty what finally convinced her that life was no longer worth living. Perhaps I never will. What I do know is that behind every suicide statistic is someone else's sister, someone else's son, someone else's father or daughter.

And behind every one of those numbers is a family still living with questions that no funeral, no tombstone and no passage of time can ever fully answer.

*This account is drawn from the writer's own life.