When someone passes by suicide, the casseroles don't come. Neither do the cards or the phone calls. Jayne Madigan's sister lives in a neighborhood with a meal train for every birth and every death. When her 24-year-old son Brandon passed, she got nothing.
That silence is its own second loss, and it's what this conversation is about.
Jayne has been living inside suicide loss for 33 years. Her uncle Ray, who was also her godfather and the closest thing she had to a father, passed on New Year's Day in 1992. He was 47. Her family was raised Catholic and told not to say how he died. He couldn't be buried in the cemetery with everyone else.
Jayne said it anyway. She has never been ashamed of any of them.
She thought she'd done her time. Then in 2022 came the call about Brandon, her nephew and godson. Then Brandon's best friend, a year to the day. Then her brother, two years after that.
Five years after her uncle passed, Jayne was diagnosed with lupus and told she wouldn't live past 50. She was a young mother of two and disabled for two years. She traces that diagnosis directly to grief her body was carrying because her mouth wasn't allowed to. So she went looking for tools that talk therapy couldn't reach, back when that meant encyclopedias and library trips.
She found them. Today she takes no medication at all, and she teaches those tools to survivors around the world.
What we cover
🕯️ Why suicide loss is its own category of grief, and how stigma turns mourners into suspects
🩺 The lupus diagnosis Jayne connects to unexpressed grief, and what finally moved it out of her body
✋ How a blue folder about EFT sat filed away in her house for three years before she opened it
🧠 What attempt survivors consistently report: that they didn't want to die, they wanted the pain to stop, and that many describe going offline entirely
⚠️ Why the word "prevention" lands so painfully on survivors who already believe they failed
👂 What people who have attempted say would have helped most, and why unsolicited advice isn't it
🔄 How childhood and generational programming shapes what you believe about suicide before you ever lose anyone
⏳ The seven-year timeline that shows up in the research, and why Jayne refuses to treat it as a sentence
✨ Soul plans and the strange carve-out even spiritual communities make for suicide, which Jayne and I both push back on
📰 What happened when Jayne wrote Brandon's obituary and named how he died, including the hundreds of messages that followed
😢 Permission to cry, and where most of us learned we weren't allowed to
One line from Jayne has stayed with me since we recorded: she doesn't believe suicide is a choice, but she is certain healing is one.
We also talk about something I say often on this show. My daughter Shayna passed at 15, and people call that a life cut short. Jayne looks at Brandon, who started a landscaping business at age 10 and filled a funeral home with people from every corner of his life, and sees a mission completed. Neither of us thinks the manner of someone's passing gets to define the whole of who they were.
About Jayne Madigan
Jayne is a certified neuropsychotherapist, master EFT practitioner, energy medicine specialist, and suicide bereavement clinician. She works with survivors of suicide loss worldwide through private virtual sessions, workshops, and free support groups. Her communities are intentionally private, because so many survivors are still not able to say out loud what happened to them.
She works primarily with women, though she takes men as well, and she offers free discovery sessions. She's also clear that she works with people who can't afford to pay.
Website: https://healingaftersuicide.net
Free support groups and private Facebook community: available through her website
Upcoming workshop: a writing and emotions workshop with Carla Fine, beginning June 9
Resources mentioned
📕 No Time to Say Goodbye: Surviving the Suicide of a Loved One by Carla Fine
📗 Dying to Be Free by Beverly Cobain, a psychiatric nurse and cousin of Kurt Cobain
🎧 Rachel Powell's episode on Grief 2 Growth, where she talks about losing her husband and surviving her own attempt
🔬 PMH Atwater's research on the seven to fourteen years it takes to integrate a near-death experience
If you're struggling right now, please reach out. In the US, call or text 988.
Let's keep talking
What part of this conversation landed hardest for you?
If you've lost someone to suicide, I'd like to know what people got wrong when they tried to comfort you, and what actually helped. If you've been carrying a loss you've never named out loud, this is a safe place to say it.
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