`I don't understand myself since my son took his life. It's like I feel nothing. I don't have the feelings I feel I should have. "It's difficult to feel angry with him. I do feel angry with him but as soon as I feel angry with him I feel guilty so I stop allowing myself to feel angry. It's like letting myself actually feel how I must be feeling deep down is selfish. "I don't want people counselling me. When I suspect friends are getting into counselling mode I switch off. I tell them to back off.

"I was never able to talk with him. We never seemed to be able to communicate. One of the last times I saw him, I knocked down a suggestion he made about a new career move. I feel guilty about that. I wonder how differently things might have turned out if I'd listened to his ideas and not knocked them. I just knocked his idea without knowing. "Rationally I know that one moment of dismissing an idea didn't make him go out and kill himself. Rationally I know that. But emotionally it's very hard not to feel guilty.

"There's a lot of blame about. People in the family are guarded with one another. It's easy to blame, blame myself and blame others or be blamed by others or hear others blame others. We don't talk so much. "The fact is that we'll never know why he did it. We'll never know why. If somebody is knocked down in a road accident you know why they died. It's horrendous, but at least you know why. You can be angry with that dead person if it was partly his own fault. But with suicide you just don't know why. "We know of other suicide victims who were all smiles with their family one minute and went out and killed themselves the next. Their parents feel angry that they didn't speak. We saw our son soon before he took his life but he never said what was going on deep down. We don't know why he did it. It's a mystery that nobody will ever be able to answer."

This is the experience of one parent, whose son ended his own life recently. Dr Michael J. Kelleher, principal investigator with the National Suicide Research Foundation in Cork, says that this is an excellent example of people bereaved by suicide. What makes death by suicide so much harder to accept is that unlike death by an accident, suicide involves a choice. The deceased appears to find his life of no value and it can appear that he is passing judgment on other people.

All sudden deaths can provoke anger, Kelleher says - perhaps against a doctor or a driver involved in a fatal accident. But with suicide it is "difficult for a parent to make the crucial separation between the act of dying and the person who dies. One feels anger at the fact that he died by suicide." Parents can feel guilty that they are transferring the blame on to the person who did the act, Kelleher says. The work of bereavement in suicide, he explains, is to make the separation between the manner of this death and the person who died.

He urges people to avoid phrases like "loved one". In the death of any "close one", there is "no perfect person and therefore no perfect relationship". With suicide, survivors can reflect back on the relationship and blame themselves.

Death by suicide, he says, can have an indelible effect on the bereaved. Often events and conversations immediately before the death can be attributed with an unreasonably high significance.

When one person dies where the relationship is ambivalent, it can make the grief even harder; this is best handled by discussion, Kelleher says.

Sometimes bereaved people become depressed. With death by suicide, there can also be an element of blaming one another. Anger can be turned to the other members of a family for poor relationships.

Kelleher says that "emotional matters are independent of time"; they can lie dormant for years. However, he stresses, people can and do come to terms with the death of a close one by suicide: "We're fashioned by nature to come to terms with death. People come to terms with the most appalling tragedies."

Ros McCarthy, head of Barnardo's bereavement counselling service for children, says that when bereaved parents are concerned about whether the suicide was planned or spontaneous, the issue underlying this can be: "If it was planned, did the parents not pick up the message?" McCarthy counters this with a simple message. "We only know what people tell us. They didn't want you to know. They felt the best thing was to die." She advises parents that getting into their own feelings is not selfish. Parents can be afraid to look at their feelings fearing that were they to do so they might "fall apart". Bereaved parents, she says, need to talk and find support. According to McCarthy, parents sometimes feel that they owe it to their son or daughter to go on feeling guilty, as if their only connection with that child is their guilt. They need to discuss feelings of guilt so they can "clarify what was and what was not their part in it and absolve themselves from it".

Jean Casey facilitates the Suicide Bereavement Group at the Northside Counselling Service in the Coolock Development Centre, Dublin. "I'm 20 years bereaved by my husband. At that time there was no counselling or groups to help come to terms with it. I searched for four years before meeting others bereaved by suicide. There are a lot who still don't know where to look."

Casey's husband shot himself in the bedroom of their home. "I had three small children. I was three months pregnant on my fourth. He was manager of a public house and he'd a lot of problems at work. For about two months before he died he was agitated and disorientated."

The day he died he took the car out and crashed into a bus. Discharged from hospital, he came home and went to bed. Later, she discovered that the door was locked and that her husband had shot himself in the bedroom. "The aftermath was huge," she says. She had "overwhelming feelings of sadness" and "huge feelings of guilt". Later still, she felt anger: "Why did he leave me like this?"

Eventually Casey received counselling and later took a diploma in counselling, leading her to her current post with the Suicide Bereavement Group. She says the suicidally bereaved need all the help they can get, whether it be one-to-one counselling or by joining a support group. She facilitates an eight-week module for up to 12 people bereaved by suicide. The aims of the group are to get the suicide into perspective; to deal with family problems caused by the suicide ("I didn't tell my own family until they were 12. That wasn't good. I had the secret in the family"); to improve self-worth, which can plummet after a suicide; to talk about the suicide; to get factual information about the suicide and its effects; to have a safe place to express feelings; to understand and deal with other people's reactions to the suicide.

The group provides support, reassurance, information, sharing and acceptance.

There is a clear structure to the programme, she says, and some rules all participants agree to. These include confidentiality; freedom to share as much or as little as they choose; equal time to talk and respect for each other's grief. There is a recognition of the need to talk and be heard and that each person's story and grief is unique.

Learning takes place in the group through hearing the experience of others, not by being told what to do.

Participants are "given permission to express what's in our mind as well as being protected from outside attitudes like condemnation or blaming".