A Friend Lost to Suicide and Implications For Financial Planning

***Trigger Warning: Suicide***

Dear Jordan,

I wish you could see my life now. Even more significantly, I wish I could see YOUR life now. Your suicide has left ripple effects in so many lives. I can only imagine all the factors that were happening in your life that led to one very tragic day where we lost a friend, son, adventurer, firefighter, and so much more. 

It is now twenty years later, and as much as I think I understand suicide now, there is still some mystery around it. Your life has been a large part of what has sent me on my own journey of what it means to have mental health, to lose your life to suicide, and how to live a purposeful life. 

We both saw others who had taken or attempted to take their own lives in our work as firefighters and medics. I don’t know how suicide has touched your life, but I know it has touched mine.

Right after your death, I met my future wife. I am sure you would love her. In meeting her and learning about her family, I got more glimpses into the world of suicide. As my life unfolded, I went on to become a financial planner, then a couples therapist specializing in financial therapy. In the latest iteration of my career journey, I am growing a financial planning firm at the intersection of money and mental health. 

At the time we knew each other, I could not have possibly made sense of some of your behavior and what I would now identify as mental health concerns. It is a great regret of mine that I could not save you from yourself. I have come to learn that I have a hero complex—the need to save people is deeply ingrained within me. 

Twenty years later, the grief I experience about the loss of your life is still great, yet slowly I metabolize it and transform it to be in service to others. The way your life influences mine isn’t always apparent, but I know that it does. Your need to be seen and valued is not lost, even though you are not here to bear witness to it. 

Jordan, I love you. I see and acknowledge your pain. In whatever way your life lives on in others, I imagine it is positively influencing them. 

Your Friend,

Eddie

This is the letter I will never get to send to Jordan. One of my healing practices for myself and with clients is to write letters to people where there is still unresolved pain. It is called therapeutic letter writing. 

Grieving our lost family and friends is not easy, but it is necessary—for our own wellbeing, for those we are connected to, and for our ability to move on in life. Moving on does not mean forgetting as much as it means transforming the grief into purpose. 

Working with countless clients and studying mental and relational health have given me a front-row view into the despair that we can collapse into after experiencing both singular traumatic experiences and ones that slowly and repeatedly wear away at our sense of self. Both can leave us in a place where we no longer desire to go on with our lives. 

As much as we might like to make suicide a simple phenomenon or to minimize the intricacies and complexities that lead to this life-altering decision, it is far from either of those. The experience of suicide has different faces to it, motivations for it, and background experiences that can lead to it. 

If you have lived with relatively good mental and relational health, it may be hard to imagine how someone could take their own life. It may evoke confusion, anger, or even moral judgment. Most of us value human life and would not want to take our own or that of another person. 

I don’t think there is one right way to see or think about suicide, but I do think there is a place for deep empathy, compassion, and an open mind to the many factors associated with this reality. It can take years of intentional work to get to this place, but the reward is a richer appreciation of life and meaning. 

The reality of mortality is hard for so many of us. We have belief systems developed to provide us with a positive story about the meaning and purpose of our lives. These belief systems can help calm our anxiety about death. Yet the relationship of belief systems to death anxiety may be more complex than we realize.  

Turning Our Eyes to Money and Mental Health

There is an ever-growing awareness and increasing research about the relationship between mental health and money. Our relationships with money are woven into a rich, nuanced story of our lives and the contexts in which we have lived.

We watch and experience in the first person just how differently people live with different levels of income, assets, education, and other resources. Our ability to maintain a sense of self-efficacy and agency to navigate these realities is complex and dynamic—far more than some popular financial personalities would lead you to believe. Put simply, hard work and a "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" attitude are not the only things that stratify access to wealth.

One place most people think about is living in poverty or financial constraint and the impact it has on mental health. There are also those burdened with debt and the cycle of mental health challenges it can pose. A less popular, less understood phenomenon (and one that draws less empathy) is those who make it into the land of wealth and have trouble adjusting. 

As a financial therapist, I now know there is no income or asset level that creates immunity from feeling financial stress. Stress is both physiological and psychological. 

If you are a single parent trying to make ends meet, that is understandably stressful. If you have a community and/or family around you who care about you and can help close the gaps, that can help. 

If you are a top executive who employs 2,000 people and the company has fallen on hard times so you need to lay off 500 people and you risk of losing your job because the board of directors has lost faith in your leadership, that can be very stressful. 

Leading authority Dr. Dan Siegel helps us understand that mental health comes from an ability to integrate across multiple human systems. The primary job of the mind, brain, and body is to regulate the flow of information and energy to help us navigate our environments. 

With this understanding of mental health, it is not hard to see how challenging it can be to process complex, confusing responses to financial situations. I experienced increasing confusion and distress as I could not reconcile the reality that someone like my friend Jordan, who appeared to have it all on the outside—a nice house, cars, fun vacations with his family, and financial support from his parents while transitioning to adulthood—could also be so full of anger, fear, shame, and disappointment, while still being gregarious, caring, and thoughtful at times. This was compounded by the fact that we worked in an affluent suburb of Houston. It appeared that money was less of an issue for many of the people I responded to as a firefighter who had either completed or attempted suicide. 

Years later, I now know that our relationships with money, what we think, feel, and do, and how we feel about ourselves are shaped by many factors that are not always visible when we first meet people. 

We can be put in the position of being financially responsible at a very young age and be crushed under the pressure. Or perhaps we were told as a child that we would never amount to anything. Then we accomplish greatness, but we can not reconcile that with our internalized belief about ourselves.

The relationship between money and mental health is layered and nuanced at best. We can start from a simple understanding of how these things are related. These simple associations will be tested, and some will fail. 

It is what we do when we hit this point that matters. We can either throw up our hands and revert to our old understandings and beliefs, leaving us at risk for repeating risky patterns—or we can choose to dig deep, learn, heal, and develop a new, healthier relationship with money, ourselves, and those we care about.  

Financial Planning and Mental Health

Financial planning is all about guiding and planning your life and money in intentional ways. It is an ongoing process and an experience that ebbs and flows, and evolves as we mature and gain a deeper understanding of ourselves and our loved ones. 

Our mental and relational health follows us wherever we go and into whatever activities we participate in. There is no full compartmentalization—try as we might to do so. 

When we engage in financial planning, it will evoke our past experiences with money and relationships, current and future experiences, and expectations. If we have lost people traumatically—either to suicide or any number of other tragic events—it can consciously and unconsciously influence the way we think about taking care of ourselves financially. 

On one end of the continuum, it may lead us to a deeper attitude of “seize the day and enjoy it to the fullest,” including using all our financial resources to fulfill this reality, because tomorrow is not promised. 

On the other end of the continuum, it can lead us to hoard money to find a sense of security and safety that buffers us from life’s challenges. 

At either end, these polarizations can be problematic. Coming back to Dr. Dan Siegel’s definition of mental health, polarization is the absence of integration of information and energy flow, which helps us make sense of what is happening. 

When we make financial decisions, we make personal, relational, and financial tradeoffs. 

Do we do a Roth Conversion and pay more taxes now but have tax flexibility in the future?

Do we use our stock options to fund lifestyle and home improvement now, or fund our future retirement?

Do we pay to send our kids to private school or public school?

What if all three of those are on the table at the same time? How do we prioritize where we focus?   

If we are also simultaneously experiencing anxiety, depression, ADHD, PTSD, or another mental health challenge, these states of mind, brain, and body influence the way we think about these important financial decisions. We may need to shift from the perspective of what is wrong with (us as Dr. Gabor Mate encourages) to consider how our minds, brains, and bodies responded to our various traumas and how can we find healthy ways of moving forward. 

In Honor of Those Touched By Suicide

If your life has been touched by suicide please know that I care deeply about you and your experiences. Reaching out for help if you are currently experiencing suicidal ideation is a sign of strength, not weakness. 

You can call 988 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, to talk with a trained professional to help you take your first steps. 

Losing a family or friend to suicide is without a doubt a profoundly painful experience. We do not have to stay stuck, lost, or angry about this experience. We can heal from our loss. It will take intention, and likely a variety of different therapeutic approaches to get to a place where you find greater peace about the reality of what happened. 

Wishing You Healthy Love and Money,
Ed Coambs

Feel free to schedule a free 30-minute consultation if you would like to talk about any part of what you read in the blog post.