How do you talk to children about suicide? When Miriam Toews’ father took his own life in 1998, her own were just eight and 11 years old. The author admits that she was “feeling probably more stricken, more surprised than they were”. Looking back, she reflects: “I probably handled the conversation badly.”
Talking to me over Zoom from the home she shares with her two adult children and four young grandchildren in Canada, the award-winning writer of seven bestselling novels, including 2018’s Women Talking, tells me how the conversation went. First, Toews told her daughter: “Grandpa was hit by a train.” The child took that in, until later she came back and said: “But grandpa wasn’t blind.” Toews admitted that was true – he would have seen the train. Later, her daughter said: “Grandpa wasn’t deaf.” That too, she conceded, was true; he would have heard it. She exhales. “Then, y’know, you have to talk about it, why he would do that. This concept of suicide. You have to talk about depression, despair and choice... to a child.”
