The Mourning of a Suicide: "That long and dangerous night of the soul"

This text proposes a reflection derived from a research whose objective was to understand how the experience of mourning is represented in literary autobiographical narratives concerning disruptive losses, and to explore the role of writing in the mourning process. This article focuses on the axis of suicide mourning based on the formal interpretation of the memoir "Cuando muere el hijo" [When the son dies], of the writer Abel Posse (2013). The methodology used was biographical narrative, with a hermeneutic approach and documentary research strategies. As for the results, the memoir reveals some particularities of suicide mourning: the weight of the social stigma, the enigmas surrounding the decision of the deceased loved one, the questions about the participation in the fatal decision, the dismissal of the bond that was held with the suicide and the disturbing encounter of the corpse. It can be concluded that writing becomes for Posse a way to order his disruptive experience of grief and to leave his handwriting, as a system of signs, so that others may have some light in the darkness of that long and dangerous night.