I've worked with a few Native medicine people over the years; shamen who facilitate traditional funeral ceremonies and do spiritual/psychological healing work with the bereaved. The events I've witnessed / experienced after a suicide convinced me that life after death is much more than a "belief", and that people "do" just as much after they die as before; characteristic emotions/behaviours just carry on as usual.

A few years ago, a very depressed friend committed suicide. Very difficult to deal with, as everyone who'd been close to him worked through their guilt and sorrow, their personal versions of "IF only I'd done XXXX, maybe he'd still be around ..."   

This person was a womanizer, the "needy" type always looking for a new "Mommy" to look after all his affairs for him. He'd been through one woman after another over the years, tried to hook me in at one point. No go.

Well, after he died a few local "wanna-be Indians" did their version of a traditional Medicine Wheel ceremony for him. Laid a circle of stones around a big ole tree, did a pipe ceremony offering prayers and tobacco and inviting -- or perhaps I should say coercing - him to take up residence there, so he could be accessed at that place by the living for "spiritual guidance".

When I heard THAT part of the ceremony, BIG warning bells started going off. WHy would anyone want "spiritaul guidance" from someone who was so messed up he'd taken his own life?!? And why try to "trap" a soul here, on the physical plane, when they so obviously wanted out at all cost?

I didn't like it at all --- felt so uncomfortable I left, without a word.

Over the next few months, my life became, quite literally, a version of hell. I couldn't seem to get rid of the obsessive greiving thoughts about him during the day, and he was constantly in my dreams. He'd disguise himself and chase me, try to trap me. At one point I saw him, in my dream, performing weird incantations over my sleeping bod. I'd wake up from these dreams in a cold sweat, feeling like something was tied around my neck choking me. Well geez, and here he'd died by hanging himself too ...

At one point, I was so angry and so sick of the mental/emotional torment that I went back out to that Medicine Wheel and demolished it. Threw all the stones away with the intention of releasing his spirit and thereby breaking that strange and most unhealthy connection with me. ANd geez, y'know, after that I had no more trouble!   No more nightmares. No more fear, anger, or grief. No more "invisible ropes" choking me all day long. No more obsessive thoughts or constant urges to perform his original songs in public. (Haven't sang one of those in YEARS now, as a matter of fact).

And no one was more surprised - or relieved - than I! Mind you, the people who'd set up that circle were none too impressed when they heard I'd broken it without consulting them. BUt at that point, I couldn't have cared less.

Especially when a few weeks later, I bumped into the young woman he'd been "in relationship" (of sorts) with when he died. Apparently she'd been having the same experiences I was, plus a few others (ie after seeing him in a dream she'd wake up to find her apt just reeking with a most familiar and foul odour, stuff unexplainably flying off the walls, knocks on the door/walls and no-one there etc). It was getting harder and harder to explain these things to her young son, to feel safe and secure in her own home she said.

She mentioned that a couple other women he'd been close to had also been "beset" with this type of upsetting phenomena -- and then she told me that everything had quieted down over the last month or so.   Said she hadn't "heard" from him over the last few weeks at all - as a matter of fact, not since I'd torn down that Medicine Wheel, even though she still knew nothing about that!   :-D

Anyway, thanks for listening to all this. I have absolutely no "proof" of anything I've said here, and I'm not trying to convince anybody of anything. Believe it or not, whatever you like --- those are simply my own experiences and interpretations thereof. Nothing more.