Hard to find the words after suicide

Dear Miss Manners: The wife of our neighbor committed suicide in their place two days ago.

With many police, detectives, and the medical examiner all over our sidewalks for most of the evening and night, it was an unavoidable major event.

He was visibly distraught and obviously uncomfortable around the neighbors that night and has gone away for a few days.

What can we say to him when he returns?

To say nothing to him would feel like shunning him and would be cruel, yet almost anything we could say might be painful.

I might add she was young and, we thought, happy.

This was not an end-of-life choice for medical reasons.

Gentle Reader: You don’t know that. With your lack of success in diagnosing the lady’s emotional state, Miss Manners is surprised that you are now making medical pronouncements.

But you do not need to know the motivation of this lady’s suicide to offer condolences to her husband.

You are neither the doctors nor the coroners in this case, but merely the neighbors.

And the job of neighbors is only to say how sorry they are about his loss and to offer any practical assistance they can.