Left behind by a loved one's suicide: the tragedy of suicide extends to family and friends. Here, four young women talk about coping with unfathomable loss.(Real-Life Reads)

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Every 16 minutes in the U.S., someone dies by his or her own hand, making suicide the fourth leading cause of death for adults ages 18 to 65. Though staggering, it's a stat that you can too easily gloss over ... unless one of the victims is someone you love. Each self-imposed death leaves behind a legion of grieving relatives and friends struggling to understand why a person they loved gave up on life.

Grief is always gut-wrenching, but when suicide is the cause, there is often also confusion, a sense of abandonment ("How could this person leave me?"), and guilt ("Could I have prevented it?"). The universal question among suicide survivors is "Why?" says Joanne Harpel, director of survivor initiatives at the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.

"Trying to answer that question can take different forms," says Harpel, who lost her younger brother to suicide almost 16 years ago. "Some survivors replay the last days or weeks of the person's life, searching for clues, wishing they'd seen it coming, blaming themselves." Their job is complicated by another element unique to suicide: social stigma. Even the terminology is subtly pejorative: One commits suicide as one would commit a crime or a sin.

Here, Cosmo draws back the curtain of secrecy and shame that can accompany suicide to share the stories--in their own words--of four young women who lost someone they held dear.

Lisa Downs, 32

Her close friend hanged himself in 2007