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Should he let go of it? Does it increase his family's suffering, or is there something admirable in it?

In my opinion, Jack Salmon is an ordinary father who is grieving over a daughter who died in an extraordinary way. He can't get "closure" because her body has never been found; only an elbow was ever recovered.

Does his campaign to find the killer increase his family's suffering? Probably. He is so obsessed with proving that Mr. Harvey killed his daughter that he begins to neglect his wife and their other two children. Would his wife have stayed with the family if Susie had not been killed? Probably. Without Susie's death, she would never have met the police detective with whom she had a brief affair. Would she have stayed if Jack had let go of his grief and gone on with his life? Probably not. We realize early on that she is dissatisfied with her life; the scene in which Susie remembers taking a picture of her mother, in which her mother looks so different, is our first indication of her longing for another life.

As for Lindsey and Buckley, being abandoned by their mother seems to have been more traumatic than living with a grieving father.

Is there something admirable about the way Jack bears his suffering? Perhaps. It indicates that he is persistant and that he will do whatever it takes to bring the truth to light.

I'm not a parent myself but i know that if something did ever happen to me my parents and family would all stop at nothing to find the person that did this to me and have justice served. I believe Jack is quite admirable in the sense that he does not let go of finding his daughter's killer. It conveys that his children are the world to him and he loved them a great deal. In a way you could look at the way he handled his daughter's death as increasing the suffering of his family but on the other hand he did his family a favour. He stopped at nothing to find Susie's killer even when everyone even his wife doubted him. His wife even left home because she couldn't deal with the death of her daughter and the way it changed her family. She was an adult and one of the heads of the familiy but she showed weakness when her children needed her the most. Susie's father may not have dealt with Susie's death in the best possible way but he did his best he lived with the guilt of not being a better father and not being able to protect his daughter but at least he stuck in there and kept moving through the many obstacles he was faced with. He is a very heroic father in my eyes and i would love to have him as mine if anything of this sort happened to me.