I am not Gabrielle. I am Joani.

Gabrielle is my 42 year old daughter who took her own life in 2018 leaving me shattered.

Live! is an instruction, I imagine Gabs would give to me if were she here.

I share our story to break down the isolation of suicide experience. In honour of Gabrielle, and all who love her, I hope revealing my shattered grief might offer solace so you know you are not alone when you are desperately missing your loves.

Since Gabs died I have searched everywhere looking for some similar stories. How do I go on? I was looking for help from others who had gone before. I found so many, and yet it was still no where near enough.

Stories affirm existence and help us know we belong here. On this planet. In this time. Just as we are.

I encourage others, to tell their story. Stories are both remarkable and ordinary. Our stories are sacred and good even when very bad things happened.

I am instructed by my love for her to live, and to help her live on in memory.
Her words to me: ‘Save yourself mum’

This is dedicated to the heartbroken. Because someone they loved killed themselves.

We, the survivors are bereft. When suicide happens everything we think we know about the world crumples. Now is gone-ness. The foundation of our lives is missing. We are shocked into a new dimension and struggle to connect with our life before the loss.

And yet our minds are full of the ‘before’ this happened. We ruminate and reminisce. We try to solve. We want to prevent it. Still. Knowing full well we can’t. It happened already. But our minds won’t stop. We try to locate the definitive moment when things changed. The point of no return. Where exactly was the fail?

And now we are living in the fail. The fail is living in us every day. Enduring publicly, the most profound of all fails. No matter how you try to lever us up from blame, it percolates in the loss with every other thought. The blame toggles around to any person or point in their lives, system and institutional failures included.

Living in the world of deep loss feels like climbing the walls of a frozen crevasse. As we near the top, the edges give way with nothing solid to use to haul ourselves out. LIke Sisiphus, we fall back to the first knowing and there are no roots, no trees and no canopies here in this icy forest to give us a bearing.

People try to help but don’t know how. Not really. A million suspected truths abound by everyone, in those first weeks. The theories. The known. The guesses. The responsibility. Who is to be held accountable? Or perhaps there is a shorter list of who is not to be held accountable? We all feel it in some small or big way.

We are scared to give voice to many of those thoughts, in case others, or we, go the same way. We, of all people, surely know that every little thing you do or say, may have great consequence.

So we scream and roar, often violently silent, feeling locked in with non resolvability.

Much is unspoken, girded and corralled behind a wall of ‘don’t touch’; ‘don’t you dare’; ‘danger!!!’ ‘achtung’. If you go here, you might not get back.

And yet we feel fortressed, inviolable, ready to stare down the un-faceable like never before, to risk all, to throw caution to the wind in order to get things right. Belatedly.

We are the only one of our twofold connection who remains on earth so we have to get it right. Our very life depends on our love that compels us to keep trying.

How can we make a difference in their death, when we could not do it during their life?

We need to do things we could not do when we had the full motivation of the living, loved person – so how now? We have to make up for our failure to save them. And in the mean time we have lost everything, and are desperate for mutual redemption with our loved one.

We need a place to speak the unspeakable. The enormity of the grief for the person who has lost their life prematurely cannot be overstated. It is wrong. They are not meant to be dead.

We get aftershocks. Tremors remind us we cannot stay in the chasm of grief, lest others fall here too. We wake in panic as our minds run over tracks well worn, and new, to make sense of the senseless.

So many people live on the edge, close to the void, the icy fall beckoning at their feet.

Our story is for those who are treated as the human disposables by a culture that values greed, seeded in societies rooted in historical mis-doings and mal-practice. The anti-human culture that invaded our species a long time ago, and still persists, is felt most strongly by those humans who allow themselves to acknowledge the hurt.

I offer courage to adopt the dimension of speaking our deep truths as our new home, giving life to what most people can hardly bear to hear. I keep my bloodied fingers scratching in the icy gravel and allow the enormity of the loss to shape my future. Neither wallowing, nor distracting. Paying full attention to the call.

Traumatized, fragile but immutable, known to be loved and wanted by our lost loves, despite stigmatic suggestions to the contrary. Knowing also that our dead ones did not want their living loves to suffer.

We know. But we can’t tell you because suicide renders your relationship questionable at best, and invalid at worst. Their suicide creates suspects of loved ones. When someone dies by suicide we lose not only their future, but our past as well, because we lose surety of our shared experience.

Mumma, Don’t let any poison inside you, not a skerrick!

Gabrielle was born when I was 16 years old. I had a life before her and very strangely I have a life after her. I had no other children.

She was the best and most precious thing that had ever happened to me. I was blessed.

Unable to be fully the mum that both she and I wanted. I have no defence, I am a human being – wanting and seeking perfection but full of mistakes and omissions.

As a parent, she lives on always and forever in my mind, every day.

Gabrielle was a powerful woman who left a big impression. She battled with demons and angels and ultimately, to my great sadness, and to her extreme annoyance, if she were still here, lost.

Multitudes live in the deep struggle of this hard-edged loss. It is hard to be generous to others when we are in this consuming grief. Sorry. We are overtaken by it but we do our best.

Things can still kick me in the guts no matter how calloused the remembering. Her. The situation has the power to throw me to the floor in acknowledgement of her loss.

Healing is not straight-forward. Setbacks can occur at every corner. Like sliding down the inside of a tea cup, awash and lonely in the slops of the beverage fully drunk. Surviving is sometimes a relentlessly barren place.

If your child kills themselves, it is extremely, extremely, and utterly complicated.

To those of us you have been through it, judgement feels to come from every direction. You may feel hated. You think that people must believe you are very bad for your loved one to leave you in this way.

Us, the close survivors, become the target of the dread – the lightning rod of fear of the worst thing that can happen.

Others cannot hold it this in their mind as a reality for them. It is far too much, beyond possibility. I know I used to be there.

It is an impossibly unbearable situation. But like so many intolerable tasks that parents do for their children, we carry this…

The suicide of a child, is surely one of the heaviest of all parent burdens?

We are not alone, there are other equally dreaded parent burdens. but the degree of difficulty of a daughter’s suicide is very high indeed.

The fear of death subsides and it can look like an inviting place. You want to follow and hold them and bring them back. Or stay with them.

I want to be where she is, even if that is nowhere.

If I tell the truth, be honest as I can, maybe I can make up for it and eventually cease guarding the cavern of the dead. But not yet.

Maybe I will get a chance to live. Really live. Be alive. Have a life. Maybe. We should. After all alive is the best way to be no matter how we feel in the moment. But I need time.

How do I square things up before I hit the pearly gates of nothingness? What do I need to put to rights? That is my job now, uncover the rest of my life. I know what is important after all. I am forever sure of that.

We might feel our very life will bruise others. Perhaps contagious? I dont want to taint you with suicide so stay back.

Us bereaved need to speak our truth without judgement or criticism. We don’t know if we are safe or not? We have no way to tell. Safety does not appear to exist as an option any longer.

We also don’t want to hurt our already dead ones any further, with their mysterious sinewy ties to our well being. We are driven to protect them, even now, especially now.

The reality is I have experienced a great love, and been blessed in a most profound way.

It is enough to have loved her.

She was enough. She was ok. She did well. She didn’t make it past this point but she was fully ok.

It is enough that we had our time. She was taken too soon but it was truly a great time. We laughed, fought and cried more than most.

I am graciously thankful that I have both loved and been loved in a most profound way. I have known real connection and the best of all human possibilities.

How can I live my life going forward knowing all that I know?

It is a real question, that needs a real response, and one that I am still trying to figure out. And I can only do that with the living. I hope you will join me in this ongoing journey of discovery of life as alive is the best way to be.