You know how hard your life is right? You know the daily drudge, the detail, the setbacks. The simple little things that don’t just fall into place. The efforts to get to work or school on time. The challenge of keeping the chores together and feeding yourself something healthy. The traffic. The unpredictable. The times when the world just does not respond to us in the way we want, hope or expect. And it does not bend to our will.
The days when life just does not connect. The family communication falls awry. The misunderstandings with friends, the regrets. The missed goals. The stupid SMART goals that sometimes evade even the champions…
If you are living with a recent suicide of a friend or family member, what you are doing is REALLY hard. The degree of difficulty is ramped up close to maximum.
A layer of whatever that is, atomic dust, volcanic ash, sits on every little thing. The world is seen anew, and not in a good way. The emotional ash covers everything. Coated with the aftermath of the event the familiar has become unrecognizable. Are you even in the same place you used to be? The same planet?
You feel removed from the world. The moment of you learning about their death, marks you apart from your own mind where you had lived your whole life. You can’t go back.
Arms and legs now weigh heavier. What is growing on your body, out of your body? Is it you or is that a foreign body? The pieces are not in order. Is that an elbow growing out of my face? You lose sense of the normal. The atomic dust settles into your pores affecting how your skin works. You cough it in.
Form is not what you thought it was. The pieces move inexplicably. You knee bone is no longer connected to your leg bone, no longer connected to your foot bone. Do I have a leg?
Like an amputee, everything needs to be relearned, while you are still feeling the phantom limb. The dead person flutters away at you as if they were still alive. Because that is the only way you can know them. Alive. You have never known them as a dead person. They cannot be your person.
Air is not what you have always thought it to be. It is mixed with other poisonous gases that you must exhale without recognizing what they are, before you can benefit from the available oxygen. You feel the grit. The smoke.
Time is both slowed down and sped up. Things take forever and then fly past you in a completely out of control way. Time is completely unknowable.
You realise on this planet that every atom is open to being smashed by every other atom. This includes the atoms of your own body. You do not feel like you have any protection.
You double check everything before you move. Automatic habits are non-existent. Formerly small details require a focused and fully conscious attention. Rumination is necessary. What might have we have missed?
Something fundamental obviously, or she wouldn’t be dead. We don’t want to make that mistake again. We tell ourselves stories over and over to keep the remainder ones safe. We try to hold ourselves in the world with our beloved dead one. How to preserve the memory already loosening itself from us through the minute by minute progress of time?
We may feel lobotomized, unable to access half our brain. All the parts of our mind devoted to that relationship have taken a blow, we can not keep that person fresh in our memories.
We cannot satiate ourselves with contact. They are removed from our connect. But it doesn’t cut out in one piece. Strand by strand our connected minds feel to wither in the absence of their voice. As each strand snaps from non-use we panic in exhaustion. Their existence. Their love. Their presence in our minds is sapped away daily.
Like an Olympic gymnast’s score card, your sense of your success should be calibrated by the degree of difficulty and this level requires extensive latitude, and a big tolerance for ambiguity.
When your child kills themselves many simple things look impossible. We try to live as we know they would want us to. We work to pull ourselves out of the depth of the tragedy. Every day we extract pieces of our self from the glug that is pulling us backwards towards the time when they lived.
Perhaps we can learn to live with ourselves if we only could be thoughtfully honest. Enough. Get a perspective. Get forgiveness. Make amends. Achieve atonement. Every part of our body and minds wants to rectify the situation and we endlessly try to think of how?
Although fruitless, we don’t give up. We can’t. That would mean giving up on everything we worked for our whole lives, our most dearest ones. We can’t do that. Not yet. Maybe not ever. Now we have to protect them, more than ever, as they are no longer here to do it for themselves.
Meanwhile in this deep grief life goes on and struggling with the added degrees of difficulty, basic life is not what it used to be.
Nothing I, or anyone can say will make it easier on the recently bereaved. But what we can say is be kind. I know it doesn’t make sense to you at this time. But be kind. To yourself mostly first. And then others you love. You may not know how, but first recognize the degree of difficulty you are enduring to juggle this new world order is exceptional.
You are doing things that you have never done in your worst nightmares. The execution of every day matters is considerably harder than it ever was. Acknowledge this is very likely the greatest challenge of your life.
Become your own Olympic coach that is going to greet you lovingly, thoughtfully, respectfully at the end of every foray into life beyond suicide. Train others to stand by while you learn and fail and hurt yourself, and allow recovery time. The degree of difficulty puts you on a new level of playing field. You are the first one of yourself to handle this. Your courage is immeasurable and I respect you.