When you lose a loved one, things are hard. Anniversaries suck and you have to look to those around you to be your support system during difficult times. When you lose a loved one to suicide anniversaries become a constant question of why and blaming yourself. You find yourself wishing you could have done something different, answered that text, called them more, anything.
When you lose two loved ones in a very short time, both to suicide, every day feels like a coin flip. You never know how to approach anything anymore, because you want to go out and take pictures and make memories and force people to see that you love them. That you'll miss them if they're gone - because you're constantly afraid of who the next one will be. But you also want to spend every single day in bed, even if you can't directly correlate their deaths to your lack of motivation on any given day. Everything just hurts.
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The aftermath is a mess.
Sometimes you're fine, and sometimes you're driving home screaming along to a song you haven't even been paying attention to and you're crying – and that’s six months later.
The immediate aftermath is just finding a safe place to shatter.
There is an endless supply of people telling you it’s okay to cry when you don’t actually feel like crying. There is an equally endless supply of people telling you it’s going to be okay when you do feel like crying. They mean well – they honestly, really, truly do – but they always seem to be on the opposite page and it’s hard to explain the way sometimes you just want to be told the world really is as bad as you think it is. It’s comforting, sometimes, to be told things really are as bad as you think.
Sometimes the only way to make things okay is to acknowledge that things are very much not okay.
December 24, 2015 is the last time my friend Johnny was seen alive. His body wasn’t recovered until February 21, 2016 – and no one told me. I found out through Facebook when they found him while I was six hours from home waiting to see my favorite band – EXO – in concert. One of the members of EXO – D.O – played a major role in a show Johnny and I had been watching together before he disappeared. Six hours from home and the people I knew, I stood outside a concert venue sobbing and trying to call my mom so I could gather up enough strength to drive home and face this.
I’ll be the first to admit, I didn’t handle it well. I was crying at work, crying at home, crying in the car. And I was angry – so, so angry – at him for leaving. I could see the way everyone I knew was changing as a result of what had happened. Two of my best friends left the state completely. How could I forgive him for all this destruction he left behind?
But then I would remember his smile, remember the way he’d poke me when he wanted me to smile, remember the way he held both hands out in front of him when asking for a hug, remember how it sounded when he said my name. I remembered watching It’s Okay, That’s Love with him in my mom’s living room at one AM. You can’t hate someone that pure of intention, no matter how much you may want to at times. We just wanted him to come home safely, but he never did.
On March 21, 2016 it was early – early – in the morning when I spotted a Facebook post that seemed unusual, but it was nearly 3 a.m. and I couldn’t convince my brain to think anymore, much less take a second look. When I woke up later in the day, I looked on Facebook and realized it was my friend Scott’s suicide post. He was gone, and I had to call our friends to tell them what had happened when I didn’t even know the details myself. I drank whiskey all night and wondered what I was supposed to do next.
One of the side effects of losing people like that is realizing how few photos you actually have of yourself with other people. You realize after someone is gone that you never took a selfie or went into the photobooth at the mall. You go through moments of such overwhelming regret and sorrow that you can’t help but to break and break and break again.
I was having a conversation with a friend a few months after Scott died and I told her that the reason all my friends kept killing themselves was because I was a terrible friend. Obviously this was said in a moment of hysteria, but the weight of their losses weighs heavy enough to scar the heart, and I’m not always as strong as I should be. The shock of losing them has left me with insecurities I never even considered, and I hate letting people close to me because I just can’t say goodbye anymore.
With both Johnny and Scott’s birthdays coming up in the next week, it’s been very difficult to see past today and into tomorrow. I’m in my seventh month of this journey without either of them, and I don’t know how the story will play out.
I just know I always thought they would be there, and I was wrong.
