Dear Suicide Survivor,
I have been in your shoes. The pain, confusion, and fright come rushing in all at once. I will not say I know your pain. Each of us experiences such a tragic grief differently. No one loss is the same as the other. I do know that a loss is a loss. It hurts and leaves you feeling alone. To love and live on is not an easy process. To choose to wake up the next day and carry on throughout life is one of the hardest decisions. It does not matter if this is a brother, sister, mother, dad, friend or acquaintance. This pain can carry its own form throughout each loss.
How will you get through this? This most irrational question will attempt to overtake your brain during this time or grieving. My promise to you is this — you will! You are going to wake up and continue on. Your person is in your heart. You must allow yourself to continue enjoying life without them yet oddly with them. Each moment that reminds you of them, cherish. The memories are essential to healing. Never forget them, but never allow yourself to stop living yourself.
Take chances to share your heart. I know this sounds odd. How can you share this tragedy that happened? Take my word. As soon as I started to spread awareness and share my story, the easier the healing processes began. So many people are suffering from losing someone, from questioning their self-worth or from seeping into a deep depression. The more you share your story, the greater impact you will make in breaking the cycle. A movement that escalated my healing was Project Semicolon. The idea behind this non-profit suicide prevention group is the simple beauty of a semicolon used in a work of literature.
The founder of this project, Amy Bleuel, ignites the beauty that a semicolon shows when an author had the power to end the sentence yet chose to continue. This visualization showed me that hope can be found in each situation. Some situations, like losing someone to suicide, may feel like the end. I know when I lost my friend, Taylor, I could not image continue forward into the days to come. We have this power to choose to hold the beauty of choosing to continue on even when we have the power to end it.
My final comment to you — and the most important one — is that you allow yourself to hurt. It is part of the journey. There is no set amount of time that you should recover in. There is no equation that helps us understand when the pain will overtake us. It has been two years since I lost my friend, and I still struggle on the most random of days. Know the pain is real and the hurt is okay. Do not forget that with each heartbreak, you continue to live on. It is okay to think about them no matter how much time has passed. It is perfectly okay to not be okay. One friend of mine once told me that it was okay to be upset as long as you did not unpack your bags and stay there.
Love,
A Fellow Survivor
P.S. A few groups brought breath to my aching heart as I searched for hope in sites such as the following:
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