It’s been one year since I’ve written or even looked at this
blog.
The Grief. The loss has become significantly less
traumatizing over time. I accept Mike’s
suicide as a fact of my life. Not to say there weren’t rough days. For example,
April 20, 2012: the day our Aunt Lyda died of brain cancer. September 28, 2012: the day Mike would have celebrated his 40th
birthday. November 2, 2012: The Dia de los Muertos celebration in San
Francisco where I totally lost my shit in front of thousands of people after
making an impromptu altar to my dead family. December 5, 2012: The three-year anniversary
of my brother’s death by suicide.
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The Gratitude. If there are any silver linings to this
experience of going to the place of unimaginable pain and grief and arriving at
a place of acceptance and relative normalcy (emphasis on “relative”), it would
be the kinship I have developed with fellow survivors of suicide, and the
opportunity to be of service to others suffering with depression or grief. A
couple of months ago a close friend’s brother committed suicide. I could
identify with the rawness and intensity of her feelings. I was grateful to not
be in that place anymore, and grateful that I could have anything to offer in
way of comfort. . After Mike first died, the people I wanted to talk to the
most were people who were survivors of suicide or who had also lost a sibling.
Because grief is a lifelong journey, I imagine I will still
drop in on this blog from time to time. Before writing this entry, I logged
into my Gmail account for the first time since December 2011. There were
several messages each month from survivors of suicide from around the country
and the world who somehow stumbled across this page and took the time to write
to me about their loss. Aside from feeling like an ass-hole for not checking my
old account, I was overwhelmed with the love and connection from these fellow
survivors who helped me get through another rough day of surviving my brother’s
suicide.
