I’ve always loved Valentine’s Day, and I attribute most of that to my parents. They celebrated one another and each of us kids: Mom gave gifts to the boys, and Dad gave a gift to me every Valentine’s Day until I got married. When I lived with them, Dad would leave a gift outside my bedroom door to greet me in the morning. It’s a great way to raise one’s kids because it made the holiday special from the beginning. I never minded being single on Valentine’s Day. I love getting to celebrate love, whether my own or someone else’s. I love the hearts and the pink and red and the genuine giddiness and galentines, too! Sure, hallmark and corporations push the holiday but hey, I love any excuse to celebrate Scott. I love opportunities to do something special for my love, and Valentine’s Day provides just that!

Buuuut… Losing my mother to suicide changes everything I knew about love. Abandoned by my mother, rejected by her family, shunned by the majority of her church leadership, and my parents’ marriage nullified by her death— four institutions that were once steady in my life, irrevocably destroyed. Three groups that made the contentious decision to harm me via violent action and lethal passivity, and one marriage that created a family obliterated.

What is love, if not something that shatters you?

As I’ve written before, you can’t feel a mother’s love from the grave.

The last fabrics of security slowly tear from me. It’s fortunate I married before Mom died — I’m not sure I would believe in anything concrete enough to marry after she passed, and I’m quite thankful for my husband.

Like any couple, Scott I do our best to create and build our own love, and I try my hardest not to fear the possibility of every form of love slipping from my fingers.

There’s a pendulum in my mind that swings between the people I never thought I’d lose and the people I am amazed showed up.

Those who know deep pain speak a language entirely foreign to those who don’t lean in. Empathetic witnesses can learn this language with study and exposure, though they speak it with a distant accent.

Not everyone can show up, and that’s okay. Everyone can show love. Love marks people: it can heal them and brighten them, unrequited love can mar them, the absence of love can destroy them.

My father and my surviving two brothers remain a chain of unbroken and unwavering dedication towards each other, for now. I will always fear another suicide in our family — odds for repeated suicide increase dramatically after one suicide in the nuclear family. With two in mine, we survivors are 600% more likely to end our lives — but, we four survivors have been incredibly supportive towards one another.

Aside from these four, I remind myself that it’s the people who have chosen to show up time and time again that have aided in my support and healing. It’s the “aunt” and “uncle” I didn’t realize weren’t related to us that have become more family to me that my genetic relatives. It’s the friends that have shown up when siblings have checked out. It’s the Christian [and non-Christian] community disconnected from any one church that came together when my [past two] churches stigmatized us. It’s the people that weren’t necessarily “supposed to” be there who have shown up the most in my life, and this isn’t an uncommon phenomenon. We all know the saying “Friends are the family you choose.”

I don’t write any of this to bash my mother’s family or her church, and I don’t want people to weaponize my words against either party. There has been enough hurt, and it’s 2026: people have nearly unlimited resources, cell phones, and endless ways to reach out to one another. If they wanted to fix things, they would. It’s been eight months since my mom died — they don’t want to fix things, and additional [well-meaning] people getting involved will not change that. Sometimes the most loving thing one can do is let go. So, I let go of them. I release any hope of healing or restoration. Maybe it happens, maybe it doesn’t, but realistically I haven’t needed them to come this far.

Sometimes we are forced to create meaningful and beautiful lives without the people that were supposed to be there for all of it, and sometimes it’s because of death while other times it’s because pain separates the living.

To those who have shown up, thank you. I see you, I love you 💙. To those who can’t show up or chose not to show up, I love you, too. Take care, be well. Pursue healing and love.

The point is — this is what it’s like to survive suicide. A whole world erodes, and the roots left turn out to be beautiful and complex and mangled in grief.

The best people come to tend to and to water these roots, and one day new life and new dreams will bloom from what they have cared for. Above all, love each other deeply. Love heals a multitude of sorrows.