October 11, 2025

Most of our wounds remain safely hidden in our own psyches. Often, we pick and choose whom we share our deepest thoughts and hurts. We choose to share with “safe” people and find healing in that shared space of community, grace, and love. We choose not to share with people who are “not safe:” people who would misunderstand us, minimize us, or intentionally harm us with this sacred information. In this way, we manage our pain. We protect our hearts. This is safe.

Privacy is seldom discussed amongst mourning communities, and I suspect scarcely thought of by those who support survivors.

Police, media, and gossip often accompany sudden, unexpected, and catastrophic deaths. At a minimum, police create reports and etch into public record details that feel so intimately private. It’s not often that our most painful experiences are published to the world.

When this happens, multitudes of “unsafe” people have what feels like limitless access into the pieces of survivors’ hearts that are still bleeding.

These unsafe people take that information and form conjectures meant to pierce the bleeding hearts of survivors. Or maybe they’re not meant to… but they do.

People I would not choose to share this information with know the final details of my mother’s life. These facts that feel so close to me, so personal to me, so private to me, so painful to me are in the reckless hands of unsafe people. People who don’t know me well, people who don’t know my family well, and people who attempt to weaponize that information against us.

Pain and rage and mystery tend to create delusional stories in hurting people’s hearts. No one wants to accept this reality, and so they make up their own and kill her survivors in the process.

Stigma. Once more, here it is: I think some people would have rather I died than my mother. I think some people would have rather everyone in my family died rather than my mother. I think some people still want us to die. That’s what their actions communicate, that’s what their rumors point to, and that’s where their conjectures conclude.

And then you don’t know who to trust. Who is safe? If I speak with them, will they use my words against me? Will they use my words to harm me and my family? So then I withdraw because no one feels safe anymore.

How exhausting.

I just want to mourn my mom. My mom.

It’s so messy, all of this surviving suicide.

They want us dead or perhaps they want us more injured than we already are. I’m really not sure what they want, but it only creates more suffering.

I don’t want to die. I don’t want my Dad to die. I don’t want my brothers to die. My Mom and my brother are already dead. My mom is dead.

Suicide survivors need your support: we need you to acknowledge and affirm our pain. We need to know you see us in all of our pain. So much of support is simply helping us tend to this pain and to care for ourselves when we feel as though we can barely stand.

It’s so painful when these private details are published to the world. Anyone can bring it up at any time, no matter how unsafe they may be. But that’s just the reality of loss.

I just want to mourn my mom.

I miss you, Mom.

October 11, 2026

Ah yes, I remember finding out that my mother’s family began sending out my mom’s police report to the whole world. They would ask the most random people if they wanted the report. It didn’t matter how individuals responded — they’d send out the information whether people wanted it or not.

Then they’d tell everyone how awful my family is and would rage at anyone who attempted to share a different perspective.

Like I wrote last year, it still feels like they want me to die. Like they want my whole family to die.

Sigh.

I cannot imagine intentionally inflicting added pain on people while they’re enduring life’s most intense atrocities. That is evil.

People who partook in that campaign and added to our suffering — their actions were evil. Their motives were wicked.

I have been amazed how some people who called my mother “friend” treat me now. I was amazed at how her church treated us, and how they ostracized us.

It blows my mind.

My grief, my vulnerability, my privacy, and my mother’s death were exploited by the family and church community I should have been able to trust to treat me with compassion, dignity, and love. They should have protected me.

I won’t minimize the evil that my mother’s family and church inflicted upon my family. I am grateful, though, for the clarity and life I’m building without them. I’ve realized and unlearned so much since saying goodbye to them, and it’s so freeing.

I wish my mom would have lived to experienced this freedom, too.