mental health

Traveling Bags and Broken Hearts — Week 9: One Year Later

August 23, 2025

Traveling while grieving can become a sick game of “how many places can I be sad in?” Each new experience serves as a reminder of how I can never share any of this with my mom.

Grief mutes the senses and dulls the atmosphere. It prohibits its host from experiencing anything to the full. The infamous brain fog clouds everything one’s eyes behold and rains on the memory of one’s newest experiences.

Traveling is helpful, I suppose, in that it requires a massive amount of focus from one’s mind — one must keep moving, walking towards the goal of his or her next destination. One’s loss can’t be at the forefront of the mind when navigating unknown places, but the ache is there. It’s always there.

The deeper horror of how my mother died resides beneath the exhaustion of traveling with grief. Death is such an unwelcome visitor, knocking on the doors of our lives and bursting them open despite our protests. Illnesses can creep in to poison one’s life, accidents can wreak havoc and destroy life, wicked people can barge in and steal life, but what is this?

What is this?

How terrifying that one’s own mind can betray itself and create death in a most unnatural way. How terrifying that we can’t even see it coming.

And then there’s the stigma: Stigma about grief, stigma about suicide, stigma about mental health, and the deep shame these stigmas create for people who struggle and for survivors left behind by those who lost the battle. Stigmas that prevent people from getting help. How can one reach out for help when everyone around them expects to have the answers?

Our church did not/has not publicly acknowledged my Mom’s death — my mom, a highly influential staff member of the church. What type of message does that send to the stigmatized? What message does that send to the thousand who attended her service and who are in deep mourning?

Maybe they don’t address it because they’re terrified of it, too. Silence always helps, doesn’t it?

Ignoring problems never makes them go away: Silence simply suffocates the suffering, and stigma shames them into solitude.

There should not be shame in “having demons.” Life is abundantly difficult and misery isn’t something to be ashamed of. There should not be shame for having a good life and still struggling with terrible intrusive thoughts. You should be safe to voice that. You should not be shamed or silenced for voicing how horrible life can be and how tormenting your own mind can be. Even God acknowledged that it was not good for man to be alone. Even Jesus acknowledged that life is troublesome. Even Jesus asked for a different way out.

I return home from a trip I aimed to keep very private — there’s a comfort in enjoying quiet and hidden moments after the world discovers something so deeply personal out about one’s life — but all I can think of is the fact that my Mom won’t be there when I get home.

She used to say that she couldn’t wait to get home after traveling because “there’s no place like Florida.” She loved its warmth and its beauty and its vibrancy. She loved that it was home, and she built her home in the loveliest ways.

I can’t reconcile how someone who loved life so much, and who loved me so much, could execute the cruelest action against all that she loved.

I wish she thought that she could get help. I’m sickened that she couldn’t verbalize her struggle. I hate the stigma, I hate the silence, I hate the finality.

If you have ever — ever — ideated, please speak out. Seek a professional counselor and share your ideations. Don’t let shame kill you. Don’t let shame destroy everything that you do love in life.

Be there when someone gets home. Be there when your friend gets home. Be there when your family gets home. Be there to welcome your loved one back. Don’t let stigma take that from all of us.

August 26, 2026

There are so many things that are simply eternally somber when you’re a survivor. Holidays, birthdays, travels, any new experience: everything happy eclipses with hollowness because of the life-sized void filling one’s life.

We survivors simply learn to exist with the void, to carry it with us like another piece of luggage. Sometimes we utilize tools that make the baggage easier to carry, other times it feels as though the weight encompasses us entirely.

This time last year, my sister and I travelled to London with little bags and breaking hearts but we had a lovely time despite the heartache. We conversed while we explored, we reason while we walked, we navigated foreign streets while seeing pretty new things. It was a precious trip and it was a sweet trip. It was fun, too. I look forward to our next trip 💗.

So much of surviving is learning to live with sorrow beneath happiness, to cling to the old and dead while experiencing the new and wonderful.

So much of suffering while surviving suicide is derived from stigma. I don’t know if my mother’s former lead pastor ever acknowledged her death publicly. Again, what type of message does silence send? It saddens me for the people who looked for the church to teach them to mourn and were greeted with silence and stigma instead.

I have a few people who seem to only reach out to me when I write something about that church — that feels icky too, as if they reach out to admonish me or correct my perspective. It amuses me how many congregants are quick to justify their pastors’ transgressions and rebuke the wounded for writing the truth.

Stigma scares people from getting help. It shames them from considering help and hinders the realization that someone may need help. Judgement kills emotional vulnerability and teaches people to keep to themselves. Isolation festers unhealthy thoughts and behavior, and a mind decayed wholly can no longer seek help.

Stigma is not talking about it. Stigma is pretending everything is okay. Stigma is spiritually bypassing. Stigma is dismissing the reality of mental decay.

If we could only teach people to speak instead of to simply obey and conform, perhaps then people would truly be healthy.

Photo by Karley Hope Photography

Torrents of Grief — Day 16: One Year Later

July 7, 2025

Silence. Quiet. Peaceful, terrible.

Tomorrow will be the first day without any guests. All have gone home, and my father, my brother, and I will experience our first bouts of alone time. It’s necessary, it’s healing, and it will likely be painful.

Torrents of grief, sacred and terrible, assuage we mourners. I’ve loved and appreciated the depth and beauty of sadness, but I still hate enduring it at this level of intensity. Sorrow opens one’s eyes to a new world and demands a new perspective from the sufferer. This new perspective can make one bitter or it can make him or her more compassionate, but it either way the perspective shift prompts a response.

Grief is traumatic. It assaults the mind and the nervous system. It manifests itself in sadness and anxiety. It steals sleep from some and it keeps others in bed for days. It produces shaky hands and sore eyes. It creates fear and mistrust. It eliminates filters and threatens boundaries that otherwise would protect its victims.

We aren’t strong, we mourners, we are incredibly weak. We are at our most vulnerable and most sensitive. We are raw. We hurt, often more than we ever deemed imaginable or bearable. Yet, we bear it.

Some watch mourners with awe and amazement — unsure how we could function. Some are offended if a mourner is snappy or not as “bubbly” as normal. Some prefer to look away, noting how painful it is to even think about what a mourner endures.

Grief manifests differently in every individual because of the uniqueness of every single relationship; while that makes each person’s experience vastly personal, a wondrous communal aspect exists when we mourn the same individual.

It’s private, and it’s not. It’s personal, and it’s shared.

Mourning callously brings out both the best and the worst in people, because we join together in our grief but can quickly isolate from offenses and hurts. We are vulnerable, we are tired, and we are boundlessly sad.

When we love each other and show up for one another and extend continuous grace — that is when we mourn well.

We mourn because we lost someone so incredibly precious, and we cannot stop loving them. Love transcends time, space, and even death. Love well.

Above all, love each other deeply for love covers a multitude of sins

I Peter 4:8

July 7, 2026

Mourning together softens the harshness of grief, but grief becomes even sharper when blame shifts grief’s focus.

Shared grief unites and upholds, it’s terrible but it’s together.

I had high hopes for our community at that time, but I suppose they were unrealistic expectations. Some people do wicked things because they’re in pain. To an extent, we all lash out in pain at one time or another.

When she first died, we mourned with thousands, but within a few weeks we were strategically cut off from many because of a few people’s commitment to weaponizing their pain.

We mourn more isolated now: we don’t mourn alone, but we really don’t mourn together either.

Mom wouldn’t have wanted that… or maybe she would have. Maybe that’s exactly what she wanted.

Maybe she didn’t care what happened to us or maybe she wanted the worst to happen to us, too.

Maybe it wasn’t about us at all. Maybe it was simply her brain dying, destructing with every breath she used to take, but it wasn’t an incurable malady. It was simply a neglected disease, hidden, shamed, and stigmatized.

That’s the scary thing about mental illness — it lies. It tells its victims that they don’t need to seek help. It tells its victims that others are the problem. It whispers to its victims that people don’t love them, don’t want them, don’t see them. Mental illness makes the sufferer think that he or she is sane, and that everyone else is the problem.

Mental health is a commitment to reality no matter the cost.

People can get caught up in delusions of terrible grandeur, thinking that the world is against them and that hopelessness will win. This is a clear sign that one is mental unhealthy, because while one breathes there is life and there is choice. Choice destroys hopelessness, and can bring change and renewed life.