sadness

Exploited — Week 16: One Year Later

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.

A Ghost Among the Living —Week 14: One Year Later

September 26, 2026

Sorrow upon sorrow.

“Painful” is the word I most often use to describe this liminal and tormenting reality, but it’s not just emotionally painful.

We are whole beings: sorrow and stress affect our entire bodies as much as they affect our minds.

I started to experience heart complications about a year and a half before Patrick died. These moments manifested as chest pain, a resting heart rate of around 145 bpm, and a persistent murmur. They grew worse after my friend Walter died, and worse after Patrick died.

My parents finally convinced me to go to the doctor a year after Patrick died, when my chest pain and exhaustive heart rate seemed more of a regularity than an exception. Doctor after doctor and test after test finally led to an ultrasound of my heart that revealed that my heart aged far quicker than the rest of me. The stenosis resembled that of someone in their 50s or 60s, not that of a 22-year-old. They gave me a beta blocker and told me I’d likely need a pacemaker by the time I turn 35.

I began EMDR, a form of intensive trauma therapy (10/10 recommend), a few months after the diagnosis. To my surprise, I hardly needed my medicine anymore. I restabilized and seldom needed the beta blocker to calm my overreacting heart. Every few years, my cardiologist will monitor my heart for a couple weeks to check in, and I received fairly positive results from my last exam in 2023. Healing my mind healed my body, but not entirely. In 2023, my heart still appears like a 60-year-old’s heart rather than a 25-year-old’s heart.

Since my Mom took her life, I’ve had 56 episodes. These days, sometimes even the beta blocker seems to have little power against the arrhythmia. I wonder what an ultrasound would reveal now. I wonder if the timeline for my inevitable pacemaker draws nearer and nearer.

I’m so tired. Everyday feels like a fight. A new drama, a new hurt, a new layer.

Grief haunts the mind and lives in the body, terrorizing its hosts with one complication after another.

And then you add the drama, all the extra losses, all the disappointments that coalesce to prohibit the griever from feeling alive.

I feel like a ghost, living among ghosts who haunt me from their violent deaths. I feel like a ghost, haunting my friends who are vibrant with life while I am trapped by these deaths. I feel like a ghost, left behind in this unforgiving world.

September 26 & 27, 2026

Before and after reading a book, I write a few paragraphs about what’s happening in my life in the blank pages at the back of the book. I scribbled the following December 28, 2024, six months before my Mom died:

I really can’t believe how much healing I’ve experienced just by reading these books. They’ve made me recollect my youth and early twenties & have gifted me with such sweet memories that were buried beneath so much pain.
I can’t believe it’s nearly 2025. I think the new year will bring so much change.

I’d had so many hopes for 2025. I thought it would be a really grand year. I didn’t realize it would be another worst year of my life.

* * * *

It’s the eve of the 36th anniversary of Patrick’s birth. How odd it is — how strange it is to exist in this realm where one’s family is slowly obliterated from it.

It feels meaningless to hope or dream of a future I have no control over.

I look back page after page in my writings, all filled with disappointment after disappointment. How futile. Nothing I want, nothing I say, nothing I plead matters. The money I spend is my only source of power and my only source of control. So why not buy pretty things? My life is a joke. God laughs at me, I swear.

And yet He blesses me, despite my anguish.

I’m so tired of everything being so hard. I hate it. I hate what life has done to me. I hate how other people’s choices have desolated my life. I hate all I carry. And for what? Years of recovery. That’s all I’m ever trying to do — recover.

Maybe all I’ll ever be is death and whatever new thing I can buy.

A world full of pretty things and anxious thoughts.

So may things and so many ghosts.

I’m still a ghost, haunting the vibrant lives of my friends with my gossamer existence.

Maybe that’s all I’ll be.

Maybe that’s all I’ve ever been.

* * * *

Today, Sep 27, is Patrick’s birthday. He would have been 36. How peculiar that I am now older than he will ever be.

We drive through the desert and the landscape makes me ponder how life persists: with little water, with little tending, with little soil, desert plants bloom from almost nothing. They decorate an otherwise barren landscape in what seems like an impossible environment in which to live, and yet they persist.

I think about the wildflowers of Matthew 6 and how we live in a world worth marveling in. My eyes water the desert, my hollow heartbeats remember the hearts that beat before me.

I miss believing the best in Patrick, I miss believing that he could get better. I miss the days when he had opportunity to heal and to continue.

Rain sprinkles and wind howls around us now. I see Patrick when I close my eyes. I see the desert when I open them. The gale reminds me of Genesis as the breath of life fills my lungs.

Somehow, a solemn peace persists after unreconcilable loss. An unfaltering ache holds my heart, but an unwavering calm returns no matter how poignant grief feels.

I hate what life has done to me, but I appreciate who I am despite all my heartaches.

* * * *

Happy Birthday, Patrick. I miss you every day 💙

A Suicide Survivor’s Perspective on Suicide Prevention — Week 12: One Year Later

September 12, 2025

Happy Suicide Prevention Awareness Month 💜🩵💜

I write, with a pit in my stomach, dryness in my mouth, and fear behind my eyes.

For years, I’ve dreaded this month. It’s a month in which I felt so invisible and so abundantly reminded of my own pain. No one really cares about awareness months, except the people whose lives they reflect. For suicide survivors, it’s a tiny little broken community, screaming out in the darkness. It’s not like heritage months or LGBTQ+ months or even cancer months, which all seem to have so much support… because so many people are affected by prejudice and cancer.

Of course, I have been well aware of Suicide Prevention Awareness Month, but it felt as if no one else really was. September meant annual Suicide Prevention trainings at work, where I’d cry to myself during my computer-based trainings, or fight not to weep during the in-person HR trainings where no one else was affected… except me.

Quite honestly, Suicide Prevention Awareness Month feels like a giant shame-fest for survivors. “These are the signs,” the trainings warn. Only, the thing is, we can see all of the signs, take all the right actions, and people can still end their lives.

So I sat isolated in trainings, and reflected on all the help we did get for my brother Patrick. All the signs we did see. All that we did do.

I reflect on my last conversation with Patrick, when he told me “Hopey, you’re my hope. You make me believe that we’ll really beat this.”

This is the first year that it seems other people are aware of Suicide Prevention Awareness Month: it fills my Facebook and Instagram feeds with posts of warning signs, of fundraisers, of hope, and of so much sadness. It’s strange, and it still feels so icky.

For my Mom, there weren’t signs. It’s a terrifying reminder that, if someone really wants to die, he or she will ensure that we can’t stop them.

Where is the hope in that?

I’m not sure. I’m not so sure there is any hope to prevent suicide. For now, you can hope for me, and maybe I’ll find hope again someday.

What I do know is that this world was a much brighter place with her in it, and the world is a much brighter place with you in it, too.

September 13, 2026

The more I think about it, the more convinced I am that we cannot prevent suicide. Not really. I think that it’s too late by the time someone gets to the point where one wants to end one’s own life. People who want to end their lives do it, and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop it.

It’s ironic — we teach people to “look for the signs” before someone’s life ends in suicide, and then we teach survivors to say “even if” after the fact.

“Even if I checked in more.”

“Even if he or she spoke up.”

“Even if I was more involved.”

Our ideas about Suicide Prevention detail a broken system: we can’t tell preventers one thing, tell survivors the exact opposite, and attest to making progress.

Suicide prevention begins long before someone starts to exhibit warning signs and before someone utters woeful statements.

Suicide isn’t simply a collection of symptoms — it is the result of profound mental and emotional distress. It can be the consequence of an unhealthy mind or a mind in crisis, a mind that struggles to perceive reality clearly.

Sometimes you can tell when someone is physically sick, sometimes you have no idea: it’s the same with mental illness. People experiencing suicidal thoughts may be suffering deeply while simultaneously being unable to recognize how unwell they are because stigma, fear, and the illness itself distort their perception.

That’s the frightening thing the mind unwell — it can convince someone that he or she is okay. It can convince someone that everyone else is the problem. It can convince someone that seeking help is more dangerous than seeking treatment. It can convince someone that death is the only end to pain. The idea that death is the only option to end suffering is both untrue and terribly tragic.

* * * *

We can’t prevent suicide by looking for signs.

We can’t prevent suicide by being kind — though kindness helps.

Perhaps we can prevent suicide by listening to the narratives that people speak; especially listen for changes in someone’s thinking, relationships, and perception. Maybe then, we can notice threads of delusion or unintentional self-deception . Sentences that do not sound quite right — not only about self-harm, but about someone accusing everyone around them of being destructive. Discord can be one of the earliest signs of mental distress. If we do hear stories echoing oddities or triggers [reactions that contain more emotion than one may think appropriate, which often point to deeper wounds], perhaps we can prevent suicide by calling that out and helping others realize that they may need professional treatment.

Perhaps ending the stigma and the denial about mental illness will help individuals’ awareness of and willingness to connect with personal care.

At the end of the day, if someone is in such profound distress that they believe they need to die in order to survive [again, this is a clear sign of mental unhealth/severe mental distress], they may succumb to viewing death as the only way to escape their suffering, and there is nothing anyone can do to stop that. Everyone has the power to choose and the power to act.

If you have had this thought, please seek professional care — you are suffering and you deserve help. Your thoughts do not make you broken, and your suffering is not your fault. It’s not your fault. It’s not your fault that you are struggling. There is no shame seeking help. Choose life. By seeking help, you will discover renewed life beyond your suffering. Healing mends hurts. It does not erase them, but healing will transform your life into something beautiful and beyond the pain you are experiencing today.

* * * *

So no, I’m not convinced we can prevent suicide, but I am convinced that we can better support high-risk individuals. We can intervene earlier, reduce suffering, recognize vulnerability, and support people better.

There are groups who face significantly elevated risks of suicide and, as such, they deserve particular attention and support.

Suicide survivors [immediate family members of those who died by suicide] are at the highest risk of dying by suicide. Support them.

Middle aged individuals are highly vulnerable. Connection tends to dissipate and unresolved trauma tends to surface — if you are a middle-aged individual, please meet with professionals to help you deal with current stressors, past problems (traumas), and take it seriously. Support them.

LGBTQ+ individuals are highly vulnerable. Stop rejecting people because of complexities / preferences you may not understand. Support them.

Veterans are highly vulnerable. Support them.

Refer to the American Society of Suicidology and the CDC for additional details.

For the love of God, support these people. If you are in one of these four groups, please take care: know that you are vulnerable.

If you have no idea how to support survivors of suicide, a great place to start is by reading Megan Devine’s It’s OK that You’re Not OK. This book isn’t centered around suicide and is a great resource for a lot of different groups, because it will teach you how to speak to people in crisis.

It’s 2026. We are in the age of unlimited digital resources — if you don’t know how to support someone at risk and you want to help — go educate yourself.

A Family Fractured, A Truth Exposed — Week 11: One Year Later

September 6, 2025

I began writing these posts to bring awareness to grief, loss, and surviving suicide.

I lost my brother to suicide when I was 21: back then, very few people in my life had experienced any type of familial loss. I lost my mother to suicide when I was 27, and, still, few people in my life have experienced familial loss.

A majority of people my age haven’t experienced loss, and a majority of people who have experienced loss have not experienced suicide.

Most people reading these posts know me and my family, and have thus now been affected by suicide.

These posts are meant to bring awareness and to highlight a community of mourners. I try to write about my individual experience with grief and it seems that many have found solace and community from these words.

A few weeks ago, I wrote how many have experienced me at my worst while I have experienced them at their best — their tenderest, their most thoughtful, their most considerate, their most generous. It has been beautiful to see people show up for me and my family.

I would be remiss not to mention how this brings out the worst in us, too. Unexpected loss makes people quick to anger or irritation as the brain tries to process a world that no longer makes sense.

Suicide loss forces people to try to find meaning behind a senseless and terrible loss, and this can turn people against one another in the vilest ways. Endless questions of Why did she end her life? exhaust survivors’ minds and, too quickly, the community that should rally to support one another the most instead turns on each other.

In trying to find meaning, survivors can all too easily blame one another — It must have been her job stress. It must have been the church. It must have been her family. It must have been her parents. It must have been her kids. It must have been her spouse. It must have been her sibling. It must have been her friends. It must have been myself. You should have seen the signs. I should have seen the signs.

Do you see how damning those statements are?

Damning.

Those statements destroy, and, yet, those who should support one another the most can viciously accuse one another with similar statements.

People think it. Some people say it. All survivors feel it.

The truth is that all of this is horrific. The truth is that no one on the planet wanted this. The truth is that any of us would have done anything to prevent this outcome. And yet, people still whisper accusations about survivors and can scream them at her closest friends and family members.

Nobody wanted this. Nobody caused this. Don’t blame her community. Don’t blame her friends. Don’t blame her family. Don’t blame yourself.

Don’t add more hurt to the most painful situation imaginable.

September 6, 2026

Ah yes.

This is the post that cost me my grandparents and aunt. Or rather, it simply exposed the rotting beneath our fragile relationships.

I’ve already written of their audacious accusations and the intriguing lengths they went to communicate the misinformation — the hate mail, the phone calls, the texts . I’ve notated how my mother’s church harbored them at our expense, indulging their sinister fantasies, and pretending that I blamed their organization . As classic abusers do, my mother’s family urged people “not to mention anything to ‘the kids’ [me & my brothers] to protect our relationship,” which is really ironic because my aunt was barely involved in our lives. We maybe exchanged one phone call a year.

I don’t blame my aunt for our emotional distance — we’d been long distance family my whole life — but to be so uninvolved with my life, and then to start saying wicked, wicked, wicked things about my Dad and my family right after my mother’s ghastly death?

Oof.

At the time I wrote this post in 2025, I didn’t know half of the insane things my aunt and grandparents were saying. I suspected something because things were just… off, but I couldn’t imagine the things they would do or say.

I should have been able to imagine it, though. They did the same thing to my Momma after Patrick died. They told her she was a terrible parent and that they should have taken Patrick away — they claimed it was Mom’a fault he died.

Despicable.

I’d like to claim that I’ll never understand why my mom allowed them back into her life, but that would be untrue. Love, oh it can be so powerful. It can be so dangerous.

When you love someone, you can let them abuse you again and again and again and you can want them back despite all the atrocious pain they intentionally inflict upon you.

It’s heartbreaking when someone you love mistreats you. Forgiving someone can bring them closer, but when the patterns persist the hurt will repeat.

I understand now that, a year ago, I was writing about a pattern that had already happened to my mother and that I didn’t yet fully recognize was happening to my father again.

I confronted my grandparents after I wrote this post, detailing that I suspected they were saying unkind things.

I asked them to stop.

I told them I loved them.

They didn’t respond.

One year ago, and I never hear from them.

Languishing Between the Lands of the Living and The Dead — Week 10: One Year Later

August 29, 2025

This has been one of the hardest weeks to get out of bed. Perhaps it’s a mix of jet lag, allergies, and grief. Perhaps it’s simply reality sinking in deeper and deeper as the days pass away, each new day taking me farther away from my mother.

I woke up at 3 am other day with the slightest fever and spent the next few hours weeping and feeling the weight of this catastrophic loss. I want my Mommy, I yelped again and again and again. She always made sure to stop by if I was sick, even if it was just for a quick hug or to play with my hair, but mainly just to make sure I was okay. She’d bring medicine, ginger ale or Gatorade, maybe some soup, and all the compassion in the world.

But no more Momma.

I’ve gotten out of bed every day since she passed. I’ve brushed my hair and my teeth each morning and each night without fail. Last week, I finally started putting some jewelry on… it’s funny the little things you do or don’t do in deep grief… but this week I have not wanted to get out of bed at all.

Several grief books discuss the experience of derealization and depersonalization — the out-of-body feeling where one can’t ground oneself to the present moment. The sense that the griever is observing oneself from outside one’s most often in large groups and, hence, I am a bit uncomfortable and almost alarmed amidst them. These group activities become a source of anxiety and tension, where I end up spending an inordinate amount of energy on pretending to be normal or pretending to have fun.

The good thing about pretending, though, is that it can often result in positive experiences, but at the cost of an exponential amount of energy.

I think I am pretty spent from the few social activities I have mustered the courage to participate in. I’m not quite sure how one finds balance in this. Maybe I need to plan more one-on-one activities with patient listeners, eager to indulge me with their empathy and kindness. Buuut scheduling that is exhausting, too.

Thus, in the end, everything is simply hard. So excruciatingly difficult and sad and painful.

I’m still getting out of bed, I’m still brushing my hair and my teeth each morning and each evening, but this week it’s seemed to require so much more from me than past weeks.

Friends have done their best to help ease the suffering and mental load, showing up with kindness by bringing me soup, dropping in just to give me a hug, and so much more, and I’m so grateful for that. More grateful than I can probably communicate, but…

It’s a living nightmare, and that’s the reality of living with pain that cannot be fixed. Time and new memories will heal, but not today, not this week, not anytime soon.

August 29, 2026

Observing one’s feelings is far easier than feeling them. To be aware of one’s sadness is different than experiencing one’s sadness poignantly, deeply, despairingly, sharply, harrowingly.

The ache in one’s chest, the heaviness of her shoulders, the oblivion fading into her mind.

I spend week after week going through my mother’s and parents’ old things. While peers enjoy their summers and plan for their futures, I sort through the past and try to organize all that’s been left behind. With each weekend I clear corners of my house, bit by bit, covered with artifacts of the dead. I clean out the dead, trying to make space for the living. Empty space for the living, really. I don’t want to fill the space, I just want to clean the cobwebs the departed left behind.

Anger tempts me as of late, as I think about how little I have the capacity to engage in. I have little mental energy or desire for most things, but I’m sad about my existence on the fringes of society.

I exist outside, veiled by a shroud that obscures me from the world of normalcy. The cloth borders me from the world and keeps me entangled in an unending void of grief-related tasking: organize this, declutter that, find a space for this, make room for that, forever part with this. Items that once held little significance hold the weight of a life once lived and left behind without a single goodbye.

It’s exhausting, and it’s my everyday reality and responsibility.

I began the process of attempting to reintroduce myself to society, but engaging in more than one social activity per weekend leaves me entirely spent. I hardly have the energy or the courage to endure it. Yet I want friends, I need them, but how can I be maintain friendships when I live like this? I lack the bandwidth to live any other way.

So, in the margins I exist. Not because people are unwilling to support me or because I don’t want to engage with them, but because I can barely manage to occupy my own home. It’s filled with too many relics of a dead life, and I’m swimming through its River Styx attempting to separate the living from the dead while wandering the borderlands between them.

Ghost Stories — Week 6: One Year Later

August 1, 2025

I know pain, I know it well. I am friends with sorrow and companions with anguish. I’ve made a home with sleepless nights and solitary mornings. My eyes sore and strained, my lungs feel heavy and weak.

I have known sorrow for years, it has always been with me. It resonates throughout my mind, into my chest, and it overflows from my eyes.

I was just getting used to happiness. Laughter and joy, for what felt like the first time, finally took residence in my soul. I was healing. I wasn’t afraid of the worst case scenario anymore. I felt freedom and enjoyed the good gifts I had. I felt plenty in my abundance, and I felt safe with my family.

We were building a home here, we were building a life here. Our days were filled with sunshine and laughter. My only concern was what joyous outing we would participate in over the upcoming weekend.

I thought we were in this together.

I thought we loved this life, and maybe we did. I thought we were all healing and moving forward after catastrophe. But while I flourished, part of her soul was dying.

She couldn’t tell me. She couldn’t tell anyone. That will never make sense to me. That will always haunt me. That will always terrify me.

Some days it feels impossible to truly smile. How many days did she feel like that, too?

Every day of this nightmare, it’s like I discover something new. Something new about my Mom, something new about my reality. I’m forced to process a complex piece of information day after day, thought after thought, moment after moment. It’s exhausting. It’s haunting.

Maybe ghost stories were never really about apparitions but about the horrors left behind by the deceased. The painful thoughts they force you to think, the painful loss you have to shoulder. The painful dreams that wake one up in the middle of the night. I feel haunted by my mother and haunted by her actions.

I can’t feel a mother’s love from the grave. Not like this. Not when she leaves me with all this. All I feel is the pain and abandonment from being left behind.

The saddest part is that she never would have wanted that, but she doesn’t get to influence or comfort me anymore.

August 3, 2026

I often think about the line I can’t feel my mother’s love from the grave. It’s still true.

* * * *

This week, Carrie took me to New York for my 29th birthday 💜. We went in February 2019 and had such a delightful time that we wanted to do it again!

Nostalgia, though, delivers a collection of recollections. February 2019 was a mere three months before Patrick (Olivia’s father) died. Olivia was nearly six years old, but she and Carrie were separated from Patrick.

Since that February 2019, Carrie married and got pregnant. Her sweet husband Josiah was murdered during her pregnancy. They had a beautiful baby girl, Josi Faith, the February after his death. Then, my Momma died. Nostalgia no longer carries only happy memories. Instead, it has become an archive of grief and ghosts.

Perhaps we are haunted not only by their deaths but also by the way that loss is tethered to our memories of life.

Three deaths, one birth, all within seven years. It’s a lot to remember. We are tormented by the choices my brother, my mother, and a stranger made. I wrote last year that my mom “couldn’t” tell us about her demons, but, realistically she wouldn’t. She — and Patrick — had the power to share the truth before longing for death overwhelmed their will to live. Each person had the power to make a different choice that would have preserved life, but each chose death instead. That is haunting.

Shrouded with death, we try our best to live. Ever haunted by the past, we step forward into our new lives.

It was a beautiful trip to New York. It was sunny and glorious and fun and wonderful. We laughed, we hugged, we played, we explored.

We live this beautiful mosaic life: we’ve been building it from the shards of glass that shattered from the gunshots that haunt us. Their ghosts, ever with us, and ever reminding us of their absence from our new reality.

May we continue to build beautiful lives.

May life refill us.

May new memories create safe places.

May our nervous systems find rest.

May we always love.

An Elegy for My Momma — Day 30: One Year Later

The sorrow that I dreaded has made its home in my heart, where it will forever languish.

I am so sad, forever.

Perplexing thoughts cross my mind and the minds of many as people try to make sense of this cataclysm, but it is truly senseless. My mom’s death highlights mental illness — mentally healthy people do not and cannot end their own lives. There is no reason, there is no “why,” there is nothing to blame or to conclude about this situation other than the advancement of mental illness. My mother hid it extremely well. She knew well what mental illness is, and perhaps she did not realize the depth of her own struggles until her mind was too impaired.

She didn’t do this to us, she didn’t do this at us, she didn’t do this in spite of us.

There is much we don’t know and won’t understand, and, to a point, it doesn’t really matter: nothing will bring her back.

My Mom’s death doesn’t forfeit her love, it doesn’t forfeit what she believed, and it doesn’t forfeit all she strived to do and who she wanted to be.

In her right mind and in her fullest, she loved life. Her laughter filled the room and bellowed from every conversation. Her smile beamed brightest around her family and with her friends. She loved getting to discover the depth of others by asking provocative questions and teasing the answers out of one another. She loved Jesus, and she wanted to experience the fullness of life that God promises, but she may have missed that He promised that life here on earth (John 10:10). She was passionate about mental health and desperately wanted to see others healed on this side of eternity, and I think she believed that wholly for herself, too.

Mom fought a horrific battle that she could not share with us, and while that hurts us more than anything, these facts detail a torment she kept in the shadows. If only, if only she had applied her studies and reached out in the way she encouraged others to do. Maybe she spent so much time encouraging others in the hopes that she, too, would find the courage to reach out.

She wanted to make a difference, she wanted to heal. She wanted so much from this life that gave her so much. Her life was beautiful and full of laughter and love, and, in her best moments, she felt that wholly.

My mom did not die because of any one thing: she died fighting an unspeakable battle, one we’ll never know how long she fought. This painful reality scorches my heart and sometimes it feels impossible to believe that my life is good and beautiful and kind, when all feels so dark and grotesque and cruel.

But I know — I know, somehow, there is grace in this. My family and I have so much life left to live, and our lives will be filled with laughter and love and goodness and opportunity that we cannot begin to imagine right now. We are blessed. We are blessed with each other, we are blessed with our outstanding community who supports and mourns with us, and we were blessed with my Mom.

My Mom was a light and a gift that I will never have again, and her absence brings tumultuous tears to my eyes each day. While this is so dark, my Mom was not all of the light in the world.

I will carry this grief with me forever, but this sadness and this grief does not dismiss the many years of joy and abundance still to come.

Grief gifts us with a new understanding of God and life and the universe. It strips us bare of any preconceived ideas rooted in anything but truth, and the fire of affliction will bring about unimaginable glory.

Right now, it’s physically impossible for us to imagine or even desire a good life when my Mom was what made our old lives so good, but we will experience blessing and healing and a new good life.

July 21, 2026

I’ve written about 80 posts since my Momma died. Sigh.

I love her, and I miss her every day.

Some of you have been reading along since day one, some joined later. Some who never met my Momma joined because of their own similar loss. I’m sorry for your losses, too.

Mourning both isolates and attaches people to a silent and somber community.

I never would have imagined how small my world would get after those first thirty days. It’s quieter these days. It’s as if my family members and I have become myth — whispered about but rarely seen.

A strong urge persists to shut the entire world out and enjoy the bliss of anonymity: you can’t hurt me if you can’t find me.

Rumors I’ve heard about myself and my family initially fill me with anxiety because they feel dangerous, but once the fear settles, I find myself laughing softly. I laugh not because they’re harmless, but because they’re so detached from reality.

So maybe I’m an oracle uttering insights that glistened through my tears. Or maybe I’m a muse, breathing life into myths and legends of a veiled existence. Maybe I am the whispers you hear, and the stories you trade in hushed voices. Or maybe I’m so much more.

Baskin Robbins — Day 23: One Year Later

July 14, 2025

Adrenalin has faded. Shock and denial slowly sift away, and reality rises like the sun in my tired mind. Tears fall more readily, memories pour out more steadily, and I remain dazed.

Grief shrouds everything, creating fog in every way. I don’t realize how dense the brain fog is until I attempt to have a conversation — it’s like I can barely remember to finish a sentence.

Any chores accomplished are simply done by an automatic response from years of habit. If I take a sweater off or a pair of sunglasses, I place them down and I will completely forget about them, leaving tattered articles throughout the house.

We were quite social today, which is both nice and weird. It’s like re-acclimating into society: it reminds me of being at a restaurant in a foreign country where I don’t know the language or the customs. We’re all still eating, which is pretty universal, but everything else feels so different.

I’m so tired. So, so, tired.

Everything is sad — it’s the opposite of rose-colored glasses. It’s like seeing everything in deep shades of blue and gray, muting colors from the world.

July 14, 2026

Update: I’m still tired. All. The. Time.

Least favorite phrase people regularly say to me: “Tired?? You’re too young to be tired.”

Also way too young to lose a sibling and a parent, but thank you for letting me know that I shouldn’t be tired. It really helps me feel even more isolated and out of place from people my age.

I’m traveling right now for work, and this Baskin Robbins happened to be right by my hotel. I saw my photo from last year and decided to go and honor Momma — B&R was her favorite ice cream shop.

The Danger of Silence — Day 22: One Year Later

July 13, 2025

We don’t have to be afraid of our emotions, we don’t have to be afraid of experiencing deep sadness and despair, but we should be afraid of not sharing those emotions. We should be afraid of bottling up our feelings, we should be afraid to pretend everything is okay, we should be afraid of running/hiding/escaping from our pain.

Pain demands to be felt. When we ignore it or when we hide it from the world, we destroy ourselves. It’s not fun to be sad, it doesn’t feel good, but it is vital to our health and to the health of our community.

Isolation demands secrets and keeps one quiet. Feeling one’s pain will not ruin oneself, but unshared thoughts and feelings can consume their host.

True community, sincere authenticity, and genuine friendship begin when honesty permeates every interaction. The pain that we conceal cannot stay hidden. We cannot protect our hearts from feeling deep heartbreak, but we can grow and heal from that hurt. Sharing our pain creates a system of rivers and waterways that lead to an ocean of safety — it protects from flooding and destruction that unchecked thoughts create.

Yes, enjoy privacy, yes, be discreet, yes, be careful with whom you share your inmost thoughts, but make no mistake: you must share. Be honest with yourself about your thoughts and feelings, and be open with your friends.

The only way we overcome darkness is with light — the light of honesty and truth.

July 13, 2026

I’ve learned that judgement is the greatest predictor of social withdrawal: we share when we feel safe, we hide when we fear punishment, misunderstanding, and loss.

Maybe suicide prevention should focus less on encouraging people to open up, and more on becoming a society that prioritizes psychological safety and cultivates the proper environment for honest conversation.

People don’t speak up when they’re afraid to be condemned or when they fear another’s reaction. Sometimes this fear is based on current intrapersonal relationships, while other times it’s rooted in past trauma.

May we be a people who listen with empathy and kindness.

May we choose to believe the best in our interlocutors.

May our compassion outweigh our condemnation.

May grace lace our conversations, connect our relationships, and strengthen our attachments.

Survivors’ Isolation — Day 14: One Year Later

July 5, 2025

Two weeks.

There’s a weight so heavy on my chest I feel like I can barely breathe. It feels like I am operating at 50% of my normal capacity, if that. It feels so heavy. What does that even mean? Why does it legitimately feel like there is a weight pressed against my lungs, collapsing them? How does that work? How does the body do that?

I thought we had something special, me and my mom. I thought we had a great relationship. Now I feel like I didn’t even know her. Who was this woman I spent so much time with? I thought she liked being with me, I thought she wanted to be in my life, I thought she wanted to be here. But in the end, she wanted to leave me. It wasn’t worth it for her to stay in my life. She didn’t want to see me grow up anymore. I thought we were going to be two old ladies together. I thought she wanted me. I thought she wanted me. Did she think I did not love her? Why weren’t we enough?

I hate my name. I’ve hated it for a long time. My mom gave me this name because she hoped so badly for me… what good did that do for her? It’s so cruel to be named Hope when it feels like so many people in my world are hopeless.

“Hopey, you’re my Hope. You make me believe that everything’s going to be okay and that we’re really going to make it.” That’s what my brother Patrick told me two days before he ended his life. Once he died, I really started to hate my name.

Before that, I was always a pessimist. It felt so ironic to be called “hope” when I so seldom experienced hope myself.

Now this? I hate my name. It feels so cruel tonight.

Why did I start writing these? I keep asking myself that. More precisely, why did I start publishing these? I’ve loved writing for my entire life. I used to write fantastical stories, dreaming worlds late into the night when I was just a young girl. Then in puberty I started writing to cope with my ever-changing world. Now, I almost exclusively write when my emotions cloud my head, spill out of my eyes, and pours from an ink pen onto a blank page.

So, why did I start publishing these?

After Patrick died, I seriously isolated myself. I did not answer my phone for over a month and I had no desire to make contact with the outside world.

In our American culture, grief is so private. Suicide is beyond taboo, and people in mourning may be given three days of bereavement leave. Three days… how pathetic. Our culture almost treats grief like something to be ashamed of or to be quickly gotten over. Because of this, death and grief are seldom discussed and very few — especially at my ripe old age of 27 — people do not have much of a framework/understanding of mourning and grief.

Grief shouldn’t isolate. It should be something that pulls us all together, something that makes us stop and hold one another closer, something that prompts us to change our lives for the better.

As my friend Olivia Chancellor always says “Alone is a lie.” Maybe if I share my thoughts, others will have the courage to share theirs too. Thoughts can be scary and painful and feel so isolating, but alone is a lie. “Everything that is exposed by the light becomes visible–and everything that is illuminated becomes light,” Ephesians 5:13. It’s only when we share our darkest thoughts that we are truly able to heal from them.

I want to live. I want to have a life full of beauty and joy and pain and wonder. I want to experience it all. I want to be fully present. I want to experience life to the full in every possible way, no matter how it hurts.

I don’t want to move on from this. I will be carrying this for the rest of my life, and I want to grow and learn to carry this with grace and love and even hope. I want to live, and I want to live well.

July 5, 2026

I don’t have much energy to add anything to this today.

Maybe these posts help people to be brave, maybe they help explain or empathize or realize one’s own emotions. Maybe they give people a glimpse into my life. Maybe they help people gossip. Maybe they make someone else feel less alone.

I didn’t want to wall myself off from the world this time. I wanted the world to know what it’s like, even if it’s just tiny glimpses of my mind and heart for one week at a time.

Everything is painful in this reality, and everything is complicated. I’ve been really frustrated about that lately.

Sometimes it feels like there are no good things — even good things are met with hurt and pain and confusion. That’s been the hardest reality thing to accept lately. It’s the type of thing that makes me want to run away, leave all this behind, and start a new life somewhere where no one knows my name or my story.

I’ve gotten to start over my entire life. Seldom staying anywhere for more than four years, and yet it’s hard, too, not to have any roots.

Grief isolates regardless of one’s best attempts to mourn in a community. It’s the nature of being a survivor — I survived. My brothers survived, my dad survived. My mother is “survived by” the four of us she left behind, and that’s it.

She left dear friends behind, a whole community behind, an entire world behind, but they didn’t survive. They aren’t on that short list of survivors, and that fact separates more than outsiders can fathom.

Grief isolates because it steals energy and capacity and time and color from the world. Grievers can barely reach out or respond to those around them, not because they don’t want to but because they have no energy or thought capacity to do so.

Only a shadow of the griever remains, and people have a hard time holding onto shadows.

We’ll get some life back, we survivors. One day. One day, it won’t take up all of our energy and we’ll be able to show up for our friends again. I’ve been a survivor for enough years to remember that, at one point, I was able to show up for friends again.

In the meantime, it just sucks. Even people closest to survivors weary of our lack of capacity, because it hurts them, too. It’s not easy when you’re supporting a survivor but you too need support. In fact, it’s painful. We can’t be what you want us to be. We can’t even be what we want to be ourselves.

I’m still half of myself, operating at 50% or less, and I’m tired of it, too.

* * * *

May the God of all peace comfort you with his love.

May others come beside you and support you in your hurt.

May an empathetic ear hear your pain and see you with eyes of compassion and love.

May you extend grace.

May your mind rest and slumber.

May you remember how loved you are, even when you can barely show up.

May someone love you in your weakness.

May you experience that love.