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.
