tragedy

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.

Remembering — Week 15: One Year Later

October 3, 2025

I loved my Mom.

When you lose someone, loss tends to multiply all around you. There’s the one massive loss followed by a series of losses that convolute your grief and make it all so difficult to process.

There’s the drama, the unexpected twists, and the complications you would not fathom. There’s blame, stigma, and criticism waiting to greet you at every turn.

And, oh yeah, there’s the fact that someone you loved died.

The initial months of grief bring triggers you don’t know you have. One day, I’ll get used to them and have a better idea of what will cascade in outbursts of tears or uneasy anxiety, but for now, it could be anything.

So much feels stolen when someone dies. Suddenly Mom dies and my whole relationship with her is available to the watching world. People are drawn to chaos and redemption: some turn away because it’s too painful to watch, while others lean in and hope to see a brighter day.

Today, I remember our smiles. I remember my Mom’s beautiful enthusiasm and I remember us rejoicing together, enjoying one another’s companionship. I remember her warmth and endless laughter, I remember her closeness, and I miss her.

October 6, 2026

I wonder, if we were to read the pages of our own lives, would we see clearly the good that comes from anguish?

An excerpt I l wrote in the back of a book. February 24, 2025.

* * * *

There are so many little things I miss about my mom. I’m being able to call her and talk about nothing. I miss the way she laughed. I miss her blind optimism, but perhaps that was just something she faked. I miss her smile. I miss the way. She celebrated little things. I miss being able to talk to her about my life. I miss having someone who actually cares about all the stupid tiny details of my life the way she did. I miss how effortless it was to enjoy life when she was alive.

I loved my mom, and each day I grow more convinced that Love is the only eternal thing. Love does not fade. I’ve been grieving my family for so long, I’ve learned that Love never ends, even when those you love are buried beneath the earth.

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 💙

Added, Inflicted Suffering — Week 13: One Year Later

September 21, 2026

I’m a little “late” to write this post because I have been so enormously frustrated and exhausted.

Let he who is without sin throw the first stone.
John 8:7

Within the past month, there have been some who surmise that they have discovered the answer for “why” my mother ended her life, and with that “answer,” they cast stones at my family.

Lovely.

In the name of love for my Mother, they seek to harm those she loved most.

Those who believe they discovered the answer claim that they saw the signs, and, to that I ask, “why did you not share them?” If you think you found the root cause, if you think you saw it while she still lived, why were you silent?

Let he who is without sin throw the first stone.

There is no room in this sacred space of mourning and bereavement for blame, self-righteousness, shame, and condemnation. It is shame that kills us most. Do not speak of things you do not know or understand. Do not assume to know the mind of the departed. Do not impart discord, hatred, and cruelty on her survivors.

Victims and perpetrators, that’s what everyone is in the wake of a suicide, including the one who physically died. Those left behind simply become more dead than alive, people walking without their hearts. Sullen, sunken, and tired eyes barely greeting those around them.

There is much we do not know, and there is much we do know. Do not be foolish enough to think that you have it figured out, and do not be cruel enough to speak abhorrent conjectures into existence.

This is the mess that fuels the stigma suicide survivors live through. This is the loss that begets loss, the suffering that begets suffering.

Yes, it’s harsh. Yes, it’s cruel. And yes, unfortunately, it’s the reality.

* * * * *

For those seeking to help and ease the suffering, the best thing you could do for your friends in mourning is simply to show up and listen with empathy and understanding. Advice doesn’t help. Platitudes don’t help. Conjecture doesn’t help. Empathy and compassion help.

Calm kindness helps. Showing up helps, checking in helps.

Reader, may your lives never experience this horror [again], and may love and compassion greet you. may kindness and humility envelop you. May reconciliation find you. May peace carry your broken heart.

September 19, 2026

Not much left to say about this, other than shout out to my Mom’s family and church for adding to our suffering in such a sinister way.

Reading my own pointed words from a year ago, I feel compassion for the panicked woman reacting to added atrocities. I’m not sure how she made it through it, but I did.

* * * *

Words stab, they leave holes and wounds left for victims to mend.

Duplicitously, words are one of the few ways to mend wounds left behind by cruelty. To heal from harsh words, we have to speak them and share our stories with empathetic witnesses.

Why are we a people so afraid of grief and honesty? It’s like people can understand the need to share frustrations and emotions, but when it comes to grief people assume it cannot be spoken. But we must speak about the things that overwhelm us, especially grief.

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.

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

Last Year of My Twenties — Week 8: One Year Later

August 15, 2025

Happy birthday to me… 🎶

I’ve been dreading this day for the past six years, since my four year old nephew looked up at me and said “28. Hopey, are you going to die when you turn 28?” Because his uncle, my brother, died when he was 28 and that didn’t make sense.

I’ve called it my “Patrick Birthday,” and I knew it would be difficult, but I never imagined it would be this terrible. A few months ago I imagined the birthday as a source of solemn strength to mark how much I have grown, and to mourn that I would now be “older” than my oldest brother. That alone would have made today painful.

I’ve been dreading this day, and I’ve been mourning it all month.

Birthday.

I used to thank my mom each day on all of our birthdays, praising her for the fact that it was her birth day — the day she did all the work and a day that changed her life immensely. I just showed up.

But now there’s no Mom, and that sucks.

So many people want to celebrate with me, which is sweet and I feel loved, but I don’t want to celebrate. It’s difficult to celebrate with sorrow seeping from your eyes.

Mom made each birthday so special. Most years, she made us us a delicious cake and made the day a big deal! She was a thoughtful gift giver and she was always so excited.

This birthday is special, I suppose, in a different way. It’s sacred: I’m surrounded by people keenly interested in trying to make my birthday magical and sweet, perhaps more so than I have ever experienced before. It’s a day filled with love and gentle care and sweet reminders of my friendships and of those who love me. I won’t forget this birthday, and I will remember all the beautiful acts of kindness so many people have bestowed upon me.

It’s my Patrick birthday. I am 28. I feel old, though so many people still tell me I’m such a baby, ha.

One day, I’ll probably have a Harmony birthday. I’ll turn 51 — “fifty-fun” as we briefly called it — and I’ll be older than my mom. The solemn knowledge of that pains me. I’m not yet ready to be excited about the future, but today I do have hope.

I am loved, I am seen, and there is life and goodness all around me.

One day, I’ll be able to participate and experience the fullness of life once more. Today reminds me that life is a gift, that I am loved, and that the sun still shines.

Thank you to everyone who’s making today special 💙

2019 – Patrick’s 28th and Final Birthday

2024 – Hope’s 27th Birthday, My Last Birthday with My Mom

August 15, 2026

The fresh weight of loss nearly crushed me when I woke up on August 15, 2025. This year, the heaviness encroaches beside me as my eyes open and my heart aches for the Momma who birthed me all those years ago today.

I’m 29 today—I have got to be the most excited person to be leaving her 20s behind. Let’s have an abridged examination:

20 — Walter, one of my closest friends, drowns. I graduate college two weeks later.
21 — Patrick, my brother, dies by suicide. I move to Florida eleven months later.
22-24 — These are quiet, restful years. They are slow and healing, allowing me to rebuild my life after catastrophic losses. By 24, I am learning to feel happy. It is possibly the only time in my life that I experience unreserved happiness.
25-26 — Scott and I buy our first house together. We marry, and I’m still learning to be happy. The days feel easy, soft. Carrie’s husband is murdered six months later.
27-28 — My momma dies by suicide. I turn 28 two months later, and I lose my grandparents one month after that.

I’ve lived three lifetimes since I turned twenty.

I’ve died three times, but cats have nine lives, right? I’m regenerating my world for a fourth time now. I wonder how many more lives I have left.

Surely, my thirties have got to be better than my twenties. But who knows?

Maybe the rest of my life won’t be so hellish, but maybe it will.

All I know is that today, I’m 29. I’m celebrating — I’m thrilled that this decade from hell is almost over. I’ve lost many, but the precious few who remain are dear to me and celebrate with me.

I’m hopeful this year, despite all the turmoil, horror, heartbreak, tragedy, and terribleness. Somehow, Hope remains: she’s the hardest thing to kill.

Life has potential. Birthdays are a beautiful reminder that not every ending is tragic—some are to be celebrated and honored and enjoyed.

Cheers to 29. Cheers to the last year of my twenties. Cheers to happy endings and hopeful beginnings.

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.

Kindness — Week 5: One Year Later

July 26, 2025

One sentence has flurried in my mind since I read it Wednesday:

Perhaps I did not deserve their deaths, but I did not deserve their presence in my life either.
Jerry Sittser, A Grace Disguised

It stings. I don’t like it. But, but, but. But perhaps it’s true.

From my point of view — a 27 year old woman, a sister and a daughter survivor of suicide who has always loved my family deeply — it’s incredibly tempting to submit to cynicism. Thoughts like Nothing I did mattered flutter through my brain. It didn’t matter if I was the best daughter or the best sister in the world, they still left. The sad part about that thought is that it’s entirely true.

I’m sure many are thinking similar thoughts… if I’d only… if I was a better _______ … I wish I would have… the list goes on.

Suicide tends to reverberate guilt throughout its affected community. The truth is, you could be the best mother/father, husband/wife, brother/sister, son/daughter, or friend, and this nightmare could be your reality, too. Chances are, if you’re reading this, you are and you were — you were a good _____. In fact, you were probably great. Odds are, you loved my Mom well, and you laughed together often. And yet…

The thought Did any of it matter? haunts me once more.

I loved my Mom… did that matter? I was a good daughter… did that matter? We loved my mom. My entire family loved my Mom deeply. Her community locally, and globally loved her deeply.

Oh, this shattering outcome makes it too easy to believe that none of it mattered.

“Why don’t I get to have a mom? I loved my Momma,” I sob endlessly to Scott (thanks, honey).

Then I despair that it feels like none of it mattered. That’s an incredibly easy lie to believe until someone knocks on my door to bring us dinner. Until we check the mail and have letters and packages from friends we haven’t connected with in years. Until we read the text messages. Until we feel the warmth from your embrace. Until we hear the care in your voices.

It did matter. It does matter. All of it mattered. Your kindness matters, your help matters, your love matters. It’s easy for me to believe that nothing I do matters, until I receive boundless kindness from those around me and I experience comfort and healing from each little act of kindness and care. That matters to me, and it reminds me that what I do does matter, and that what you do matters, too.

July 26, 2026

My brief life has been filled with such a series of endings, from moving every few years to unexpected deaths.

In therapy last week, I mentioned how I feel as though I’ve lived through several different lifetimes. It’s almost as if those events happened to someone else. Catastrophic loss alters one’s entire belief system and perspective on life, thus, when one has endured many such losses, it can feel like it happened to someone else entirely. Who I was died when they died, and who I am today is comprehensively different than who I was last year.

The 21 year old girl who desperately tried to keep her brother alive, but buried him instead, hardly feels like me anymore. She carried hopes, fears, tragedies, and experiences so foreign to me now because of how much has altered.

The 27 year old woman whose mom was alive, likewise, feels fatally far from my 28 year old, motherless self. Those women — both versions of me — feel irreconcilable with who I am today. She feels inaccessible to me. Her thoughts, her hopes, her dreams, feel like they belonged to someone else.

My therapist smiled and voiced that it’s important that I honor her; she counseled me to honor her for being a good sister, and for being a good daughter.

Tears welled immediately, connecting me to her.

“I was a good sister,” I said as my eyes created soft streams, “I did everything to try to keep him alive.” I paused, contemplating and remembering. “But I don’t know if I was a good daughter.”

* * * *

It’s interesting to reread these words from one year ago, and to see the thread between who I was then and who I am now.

I’ve been reflecting on the string of endings characterizing my life. I’ve been grieving the events that occurred without my consent, their effects rippling through every facet of my daily life.

Maybe I wasn’t everything my mother needed me to be, maybe I never could have been. Maybe it didn’t matter, no matter what I did, because she needed so much more than love to keep her afloat.

Kindness does matter, and, perhaps, in the end, it’s the only thing that matters. Kindness heals, kindness sees, kindness loves. Kindness is love in action. Kindness supports, and it helps people rebuild after catastrophe.

May we outdo one another in love and kindness.

May we forgive. May we repent.

May kindness guide our steps.

May kindness change us.