tragedy

Distraught. On Losing a Parent to Suicide— Day 26: One Year Later

July 17, 2026

Losing a parent feels like losing one’s foundation.

Losing a parent to suicide feels like finding out one’s entire life was a lie.

Distraught – that has been the word most on my mind today.

Suicide makes one relive and rethink every interaction with the lost loved one, and, today, it’s made me angry. I’m angry that my Mom is gone. I’m envious of everyone who gets to have a mom. I see a mother loving her young children, and I think of my mother and how much I know she loved me and our family. But I see a mom with her young children and can’t help but think how could you [Mom] do this to me?

How could she be so hopeless? She truly had so many things she loved, looked forward to, and enjoyed about life. She never uttered a word about hopelessness, but it was there. Maybe it was always there.

Maybe every day for the past 51 years was a blessing, maybe every day was one more day than she thought possible. Who knows? We’ll never know, so it almost doesn’t even matter.

I am distraught. I am distraught that my mother had these thoughts. I am distraught that she couldn’t think of all the beautiful things she had to live for in her last day on earth. I’m distraught because, as hopeless as she clearly was, she did have so much that she loved and so much that she did look forward to.

I am distraught because I am angry with my mother for choosing this. I am angry at God for allowing it — which is likely bad theology, honestly. God gave man the power to choose, and my mother chose poorly on that day. I am distraught because I have to have all of these thoughts and think through all of these things. I am distraught because every day feels like I’m learning something tragic I didn’t know — as if my life hadn’t had enough tragedy in it already.

Thanks, Mom.

I am distraught because I loved my mom. I loved her so much, and any of us would have done anything for her. I am distraught because she hurt immeasurably bad and there is nothing I can ever do about that, ever. I am distraught because I will carry this devastation with me for the rest of my life.

I am distraught because I know that God is good, and that God will bring good and beautiful things into my life — things I will never get to share with my mother, whom I loved so much.

I am distraught because I have to watch my Dad and brothers not have a wife and a mother. I am distraught because I have to watch my husband and my in-laws not have their mother in law. I am distraught because I have to watch her friends not have their friend. My beautiful Momma.

I am distraught because she did this. I am distraught because, in her mind, she had to do this. I am distraught that people’s minds can do that to them.

I am distraught that little things in my house get messy — my bathtub needs cleaned, my library has books and pens that I don’t know what to do with because I’m still using them and still reading them.

I am proud. I am proud that I am brushing my hair every day. I am proud that I am getting up every day. I am proud that I am leaving the house every day. I am proud that Dad and I are going on bike rides every day. I am proud that I am eating every day. I am proud that I am showering [almost] every day — sometimes I don’t remember if I have or haven’t showered, but I know I’m brushing my hair and teeth each day. I am proud that I am exercising every day. I am proud that I am going to therapy. I am proud that I am doing the bare minimum to at least be physically okay. I am proud that I started reading my Bible each day. I am proud that I am letting people help and support me. I am proud of a lot, and I am thankful for a lot.

Parents really are foundational. I feel like a house whose foundation has cracked in half. Restore me, Lord, for my foundation crumbled.

I have enough without my mom. My life is still good without my mom, but, God, I wish I had my mom to share my life with.

July 17, 2026

This post resonates with me deeply.

I vividly remember the utter anguish of those mere 26 days after suicide destroyed her. Back then, it was unfathomable to imagine living without her. Now, I’ve already grown accustomed to her absence, but all of life remains foreign to me. Existential dread fades to a quieter, guttural anxiety; no longer the terror of losing her, but the constant ache and exhausting reality of living without her.

I’m still distraught about everything mentioned a year ago, and I always will be. I’ve learned how to carry the anguish, the disappointment, and the horror of it all.

* * * *

The American Society for Suicide Prevention asserts suicide is not a “choice” that its victims make. Our laws even protect people by means of an insanity defense: defendants admit their actions but cannot be found culpable because of their severe mental impairment (illness).

I’ve read that calling suicide a choice is both inaccurate and increases the stigma around it. I’m not sure how I feel about that.

Refusing to label suicide as a choice destigmatizes survivors — no one looks at the survivors of those who have died of cancer and blames family members. No one questions, “what did they do to them?” when someone dies of an illness. No one thinks their family is better because disease takes the life of someone else’s family.

In the same way, I suppose it does destigmatize those who died by suicide — no one calls those who died of an illness cowardly or selfish. No one claims it’s a person’s decision to have a fatal disease.

If we understand mental illness for what it is — an illness — they’re right. Rational people don’t make irrational choices and, ultimately, suicide is quintessentially irrational.

Maybe the act of suicide itself, like every other illness, is not the choice but the consequence of what happens when someone does not seek proper medical treatment and intervention.

The knowledge of having an illness or disease, however, provides the choice [and the responsibility] to seek treatment.

People who ideate — people who think things like “I’d be better off dead,” “they’d be better off dead,” “if I could just die and go to heaven, it wouldn’t have to be like this anymore,” “it would be easier if I were gone” — have the choice and the responsibility to seek treatment. These are neither normal nor safe thoughts: they are clear indicators that you are suicidal. Wishing away your life in the hopes of heaven isn’t faithful, it’s suicidal.

I think some people may not realize how mentally unhealthy they are because it’s common for people to joke about death. I hear phrases like “kill me now,” or “shoot me if ___ happens” or “it’s so boring, I’d rather die than sit through ___” weekly, if not daily, laughed at as sarcastic comments. These phrases normalize suicidal thoughts. Some churches unintentionally perpetuate this in their messages on heaven and Christ’s return — longing for Christ’s return as if He didn’t already bring salvation to earth. It’s not a healthy teaching to preach people to wish their lives away; it’s not preaching salvation, it’s preaching suicide.

Maybe people do not ultimately choose to die by suicide, but many have the opportunity to choose treatment and help for their mental illness.

Whether or not my mom chose to die by suicide, she did choose not to seek treatment. That feels personal. That hurts. That is part of what makes surviving suicide so terribly complex.

* * * *

I choose to live.

Despite the pain, despite the tragedy, despite the judgement, despite the cruelty, despite the anguish, despite the horror, despite how hard it is to carry the weight of what I’ve lived through.

I choose to heal.

To prioritize my mental health, to seek the treatment Mom wouldn’t, to live a full life.

I am so proud for the choices I’ve made and the person I have become since Mom’s life ended in ruins. I’m proud of the truths I’ve been seeking, and the lies I’ve rejected; truths built on fear aren’t truths, they’re distortions hiding insidious motives. All those little things, like brushing my hair every day when breathing felt impossible, have added up. I’m proud of who I am becoming and how I’m healing.

May we seek help when we need it.

May humility guide our thoughts and our beliefs.

May we see God.

May we know his compassionate love.

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.

Rebuilding the Universe — Day 21: One Year Later

July 12, 2025

Grief spotlights time’s relativity. It’s been three weeks since…

It feels like three years, or sometimes three days. The days are all different but the heartache remains the same. Feelings. They’re just that — feelings. They’re aren’t good feelings, and there aren’t bad feelings. They are just feelings, each one with important messages and memories.

Sadness, I think, we feel most acutely. We feel grief, sadness, and trauma with all of the senses: it leaks from our eyes, it steals our taste, it snuffs our smell, it hastens our heartbeats, it deafens our ears. It makes us painfully aware of our thoughts and processes and it highlights both past memories and future dreams. We’re somehow the most vivid versions of ourselves in deep suffering, because it fractures our capacity to be anything else.

We’re raw, exposed, and in need of help, love, and compassion. We need all these while happy, but we feel the need for them most in sorrow. Our walls crumble in hardship because our defenses are broken — we no longer have the energy to organize thoughts and feelings and responses in a tidy manner.

Perhaps we are most ourselves when we allow sorrow to guide us. When we do, we are sensitive both to the more painful emotions but likewise sensitive to gratitude and awe. In the years to come, I will remember this deep and sacred pain, but I will remember your kindness too. I will remember the friends and family who joined me in my grief, who sat with me while I mumbled, who kept checking in, who brought me food, who gave generously without expectation. I will remember all the good as much as I remember the horror, because, at this time, I am most sensitive and most receptive to it all.

That is the beauty of sorrow and heartbreak. That is the beauty of love. This heightened sensitivity opens the core of who we are and allows others to love the deepest part of ourselves.

July 12, 2026

Grief mirrors us to the reality of our finiteness and forces us to confront our limits.

Never are we more weak and yet never are we more attune to our ability. They call it “brain fog,” this incessant cloud of grief, and it strains the universe before our minds.

Our eyes reflect the past. The sacred becomes our focus, our happy memories become our horrors, our hopeful future becomes our nightmares. For a time, we lose the ability to remember and the gift to dream. We eternally exist in the present, and we have no way to see beyond this holy place.

We are close to death — closer than ever, because it passed right before our eyes and out of our hands.

Galaxies rupture before us and leave us spinning, spinning, spinning into the abyss of a life erupted from the universe.

Maybe we are time travelers, in this odd and sacred space. Days don’t feel like days and minutes don’t feel like a mere collection of brief seconds. They stretch on, stitching new realities into the fabric of our lives. Each moment since that wicked day, our minds reconstruct the world. We begin to build or we begin to destroy: the choice lies within the survivor.

When we choose to heal, we plant seeds deep into the core of our being. And how do we heal?

We speak. We let all the darkness within us escape from our mouths and drain from our eyes, allowing the toxins and traumas to exit with every exhale. We do this in a safe space, free of judgement and expectation. We allow empathetic witnesses to our death and regeneration — because who we are died entirely on that day, too. That person, that version of oneself is obsolete.

We walk. We move, we stretch, we lift, we run, we honor the heart that beats in our chests and fills our bodies with life. Because life is precious, and each breath is a gift.

We pause. We allow our minds and our bodies to rest from rebuilding the universe. We honor the work we’ve done and celebrate how far we’ve come, because every single day feels impossible until we look back and see that we’ve made it through another moment.

We read. We seek to understand the incomprehensible, and we come to the conclusion that we may never understand, but we can learn how to carry the unfathomable.

One month to a survivor — a survivor, not a friend of the deceased, but to a survivor — can feel like a year. We do not measure time by the calendar or by the hours, but how much of the universe we have rebuilt. If you haven’t been a survivor, you can’t know what it’s like to rebuild an entire galaxy.

You can’t imagine the breadth and depth of the worlds we rebuild, nor can you fathom the work it took to get there.

When we choose not to heal, we bring chaos to ourselves and everyone around us. Those around us pay the price for our unhealed chaos, and are often blamed for our own negligence.

Healed people reflect a new and beautiful and tragical reality. They exhibit radical compassion, because they know what it’s like to start from the dust of life and watch seeds spring to life little by little. They’ve watched the world be reborn, and they’ve chosen what to plant and what to bring into their sacred universe.

Sorrow introduces a cleansing clarity that exposes away presuppositions and toxins. Healing washes these away and enables us to cultivate new life.

May we dance when grass begins to grow upon the withered landscape of our lives.

May we celebrate the world we’ve begun to create — this world we’ve only had to build because our old universe imploded.

May we rejoice with one another, and if we cannot rejoice together, may we gracefully say goodbye to people and things that belong to the former universe; Not everything or everyone from there belong here, no matter how much we want them to be here.

May we love one another well. May we love.

May We Love — Day 19: One Year Later

July 10, 2025

Today was hard.

I’m not really sure what to type today, but I set out to write and publish 30 days of thoughts to give people a glimpse into the world of a survivor.

“Suicide,” “murder,” “survivor” — these are all words I never thought would be so incredibly personal and defining in my life. I remember the first time I really learned in-depth about suicide the was in an eighth or ninth grade English class, studying Thirteen Reasons Why. I didn’t care much for the book then… I detest it even more now. I had no idea, back then, that suicide would claim as least a third of my family.

It’s so dark, so horrific. I observe that most shy away from the topic. Families have been shamed, judgement often cast at survivors. Survivors — what a heavy title. Institutions often choose not to address it corporately. I assume so few understand the depth of the concept, and people often flounder when they are unfamiliar with something so dark, so scary, and so sensitive.

The band Twenty One Pilots engages in the conversation. Their song “Neon Gravestones,” discusses how culture has glorified suicide, stating it’s “further engraving an earlier grave is an optional way.” Contrasting the idealized perspective, the band ends the song with the following lyrics:

Find your grandparents or someone of age
Pay some respects for the path that they paved
To life they were dedicated
Now, that should be celebrated!

The beginning of the song highlights a dangerous mindset:

“Keep your wits about you while you got ’em
‘Cause your wits are first to go while you’re problem-solving”

This is a dark post, but I do want to bring awareness to this epidemic.

For those who are struggling, ending your life does not solve the problem. Your pain and your hurt are real. It may feel absolutely impossible, but you can heal. Your life can be redeemed. This pain, it will be redeemed.

This is not the end of our story.

July 10, 2026

Today was a hard day too, but not one fraught with many tears.

“Tears are a gift,” my therapist once explained: “sometimes you’re given them, other times you are not.”

My post Words of Life & Death — Day 18: One Year Later elucidates to the incredible power of words. Words can encourage, they can build, they can affirm love, they can cultivate safety, they can bring healing. Or they can discourage, tear down, destroy love, prompt fear, and bring suffering.

Words and relationships can rapidly turn from compassionate and loving to judgmental and criticizing.

People, with their words, shame and criticize survivors long after the day of death. Common phrases contemptuously uttered, such as “well, if I were you,” “you should have,” “I would have,” plague survivors. Phrases bolstered with pride, uttered harshly with intent to harm, and claimed with little experience.

Judgement and shame seldom soften hearts — they simply teach those around you to hide from you.

Condemnation doesn’t change people: it prompts them to deny, suppress, and withhold pieces of themselves.

Life is harsh. Words can make it harsher.

The reality of surviving suicide means an exposure of your life for everyone else’s judgements: nothing we do is right, nothing we did is right.

If we say too much, it’s inappropriate. If we don’t say enough, it’s inconsiderate.

Love doesn’t judge — love demonstrates compassion and mercy. Love doesn’t condemn— it comes alongside and restores.

Love frees. Love builds. Love heals.

Love conquers the bleakest moments, and its love that makes life worth living and relationships worth keeping.

May we love one another freely, earnestly, and healthily.

May we care for our own mental health and processing. May we refuse to implement our needs and our perspectives onto another.

May love and humility guide our words and soften our hearts.

Torrents of Grief — Day 16: One Year Later

July 7, 2025

Silence. Quiet. Peaceful, terrible.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I Peter 4:8

July 7, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Surreal — Day 15: One Year Later

July 6, 2025

It was real. She was real. She was genuine and she loved so much. She was kind, she was gentle, she was lovely. She was happy, she was strong, she was proud. She smiled brightly and shined iridescently.

She was my Mommy, and she was a mother and a friend to so many. I just miss my mom. Each day she feels just a little farther away. Each day it hurts just a little more. I hate this so much.

I experienced immense growth and healing over the past six years, and the past six months I had begun counseling to work through the traumas I had been stuck in. Life felt nearly perfect. It was so beautiful and so sweet. These past few years God taught me that incredible goodness transpires after formidable sorrow.

I wish this wasn’t happening, but I know that life will be good again. This sadness will always be with me, but a time will come when it doesn’t bring me to my knees every day. It will probably always bring me to my knees at random moments, but it won’t always be this horrible.

Mourning sacredly positions us between this reality and the metaphysical. Grief connects us closely to the next realm and forces us to think of a lifetime of memories, teleporting our minds into the past.

Our past was real. It was sacred, it was sweet.

I don’t know what the future holds, and if I’m quite honest, right now I am anxious about it: Am I doomed to the same fate? Is my family? Loss instantly makes one so afraid of more loss. I have reason to be anxious, but I likewise have reason to hope.

Sorrow and joy have eclipsed my life for so long. When Mom died, it felt like all the brightness vaporized from my whole world. She was so bright and so optimistic and so full of light and life. Losing her has left such an enormous void in my life and in the lives of so many others. She was light in so many ways🤍. Right now, life feels so dark, but light will return to our eyes.

I am experiencing a depth of sorrow I never imagined possible and never wanted, but I know I will grow and heal to experience a happiness and a joy I could never before comprehend.

Loss has changed and shaped my life in unimaginable ways. In ways I never wanted, but this isn’t the end.

This isn’t my family’s end. This isn’t our end.

My Mom was a glorious light, and she was one of the best parts of my life. She gave me life, not just in my birth, but in all the joy she gave me. In all of our wonderful memories, in all of our laughter, in all of our joy. She made my life fun. She made everything fun.

I don’t know how to do this without her. I don’t know how to be bright and fun and loving, not like she was, but I want to honor her. I barely know how to laugh without her. It’s so dark without her right now, but the light is coming. I want to make her proud. I want to dance in the light she had, in a way she always wished she had.

I loved my Momma. I always will.

Thank you, Momma, for being the brightest light in my life.

I love you forever,

I love you for always.

On earth or in heaven,

Your baby I’ll be.

July 6, 2026

A chasm, a deep and rich valley, seems to separate me from my mother now. I feel such a vast distance from her. It seems like ages since she left, but these surreal feelings remain.

Strangely, it’s as if she was from an entirely different life. It feels unbelievable that I really had a Momma, and that now she’s obliterated.

It’s difficult to explain, but it often feels like she couldn’t have been real. My mind has a hard time reconciling that she is and then was — there’s a cruel dissonance.

How could she be all of these wonderful things and yet no longer be?

How can she affect every fiber of my being and yet not be in this world any longer?

Sudden, unexpected deaths transpose survivors between the worlds of “is” and “was,” leaving us in a liminal space between realities. It’s not an obsession with death or loss, it’s a new perspective forced upon us the moment they breathed their last breath

She gave me no reason to mourn while she was alive, she gave me no indication of her life being close to death. How long did she plan to leave me?

I wonder what she would say to me now. I wonder if her eyes would well with heavy tears.

I wonder if she would do it again, knowing what she knows now. Or maybe I don’t want to know.

She was real. It was all real. This life and this death of unfathomable depths confronts every layer of perspective. It stitches to each layer, a cord of red — the color of blood, the color or life poured out — and sews depth and love and loss into the fabric of my tattered and strewn life.

A necklace of tears my friend Kelly gifted me 🤍

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.

Splinters — Day 12: One Year Later

July 3, 2025

This is actually my second “Day 12” post: I deleted the first one because out of my wounds, I may have wounded another. As I heard John Mark Comer state, “our wickedness is fueled by our wounds.” I was childish in venting my frustrations with a person to the public, and I owe that individual and anyone who read my first post an apology. This is not the time, place, or space to address something of that nature. Especially because I know that person is hurting, too.

It’s heavy. It’s burdensome. Thoughts and sentences and simple human interaction, right now, are hard for me, it’s hard for my family, and it’s hard for our entire community. We all need grace, and grace in abundance.

Most of the time, I simply feel sick. I have no appetite [but don’t worry, I am eating], I feel nauseous and out-of-it and sad. I feel grateful, I feel sad, and I feel numb. Humans are so complex, how is it that we feel so much at the same time?

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We have been provided for in every way from the generous people from our church: “Give us this day our daily bread,” comes alive when each meal is delivered, with each meal perfectly supplying enough for my family each day. That has been beautiful and heartwarming and uplifting. People have been the hands and feet of Jesus each day, serving us, providing for us, ministering to us, and caring for us, and it has been astonishing and incredible to experience.

I cannot over-emphasize how grateful I am for our community and how in-awe I am for how we have been treated and loved.

I’ve never felt more provided for or taken care of than I do right now. “God is near to the broken hearted and saves the crushed in spirit” Psalm 34:18. I believe that now more than ever, despite my inevitable deconstruction. I believe it’s far easier to dismiss God than to have faith and trust in him under circumstances like these — this is when faith and trust becomes real.

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Daily Tip for Communicating with Someone in Mourning — Specifically Suicide Survivors

Saying “It doesn’t matter how they died,” is dismissive. When someone takes their own life, there is no natural cause, no illness, and no accident to blame.

Someone bereaved by suicide can only blame the person who committed the act, and his/her self. Suicide creates an arduous mental cycle. For me, it plays out something like this…

• I’m angry at my mom, she did this to me

• I’m confused. Why didn’t she reach out? Anyone would have helped her, I would have helped her

• I’m sad. She was in so much pain. What was she hopeless about? Why was she despairing?

• I’m confused and wounded. I don’t know what it’s like to have or to lose a child, but I cannot imagine she would give up life with her three living children because she was so desperate to be with her son. Her son, my brother, who also took his life.

• I’m sad, and I’m guilty. Did she know I loved her?

• I blame myself. Why didn’t I notice her? Why didn’t she want to confide in me? What did I miss?

And the cycle repeats. These are thoughts are examples of how suicide survivors think and process this type of death: grief from natural causes does not require this mental load. Thus, when one says that “it doesn’t matter how she died,” it points to their ignorance of the psychological impact and damage suicide survivors suffer.

Yes, all death is painful and comparing types of deaths certainly does not help anyone, but please try to understand the differences between a natural death and someone taking their own life.

Acknowledge the suicide survivor’s pain, and acknowledge your own pain. Vulnerability leads to life, bypassing of any type (spiritual bypassing, avoidance, denial, etc) leads to death. Take care of yourself — bypassing is not worth it.

July 3, 2026

Ah yes, Day 12. This was the first time I posted something critical about our former church. A few things sparked it: I had not been contacted, they held a women’s only suicide-specific night of healing, and the pastor did not mention her name or death to the congregation.

The lack of contact was very strange to me. My director from work, whom I barely knew (boss’s-boss’s-boss’s-boss) had reached out several times, but my pastor who I saw weekly never did. Nor did anyone from the executive staff — not until about two weeks ago, when they sent a kind card and flowers in honor of my Mom’s one year anniversary. I wonder if they mentioned her name at church that week.

The women’s only night of healing was a good idea… for women, but it completely neglected all men, as if my Mom’s life did not impact any men. I often wonder, had a man died, would they make it a night of men’s-only healing? Also… my family wasn’t invited to the event. And also… I’m her only surviving woman — the rest, the majority of her survivors, are men. Our lack of invitation hurt, then the lack of a place for the men in my life to go also hurt. It felt dismissive of male grief.

People weren’t ready for this information, though. When I first posted it, people called my family members panicking about it. That put guilt on my family members who didn’t write the post, and that wasn’t fair.

Things only got worse from here.

What I’ve observed, is that from outsider’s perspectives, it is always the griever’s responsibility to show grace. It’s the griever’s responsibility to reach out to people who hurt them. It’s the griever’s responsibility to consider the people who caused hurt’s feelings. It’s the griever’s responsibility to play the mental game of making sure no one else has hurt feelings. God forbid someone hurts the griever — that someone obviously didn’t know what to say or do… so it’s the griever’s responsibility to deal with their ignorance and excusable behavior.

Sigh.

This day marked beginning of a very big crack, splinters forming a great divide, a desolation that time does not mend.

I forgive them, and I thank them for reaching out a couple weeks ago and for the flowers.

The funny thing about pain is that you only experience it because you care. I loved these people, and I don’t believe love ever goes away. Circumstances can just change how you express it.

Dreams and Denial — Day 10: One Year Later

July 1, 2025

Day by day, more people leave, and tomorrow our last visitors will travel home. My nuclear family, all that remains, will experience one week together before some return home to North Carolina.

Then the “new normal” will really start to settle as we grasp for new routines.

My mind strives to protect me by covering me mainly in denial. Most of the time, reality feels miles away. I dream constantly of my Mother: dreams telling her why she shouldn’t leave, dreams of me finding her in witness protection, dreams that continue to deny reality. A properly-working mind knows when one has the capacity to wake up to reality, but for now my mind operates mainly from shock and denial.

I am anxious for when my mind will allow me to feel everything it must, for “pain demands to be felt,” and thus it’s only a matter of time.

Today, I am simply grateful again for everyone’s phenomenal support.

Daily Tip for Communicating with Someone in Mourning

The less decisions a person in mourning needs to make, the better. Mourning requires an enormous amount of mental energy, and helping make a decision alleviates a bit of mental fatigue.

July 1, 2026

My Momma was so excited about the mug pictured above. I got it for either Mother’s Day or her birthday 🩷. She eventually gave me one, too.

Gosh, I remember the intense denial. It was such a surreal feeling.

I remember the car ride down to the place that she died, moments after finding out, repeating “Scott, I can’t lose my Momma. I can’t lose my Momma too. Please God, not my Momma,” but it was too late.

I dreamed vividly, restlessly, for weeks. She was always just out of reach. My poor mind was working so hard to comprehend what happened to my Momma.

The only way that time heals, I believe, is through the new memories we make. The more memories we make without our loved one, the less our brain automatically looks for them in everything. The Grieving Brain comments that it takes an average of three years for the brain to process that someone is no longer a part of one’s life, and this is considered one of the only ways that time heals.

It softens the loss because, after about three years, the brain no longer assumes one’s loved one will be there. It takes a small piece of the mental load of grief and allows one’s mind to rest.

I do not dream everyday anymore, but I still often dream of my Momma.

My, how I miss her. I loved her so much.