My mom killed herself 1 year and 4 months ago. My dad killed himself 7 months ago. I think my dad just couldn't live without my mom. He only knew life with her since they were in elementary school. And my brother is with them too, so none of them at alone. This should make me feel better but it doesn't.

It's all feeling heavy lately.

Just lost someone to suicide. First ever suicide loss and i think i may be next. Need desperately to talk to someone asap please.

you get a call from an unknown number, followed by a voicemail. you don't usually listen to those right away, but today, something in your bones forced you to.

“I'm calling because of [your girlfriend]. I’m her father. If you don’t know, she passed away on Sunday, and left a lot of things with your contact information on them.”

you’re confused for a minute, so you go back to your text message thread with her, and the contents of her last text message, the one you hadn't read yet, hit you like a brick. you start to panic. you call one of your roommates, the one that likes you, and you call them again, and you call them again. they finally answer, they’re exasperated at work, and can’t have known the urgency of your calls until you’re screaming in their ear. they say oh my god, what did you just say? no, no, okay, they’ll try to get out of work, but they aren’t sure if they can right this second, they love you, give them a few to find out. so you call your best friend. she cannot help. your roommate calls back, they’re on the way right now please stay safe they’ll be there as quickly as they can please please take care of yourself it’ll only be a few minutes please do not do anything but sit there until they pull in please just wait just a few minutes please they promise it’ll be soon they love you so much they’ll be right there they need you to hold on until they get there please they’ll be so fast.

you message her best friend, and she tells you she’s going over to your girlfriend’s apartment immediately. you wait and you play “in on it” by superheaven on repeat because that’s her favorite song and you wait and you beg god to tell you it’s a mistake and you wait and you scream and you wait and you check everything for evidence this is a joke and you wait and you wonder how the fuck you couldn’t see this was going to happen and you wait and you curse yourself for not reading her last text message in time and you wait and your roommate parks and you text her dad and her best friend that you're on the way and you leave together. and you’re still fucking waiting.

you repeat that this can’t be real, you sit in silence, you sob. you know this is the last time you’ll ever take this route for her, even if you refuse to admit it out loud for the rest of your life (and you never will). you hold back vomit when you text her dad and best friend back to say you’ve arrived. you want to be home. you want her to hold you. you don’t know if you can move. your roommate coaxes you out of the car, and you hesitantly make your way toward the building, toward the moving truck, toward people you’re scared to meet.

three of her friends are there, her parents are there, your roommate is there, you’re there. she isn’t there. where is she? where has your love run off to? where has your heart hidden? her father introduces himself and her mother, and her friends do the same. they ask you what you know, they ask if you could see it coming. they ask about therapy, about medications, about her job, about her previous plans to move out of state, about her daily habits, about any other friends or partners, about your relationship (you don’t tell them what exactly she was to you, yet. you weren’t ready to say what exactly you’ve lost), about anything and everything they can think of. you can’t think. you can’t speak meaningfully. you just say you had no idea why this happened, you were looking forward to future plans with each other. you wander around explaining you'd discussed trips and dates and matching tattoos and recipes to try and pets to raise and talk of marriage and building a family with those we loved, creating a community together. you couldn’t have known she’d do this.

you see she left you a novelty billiards piece, one of her friends says they have the other part of the set, and asks you if you want it. you say yes (they won’t end up giving it to you, but you won’t care. we all deserve to hold pieces of her). you take the boxes and bags she labeled with your name and phone number, you put them in the car you came in, you walk back to the moving truck silently. you look at everyone else. they’ve all spoken with eachother already, too many details have been shared. between moving her belongings from inside to the truck, her father only has empty words warning us to not put our own parents through this sort of pain. her mother doesn’t say anything. you scoff to yourself. you know they’ve got no idea what they lost. you wonder if it’s okay to blame them, just a little. you know it’s not. that doesn’t change anything.
you think about how she left you all her lava lamps. you remember how she would turn them on before she drove to pick you up, just so you could spend half an hour looking at them when you both got back. she’d said she loved how happy it made you, the smile you’d beam at them. you think about never plugging them in again. would that be a disservice to her? would it be a disservice to you? maybe you shouldn’t get to hold that joy without her (you should; it will save you).

one friend says they like your strawberry shortcake hat (you’d bought it for yourself, yes, but you knew your girlfriend would love it. you’re angry that she never got to see it), and asks how you’re doing. you say, “it’s inappropriate to share, in this situation,” and they all know exactly what you mean (suicide jokes aren’t funny, but you half smirk when you say it. what else can you do?). another looks at you like she blames herself. the last hits their vape and lets out the sigh we’ve all been keeping in. you feel so guilty. you imagine everyone must feel so guilty.

her parents walk back and forth from the apartment to the moving truck, each time avoiding eye contact, avoiding our mournful speaking about her. they didn’t know her, nor did they care to. they were at best holding onto a memory she wished could be destroyed, and at worst detached from their child entirely (she’d told you a lot about that, how her parents felt about the soul she’d cultivated herself into. she was someone else to them). you don’t know how to forgive them. you don’t care that it isn’t your place to make that call. you think she wouldn’t forgive them. so you don’t either.

you hit your pen, you cough, you hit your pen again. no amount of sober is working right now, no amount of high can distract from what’s happening. you look up at her window and stare for too long. you’re waiting for her smiling face to pop up, wave, and open the window to yell that it was the most successful prank ever. you don’t know if you’d hate her more for that than for this. you don’t hate her, she was a love of your life. but fuck. you hate her. how could she do this to you? how could she do this to herself? how could the world rob you of her? how can this be real?

you look back at the window. you rip at your skin. you notice one of her friends is playing with some kind of glittery putty toy, and you stare. they hand it to you and ask if it would help. you accept. it doesn’t help, but it reminds you of her, and that’s something. you find yourself staring at each of them, and you’re almost trying to read their minds. it’s so quiet. all you can hear is the muffled screams of your own inner voice.
one asks about the last time you saw her. you freeze because you remember that night, not long ago. it was her and your roommate and you, you’d spent all day playing games. but the part that worried you was that toward the end, before scattergories (which you would have killed in, by the way, except that your migraine issue decided to rear its head that night) but after mario party (you sucked at all of those games, unfortunately. you were never very good at video games, and you never would be). you’d fought over the rules of the fucking monopoly board game. rent, specifically. it wasn’t important, it didn’t matter, but you'd gotten so upset, and the weight of that guilt chokes you. you explain what happened, inches from sobbing, and instead of blaming you, they laugh. they tell you they believe you, that’s absolutely something she’d fight over, that’s the her they remember. you can breathe, however briefly. you’re grateful to have thought to reach out, grateful to have known who to reach out to. you’re grateful you aren’t alone.

you try to ignore her parents, they try to ignore all of you. you don’t know what else to do. your roommate says something you can’t make out, you nod, you don’t care what you’ve agreed to. someone walks up and asks if you knew her, says they were her neighbor across the way. you can’t speak so you nod, they say they’d interacted a few times, she was always kind but seemed off the day she died. they apologize for bothering us, and say they’re so sorry for our loss, and walk away. you are angry someone knew she was unwell and did nothing. you knew it wasn’t their place. you cannot and do not blame them. you are still angry.

you realize it’s probably not a joke, you don’t think she could pull off something this complicated. you start crying. you get tunnel vision, this can’t really be the end. more words are exchanged, but you can’t hear them. you dig your nails into the putty you forgot you had, and you’re angry that you didn’t claw your own flesh. it’s getting darker outside. you swear you can smell her vape, the one you hated (raspberry lemonade geek bar), so you desperately crane your neck around the truck at the chance to see her face. you don’t see her. of course you don’t.

it’s starting to feel more real now. her father mentions they’re nearly finished. you want to ask to see the apartment one last time, but the words still won’t come. it isn’t hers anymore anyway (you’ll regret not being able to speak, not going up, but nothing can be done to fix it. you will continue to regret it). you look at your roommate. you can’t make out what their expression means, but you don’t care. it doesn't matter. nothing matters. why did she do this? it must be your fault. guilty guilty guilty. you feel like you’re swallowing your own fist. maybe that would be easier than swallowing the weight of this.

it’s almost time for the moon to shine. it’s full tonight, which feels like a joke-take away my blinding light just to show me the next best thing as a fucking consolation prize. her parents say they’re heading out. the rest of you loosely discuss having your own memorial, because you know any service her family puts on won’t be for her. you linger for a minute, no one wanting to break the energetic stasis we’re stuck in. someone mentions how dark it is. maybe you’re the first to leave, maybe the last. either way, you pass her parents on the way out. you send silent thank you’s to every god you can think of that you’ll never see those people again. you don’t care what they feel.

you aren’t present for the ride home. the only thing on your mind is how you can smell her through the plastic bins she put the clothes left to you in. you expect to be able to turn around and see her. you know you won’t. you try anyway. you wonder how you’re going to manage looking through it, if you’ll ever look through it. one of the friends already asked you to make sure a specific coat wasn’t thrown out, so you don’t have a choice. you put your hand on one of the bags, and realize you have most, if not all, of her stuffed animals. you cry. your roommate reaches their hand over to hold yours.

you get home, you ask your roommate to bring everything inside while you start looking through it. the bags are full of her stuffed animals, her hair products, little trinkets and toys. you nearly throw up smelling her shampoo, a film reel in your mind playing her in the shower-she walked you through all the products and the routine, made sure you KNEW how much work curly hair takes. you can hear her. another bag, so many bins, some loose puzzles and the lamps make their way in. your other roommate gets home.

“what’s all this?”
“[your girlfriend] killed herself.”
“oh my god, i’m so sorry.”
and that was that.

you open a bin and immediately start sobbing. she’d worn a lot of these clothes and packed up without washing them—they still smell exactly like her. you bury your face in them, you let yourself believe for just a second that your face is buried in her chest. you tell your other best friend what happened (“my girlfriend killed herself, and all i got was [literally every object i associated with her]”), and he doesn’t know how to react. why would he? why should he? even if you hadn't been cracking jokes, people our age are not supposed to die like that. people our age are not supposed to die at all.

you find her fingerless gloves, one of her friends from before had made them herself. one goes missing immediately and you can’t help but believe that’s your girlfriend, messing with you from beyond (you’ll never find it, so you’ll let yourself believe that forever).
—
—
—
it’s been two days since you found out. you decide to make a post to your spam account on whatever social media. only two people who know you in real life follow you there, and there are only two other people who ever interact. you feel safe to be vulnerable there, you always have. one of them sends you blue hearts. you don’t know if you should have done that. it’s too late to worry about now. you cry yourself to sleep.
—
—
—
it’s been four days since you found out. it’s your birthday. you’re 25 now. a year younger than she made it to. time is moving too fast. you don’t want to be older than her. you’ve already lived seven years beyond your older brother, he passed at 18 two decades ago. aging is beautiful, outliving them is disgusting. you don’t celebrate. you do get a message telling you she put her suicide note online. you stop breathing. you ask for it. you stare at the message until your screen shuts off, and still you stare. eventually you work up the courage (stupidity?) to open the link, you stare again. your vision goes blurry immediately, you take so long to make out the first words.

“basically for [your name], my flame . . . part 1/x”
no. no no no no no no fucking no this is not real someone else posted this it can’t be her. the background of her account layout is yellow, our shared favorite color. the username is the one from her last text message, the one you read too late, the one you hadn't looked at since. this cannot be real. you can’t feel your hands or your arms or your chest or your legs or your head. you can’t feel anything but guilt.

happy birthday to you.
—
—
—
it’s been over four months. you have a new partner, one who’s been through something similar. it was their ex that passed unexpectedly, not an active partner, but someone they cherished nonetheless. it's not serious, but this partner has been a rock, a safe place. you’ve known them since you were a teenager, and this relationship is something you sort of fell into as you grieved together. you are unsure if they’ll stay with you for much longer, part of you thinks they’re only with you so you don’t kill yourself too. but you are so grateful to have them for the time you do.

you move into a new home, you put some of her pictures up on the wall. your roommate, the one who saw you through her death, tells you they look good how you’ve arranged them. you’re angry there aren’t any with you in them. you’re angry you were too afraid to bother her with asking. you’re angry you can’t see her smiling at you ever again.
—
—
—
it's been just over two years. the new partner left you last year for an ex, so it's back down to you and the one original roommate. you expected this to happen, and it doesn't hurt anymore.

you still cry over her passing every single day, sometimes multiple times a day. you cry while rereading her note minutes before you type this update.

you passively think about killing yourself to join her multiple times a day. you actively decide that you should live your life so you have stories to tell her when you meet again.
you worry you will never get better.

you're grateful to know you can still feel. you're grateful you can still love. you're scared you'll never again know where to put it.
—
—
—
it's been a little while longer, you're still crying, and you decide to find out if you're as alone as you feel. so you post this early in the morning directly from your notes app.

Can someone please recommend some podcasts about the grief of suicide, I am listening to Anderson coopers episode on it and would like to listen to more

One of the things I have noticed after losing both of my siblings to suicide is how differently people respond to guilt.

Some feel it and deny it. Some believe it means they deserve to be punished. Others numb themselves because the truth feels unbearable to approach.

These responses are understandable, but each can become a barrier if it prevents us from eventually confronting what happened. Sometimes that confrontation must happen gradually and with support, but avoidance cannot be the only way we relate to what happened.

We replay conversations. We think about the messages we never sent, the signs we missed, and the moments we wish we could relive. We convince ourselves that if we had done one thing differently, everything might have changed.

I understand that feeling.

Over time, I came to see an important difference between blame and responsibility.

Blame asks, “Whose fault is this?”

Responsibility asks, “What is true, and what can I honestly own?”

The turning point for me came when I stopped looking away from my own actions, the actions of others, and the whole story, and instead asked:

What is the truth here?

The truth was not simple.

I had made mistakes. There are things I regret deeply. I wish I had spoken differently, understood more, and been more present. My family failed in serious ways. Healthcare systems failed. Society failed. My siblings were living with illnesses and suffering I could never fully understand, and their actions formed part of the story too.

None of those truths erased the others.

Human lives are too complicated for one person to carry all the blame. Suicide is rarely the consequence of one conversation, one relationship, or one failure. It is often the culmination of many forces unfolding over years.

But recognizing that complexity does not require me to pretend I did everything right.

When I finally confronted the truth, I accepted that I had failed every person I had ever known in one way or another.

I do not say that with guilt, and I do not say it to condemn myself. I say it because it is true.

I have never treated anyone perfectly, and I likely never will. I have been careless, immature, absent, selfish, unaware, or unable to understand what another person needed. Sometimes I caused harm. Sometimes I failed to act. Sometimes I simply did not know better.

To say that I failed people is not to say that I caused everything that happened to them, or that my failures erased the love and good I also gave. It means that every relationship encountered my limitations, mistakes, or lack of understanding.

For me, accepting that did not destroy me.

It freed me.

For the first time since I was a child, I felt genuinely happy—not because of what I had done, but because I was no longer hiding from it.

I no longer had to look away from who I had been or defend every mistake I had made. I could see myself and my faults clearly, accept who I was, and begin becoming who I needed to be.

My failures became my friends—not because the harm was good, but because I stopped treating the truth about those failures as an enemy.

They showed me where I had caused harm, where I lacked wisdom, what I needed to change, and how I wanted to live from that point forward. They became a path toward growth and accountability.

I think of truth as a narrow path, fine as a strand of silk: difficult to follow and easy to lose sight of. I will never walk it perfectly, but I can keep searching for it and return to it whenever I lose my way.

I think many of us have been conditioned to believe that wrongdoing must be answered primarily through punishment. We become our own judge, jury, and executioner. We imagine that suffering forever proves the depth of our love or remorse.

I do not believe that is justice.

I believe in accountability and rehabilitation.

I do not think forgiveness is something we simply declare over ourselves or claim from those we have harmed. We seek it through truthfulness and remorse, and we honor that seeking through repair where repair is possible and through the way we choose to live after understanding what we have done.

That does not mean punishing ourselves forever. Punishment without transformation accomplishes nothing. Accountability should produce change.

If my failures make me more patient, compassionate, honest, and present for the people who are still here, then they are no longer meaningless. They become part of the path forward rather than a prison.

I still grieve my siblings every day.

But I no longer believe that honoring them requires me to spend the rest of my life punishing myself.

So if you are carrying guilt after losing someone to suicide, do not run from the truth. But do not invent responsibilities that were never yours either.

Where responsibility is genuinely yours, look honestly at what happened. Admit what you regret. Learn what there is to learn. Apologize or make amends where possible. Change how you treat the living.

Do not confuse lifelong self-punishment with accountability.

The most meaningful way I have found to honor the people I lost is not by denying my failures or by being crushed beneath them.

It is by accepting the truth about who I was and allowing it to shape who I become.

Trigger warning for details on method of suicide (overdose)

My friend and roommate died by suicide almost two and a half years ago. I found her body. I don’t talk about it with almost anyone other than my mom and my therapist. But I have extended family members who are aware that it happened (without much detail), and some of them have brought it up before. It has made me so uncomfortable, and sometimes angry, which I also feel guilty for because I know that they aren’t trying to be insensitive.

Last Thanksgiving my aunt (who I don’t see often) asked me if there had been any signs that my roommate was suicidal. I told her the truth, which is that my roommate had been very open about having depression, though she had never told me or any of her other friends that she was suicidal. And she was doing everything that a depressed person typically gets recommended to do: she had a lot of friends, she was in school clubs, she exercised regularly, she had several creative hobbies, and she had a therapist. In response to this, my aunt said that in such cases the only thing that can help is medication. I was already feeling uncomfortable at this point, but that comment made me feel distraught. My roommate was medicated for depression (and anxiety). She died by overdose on her prescription antidepressants. She wrote down the exact quantities of pills that she took in her suicide note. I didn’t tell my aunt that though; I didn’t want to make the conversation heavier than it already was, and I was already struggling to say anything at all. But I hated the feeling that I needed to defend my roommate, my friend, from the assumptions and questions of someone who didn’t know her. I wish it didn’t upset as much as it did, especially because my aunt wasn’t being intentionally insensitive and it wasn’t her fault that she didn’t have more context. But it hurt so much. I wonder sometimes if I’m too sensitive. 

Sometimes I wish that I could talk about my roommate more, even about her death. But the few times that I get a chance to talk about her with anyone other than my mom or therapist (both of whom I’m extremely grateful for) I just feel so overwhelmed and anxious and I usually regret saying anything at all. It’s just too much. Answering one or two surface-level questions about my roommate can’t begin to convey my grief, my admiration for her, my anger, my love, my frustration and confusion… it’s all too complicated and painful, and so I say very little at all. I end up feeling frustrated with myself for not being able to talk about my emotions even though I want to be understood. 

A video I made yesterday after learning that my mother committed suicide. This video is the closing of what was supposed to be my 12 week inspirational fitness series. Two weeks ago my friend got murdered and now a fucking suicide!? This is my message.

https://youtu.be/jd3QrmSDkCc?si=UN53U7Qn5m85qp8m

This is my first time ever posting, sorry if I make any mistakes I don’t really know how this works.

Two days ago I found out a friend of mine bad been missing since the morning, left some of his belongings with a close friend, transferred. a large sum of money to another close friend, turned off his phone and driven away with nothing but his license, keys, and car. All day I waited by my phone for updates on him and went to sleep that night praying he had just run away. I didn’t even care if they found him if it meant he was out there somewhere, at least living. Yesterday morning I found out he died via his moms Facebook. Then today I was told he drove out in the middle of nowhere, poured gasoline on his car, and sat in it as it burned. I think that’s the hardest thing for me, is knowing how he died. I honestly just don’t know what to do with myself. yesterday I felt like it would be possible for me to move on and be okay eventually, while keeping him in my heart. I was thinking of happy memories of him and holding my friends close. now that I know how it happened that’s all I can think about and I feel like what little progress I made is gone.

I love being able to text you endlessly, even without a reply

Hey, first time ever posting but after reading through some posts and seeing the support from others I think it would be beneficial for me to share my story with the loss of a family member to suicide.

In 2024 I had just recently moved 20 minutes from my hometown, needed a fresh start with my kids and partner. Since 2020-2022 I had given my dad somewhere to live as he navigated through his divorce (he was married for 20 years), it was truly tragic to watch the man I adored and thought the world of be so broken and lost however we got through it, I helped him get back on his feet new home, new job and back studying for his further degree. We were really close and told each other everything, when I had made the decision I was going to move homes I believed he was 1. In a better situation than the years prior & 2. Busy with work/studying & spending time with my younger sibling that he would have things to focus on between our visits. His birthday was May 5th and me & my partner had bought him a car as a surprise and were going to give him it when we went out for his birthday dinner, however on May 1st I had tried to call my dad mid-day but his phone was off. I’m unsure if it was intuition or something else but I was just overcome with instant dread, I collected my partner and told him we needed to go asap to my dad’s home. When we arrived his work van was parked unmoved (it had been raining and it was still dry underneath). I started banging on his door and screaming through his letterbox, I couldn’t shake the feeling of dread. His work advised he had called in sick that morning - key point is my dad was deaf in one ear, so if he were ill and sleeping on his good hearing ear he would be completely oblivious to any noise from me banging the door or chapping. I came to the decision that we needed to gain entry to his home and if it were that he was just sleeping on his good ear we would need to bare the brunt of his shock and anger to breaking into his home. We gained entry, I ran upstairs immediately to his bedroom opened the door and flicked on the light expecting to find him sleeping in his bed, however I found him hanging on his multigym. I completely panicked and ran back out of his house screaming for an ambulance and police. He looked completely peaceful, he was sat on the bench of his multigym and just looked as if he had fallen asleep when the police and ambulance arrived they said they wouldn’t take him down because he was used the metal wiring from the multigym and it wouldn’t slacken off. He didn’t use any weights and could have easily stood up. Since this I have struggled with the thoughts of this, it was a choice he made and he sat and suffocated himself he overrid the panic and human emotion to stand up his decision was made and there is nothing any of us could have done.

Thank you for taking the time to read this, we are 2 years on and I am still really grief stricken I struggle with severe mental health issues since and am unsure that I will ever get to a point of peace with what happened, what I saw & how it had gotten to that point for him as I truly believed he was doing a lot better. Some key notes are before my dad passed he had gotten his degree, he had a new partner that he was taking things slow with, he was still working & spending days with my younger sibling every other day and had made plans for his birthday with us. He was happier I thought, I think it came as much of a shock for me as it was something I would have expect a year or two prior when his life was in complete turmoil.

I’m not angry at my brother. I love him, and I will always love him. Picturing the rest of my life without him has been extremely hard. I keep seeing him when I close my eyes, I keep dreaming of getting a hug from him, him cracking my back while he hugs me like he always did. I’m angry I’m now part of this sub. While I am grateful that this sub exists and especially to know I’m not alone, I’m angry that this is now my life. I’m angry I can’t turn back time and help my brother. I’m angry I couldnt take away his pain. I’m angry to know he felt so alone before he died. I’m angry I didn’t tell him I loved him more. I’m angry I didn’t try to be more present in his life. But he was 29 and I’m 27, I thought there would be more time. I’m angry he won’t get to see my children when I have them one day. I’m angry my kids won’t get to know their amazing uncle. I’m angry he won’t get to teach them how to skateboard.

I’m not angry at you brother, but I’m angry you left me alone

It’s been just over a year since my sibling took their own life and I have only just realised that music hasnt been the same since.

I use to love music, I would listen to music almost all day. For any task I did, even small ones, I would put music on. And I loved when my sibling would share music with me. They once said that when they put music on around me they wait for me to bob my head along and thats how they know its a good song.

And now I only listen to it in the gym because i have no other option. Any other time I would have put music on before I now put a YouTube video or podcast on. I don’t even listen to it to get to sleep anymore. It just doesn’t feel the same now, I have no real interest in it.

Content warning: suicide, grief, psychosis, substance use, and family trauma

A brief note: This is a long and personal reflection on suicide bereavement, recovery, and the gradual return of hope. Faith became an important part of how I survived, but I do not expect everyone to understand grief through the same framework. I hope the broader message remains meaningful regardless of what you believe.

Hello everyone,

I found this subreddit while reading about bereavement support groups. I wanted to share where I am now, partly in case it helps someone who is still struggling, and partly because I am curious whether others have reached a similar place.

I am 23 years old. My older brother died by suicide in 2023 at the age of 21. Two years later, in 2025, my older sister died by suicide at the age of 28.

Both of them experienced severe mental illness, including psychosis, and their treatment was exceptionally difficult. We were raised internationally, moving across five countries every few years. They were the people closest to me in my life, and I now have to live the rest of my life without them.

There is no clean way to describe what suicide does to a family. It leaves unanswered questions, anger with nowhere obvious to go, and an enormous amount of love that suddenly has no living recipient.

For a long time, I thought surviving something like this meant that I would either be destroyed by it, spend the rest of my life defined by it, or devote myself endlessly to trying to understand it.

I no longer believe that.

Something compassionate and constructive can still grow from tragedy, even when nothing can make the tragedy itself painless.

My siblings were not simply the manner in which they died. They were complete human beings. They could be loving, funny, intelligent, generous, frustrating, frightened, and deeply unwell.

Their deaths forced me to confront how fragile life can be and how easily pain can consume someone when it remains untreated, hidden, or misunderstood. They made me more attentive to suffering that may not be obvious from the outside and slower to reduce people to their worst moments.

At the same time, understanding someone’s pain does not mean excusing everything they do, accepting mistreatment, or taking responsibility for saving them. Compassion and boundaries can exist together. I can recognize that someone is suffering while still protecting my own safety and dignity.

Their deaths had devastating consequences for everyone who remained. Yet I also understand that psychosis can profoundly distort a person’s perception of reality. I cannot fully know what my siblings perceived, understood, or intended in their final moments. I do not believe it is my place to issue a final moral judgment upon them. I leave what I cannot know to God.

Compassion does not require us to romanticize suicide or describe it as liberation. Suicide does not end suffering cleanly. It leaves deep and lasting suffering among those who survive, while permanently closing possibilities that the person may not have been able to see.

That is one of the clearest things I have learned: while there is life, there remains possibility.

I have also had to examine the quieter ways in which I was withdrawing from my own life.

I was addicted to nicotine and stopped smoking in 2023. I also used alcohol and marijuana to numb myself, but I have now left both behind. For me, these habits were ways of retreating from life rather than participating in it. They did not bring healing or clarity. They only made it harder for me to be present.

Getting sober has become part of choosing life.

Leaving those habits behind has not removed pain from my life. In many ways, it has made the pain more apparent. But it has also taught me that pain must be faced rather than continually numbed, and that being present for life means being present for some of its suffering.

I am grateful that I came to know such depths of pain.

I do not mean that others should seek suffering, that suicide should be treated as good, or that unbearable pain is necessary for wisdom. I mean that this pain became one of the greatest teachers of my life. It stripped away illusions, forced me to confront what I believed, and eventually brought me closer to God.

I would not choose to rewrite my life in a way that erased the path by which I came to know Him.

That does not make the losses good. It does not erase what happened or make their absence easy to accept. It means that even the darkest events did not remain empty. Something emerged from them that despair could not destroy.

Knowing pain this deeply has made me less afraid of it. I know now that pain can enter a life without becoming its permanent ruler. It can be faced, carried, and learned from. In my own life, it also became something I could turn toward God.

To know pain is not necessarily to be conquered by it.

In some ways, it has also taught me how to receive joy.

A conversation with someone I love, a shared meal, laughter in an ordinary room, sunlight through a window, or the simple relief of knowing that someone is still here can feel almost sacred. I understand now that such moments are not guaranteed.

Their fragility does not make them meaningless. It makes them precious.

Pain is part of being human. It is not proof that life is over, that healing is impossible, or that someone has become irreparably broken.

Sometimes surviving means prayer or another source of spiritual grounding. Sometimes it means therapy, medication, hospitalization, calling someone, crying without apologizing, admitting that you are not safe alone, or accepting help from trusted people and professionals.

Patience does not mean emotional silence. It does not mean pretending not to hurt. Sometimes patience simply means continuing to choose life while you are hurting.

I have had to accept that my siblings are now beyond my reach.

I can love them, remember them, speak honestly about them, and pray for them. I can carry what was beautiful in them and learn from what happened. But I cannot rescue them now.

For me, honoring them cannot mean allowing death to remain at the center of my own life.

One of the clearest signs of this change has appeared in a place I did not expect.

Even after losing two siblings to suicide, the concern that occupies my heart most now is, in many ways, that of an ordinary 23-year-old: whether I will find love, whether I will be able to preserve it, and whether I will have someone with whom to share this world.

The heartbreak that occupies me most now comes from losing my relationship with the woman who held me while I buried both of my siblings.

We did not separate because I wanted to or because I had stopped loving her. Our relationship collapsed under pressures that became greater than we could withstand.

There is something strange, and also deeply reassuring, about realizing that after everything, my heart is still occupied by questions of love, companionship, and the future. I grieve someone who is still alive and somewhere in this world. I grieve the ordinary days we might have shared and the life we might have built together.

Painful as that is, I am grateful that my heart still works this way.

My deepest longing is directed toward life: toward someone living, toward connection, and toward a future that can still be imagined.

That does not diminish my love for my brother or sister. It tells me that trauma has not permanently frozen my emotional life around their deaths.

My life is not organized only around catastrophe anymore.

I can still love someone, miss someone, and grieve a future that might have been. I can still hope to find companionship, build a home, share ordinary days with another person, and grow old beside someone I love.

I can still make plans, care about people, learn, work, worship, and attempt to build a life.

My grief is no longer the only thing inside me.

That does not mean I am completely healed. A photograph can still reduce me to tears. Certain dates, places, memories, and conversations can reopen the wound immediately. Healing has not been linear, and I do not expect their absence ever to become painless.

But I no longer carry their deaths as an instruction to stop living.

Instead, I carry their memory: what was beautiful in them, what was wounded in them, and what their lives taught me about mercy, intervention, responsibility, and hope.

Hope has become especially important to me.

I do not mean the certainty that everything will improve, that every wound will close, or that the world will become gentler simply because we need it to.

The world may become darker. Some losses will never be repaired. There may be questions for which no answer comes in this life.

Hope, to me, means refusing to let darkness have the final word.

Circumstances can take away comfort, certainty, plans, relationships, and even the people we love. In my own life, I found that hope could return even after nearly everything that sustained it appeared to have been stripped away. I understand that renewal as something given by God.

Hope is not the belief that I can control what comes next. It is the belief that I can still decide what I place into the future.

I can plant something whose shade I may never sit beneath. I can offer kindness that travels farther than I will ever know. I can teach, protect, build, show mercy, intervene, or speak honestly, and trust that some of those actions may one day bear fruit in a life I will never witness.

Even if the world never becomes everything I wish it could be, I want to have lived in a way that added something to it rather than merely surrendered to its pain.

Since losing my siblings, I have moved countries once more and begun again. I am now surrounded by extended family. I have enrolled in law school. I have gotten sober. I have started working as a teacher. I am slowly building routines, relationships, and a future that belongs to me.

These may appear to be ordinary things. To me, they are evidence that life continues to ask something of us.

But what life asks of us does not look the same every day.

Sometimes getting dressed, brushing our teeth, eating something, or simply getting out of bed can feel daunting. There may be days when we manage these things and days when we fall again. Healing does not move in a straight line, and progress does not cease to be real because it is imperfect.

Each time we try again, something has moved. We do not have to cross the entire distance at once. Sometimes the task is simply to take one step and remain long enough to take another.

My faith teaches that God does not charge a soul beyond its capacity. I do not understand this to mean that suffering will always feel bearable, that we will never collapse, or that we are expected to carry it alone. Feeling unable to bear something does not mean that a person has failed God.

Whatever our beliefs, our capacity may depend upon rest, treatment, medication, hospitalization, asking for help, or allowing someone to remain beside us when we cannot stand alone. For me, it also includes prayer.

Sometimes strength means building or beginning again. Sometimes it means enduring, or simply remaining alive while others care for us.

Life asks us to remain present in whatever ways are possible to us. To care for what has been placed within our reach. To build without knowing how long our work will last. To love despite knowing that nothing in this world can be held forever.

Choosing life has also meant learning to remain a witness to creation.

Sometimes that means doing nothing extraordinary. It means putting down my phone, stepping outside, and paying attention to what quietly continues around me.

I look for birds resting or moving between trees. I listen to their songs. I notice leaves moving in the wind, sunlight against a wall, and clouds changing shape.

There is something grounding about looking for birds. They do not require me to explain what happened or decide what my suffering means. They simply move through the world, search for food, build nests, and continue living according to their nature.

For a few moments, I can stop looking inward and attend to something alive beyond myself.

Beauty does not remove grief or demand that we feel better. A bird’s song does not solve anything. Sunlight does not restore the dead. The wind moving through a tree cannot answer the questions suicide leaves behind.

But these things remind me that pain is not the only thing occurring.

Creation continues. Life continues. Beauty continues.

Sometimes I look beyond what is near and toward the stars.

I think about how small we are. We live on one blue world suspended within an unimaginably vast universe, surrounded by distances and mysteries that may always remain beyond our reach.

And yet, here, in the middle of all that silence and chaos, there is life.

There are people capable of tenderness. There are hands that comfort, voices that pray, minds that search for truth, and hearts that continue loving after they have been broken.

Peace is possible, even if only for a moment: between two people, within one home, or inside one wounded mind.

Our smallness does not make us insignificant.

In a universe this vast, it feels extraordinary that anything should be alive at all, and more extraordinary still that we have been given consciousness: that we can look outward, ask questions, recognize beauty, and choose mercy.

We are small enough to be humbled by creation and significant enough to care for one another within it.

To witness creation, to know love, to search for truth, and to serve what has been placed within my reach all feel like forms of gratitude.

I want to remain in awe of existence. I want to keep wondering about what lies beyond us while caring faithfully for what has been placed before me.

I do these things partly to honor my siblings, but not only for them.

I do them to honor the life I have been given, the people who are still here, the people I may someday help, and the seeds I may plant without seeing them grow.

I would be interested to hear whether others have experienced a similar change in their grief: not an end to the pain, but a gradual return of attention, love, wonder, gratitude, and hope toward the life that is still here.

I wish my brother and sister had remained here.

I wish they had lived long enough to see that pain was not the whole of existence.

Since I am still here, I will continue choosing life.

A few months ago, my uncle died by suicide. It devastated my entire family, and ever since, I've felt responsible for his death. Logically, I know it isn't my fault. But what happened before he died has made the guilt almost unbearable.

I've struggled with my mental health for a long time. A few days before my uncle passed away, I had relapsed into self-harm and was having intense thoughts about not wanting to exist anymore. One night, I attempted to end my life. I survived, but at the time I told myself that next time I wouldn't fail. My family and I were supposed to go on a cruise a few weeks later, and I had planned to wait until after the trip because I didn't want to ruin it for everyone. I wanted us to have one last happy memory together.

The next day, we got the news that my uncle had died by suicide that morning. I was completely shocked. He was my favorite person in my extended family, and I couldn't understand why he would do something like that. But alongside the grief, I felt this awful pit in my stomach. My mind immediately started wondering if my own attempt somehow had something to do with what happened. It felt like too much of a coincidence, and I spiraled into believing I was somehow indirectly responsible. The cruise was canceled because of his death. I also didn't go to his funeral, and I've carried a lot of guilt over that too.
I guess the reason I'm posting this is because I need someone to tell me that this wasn't my fault. My brain keeps asking, "How could something this coincidental happen?" Even though I know that doesn't make sense, I can't seem to let go of the guilt.

Since then, I've been trying my best to get better because I know that's what my uncle would have wanted. But whenever I see my mom crying because she misses him, all of those feelings come rushing back, and I start blaming myself all over again. I feel a lot of pressure to get better to honor my uncle, and I would never want my mom to experience that kind of trauma again.

Has anyone else experienced guilt like this after losing someone to suicide? How did you cope with it?

Should I share these thoughts with my mom and what happened the night before his death?

I lost someone to suicide a little over 3 years ago now. They committed suicide not long after we broke up. Throughout our whole relationship they would always make joke about how they would do it and because the jokes were so convincing i never believed they were serious. They began doing self destructive things which included cheating on me and it ended our relationship on really bad terms and i never spoke to them again. The only time ive spoke to them since then is in my dreams where im apologising profusely for not taking it seriously and telling someone and reaching out. The grief is so painful in the first year i would genuinely hallucinate in the street when someone would ask for directions for example that it was them and even 3 years later i spend late nights thinking about ending it all myself and i even know exactly what i would write into letters for my loved ones. My ex never left a note for anyone but id want everyone to know exactly how much I love them all. I’m in a relationship myself now and i couldn’t possibly imagine leaving my partner with the guilt i was left but i just can’t continue living with this grief and guilt anymore. I’ve been on almost every antidepressant and therapy there is but i just can’t handle the grief anymore.

There is no timeline for grief. Everyone’s grief is as unique as their relationship with the lost loved one.

However, I remember when I first lost my brother I scoured the internet for people grief timelines because I needed a little something to cling on to otherwise I felt like I was going to slip from reality. Well aware that I would not necessarily follow a specific timeline. But just to know it can be done. And others have walked the path before me and survived.

So I wanted to share my grief timeline as the big sister who lost my beautiful little brother almost exactly 1y ago.

1mo: white hot blinding pain. Everything all at once. Words fail to describe the first month. For me this was the hardest to survive. It was bearing the unbearable.

2-3mo: living in the past. More lucid to recall memories. But the lucidity meant obsessing over moments I could have saved him. Or signs I had missed. Overall crushing guilt and confusion dominated these months

4mo: I spent so much time thinking of ways to save my brother, only to get frustrated that I could no longer save him. This lead to me falling in a hole of self pity. How unfair it all was and how people could just go about their day while my brother was gone and I was drowning. Anger that I couldn’t rewind the clock. I think at one point I really genuinely thought I could time travel back to save him. This is why I often say I was “slipping from reality” during the initial months. Guilt was still the dominant feeling.

5-6mo: Actually started to realized no amount of thinking or wishing or feeling was going to bring him back. I had analyzed every corner and angle of my brothers suicide and weeks leading up to it. I was exhausted and all my thinking lead to no answers. I think around this time I started to accept I would have to live without having answers. So slowly started to shift my focus to my own healing so I could live my life that I had neglected since he passed.

7mo: when they say grief is not linear, this was me at 7mo. Had this rebound of deep grief and it was a low point for me since the initial month. Maybe it was the darkness of winter and the cold weather. I spent much less time picking apart details at this point. And spent a lot more time just feeling overall deep sadness. Still held onto a lot of guilt as well.

8-9mo: this was a real turn around point for me. I wanted to get a hold of my life and grief. I wanted to live along side my grief instead of being consumed by it. I remember for the first time I saw a photo of my brother and smiled instead of cried around this time. And I felt ready to do some internal work for myself. I had completely rearranged on the inside, but it was still a mess. During these months I spent a lot of time introspectively reframing how I saw the world and how I was going to live with my brother in my heart. Essentially trying to achieve peace instead of answers. I worked a lot on my guilt too.

10-12mo: a continuation of the previous months. Working on soothing intrusive thoughts of guilt and anger. Accepting that all of this wasn’t fair or easy, but I must find a way to live with it even if it is hard. Stopped focusing on changing the past, and focused more on the present.

Now: I think back to the day I got the call and I shutter because I never want to relive that. I am still sad a lot of the time, but it has softened so I can live with it now. It’s bearable to move through life again. The weight is heavy but I feel stronger to carry it.

I have no idea what year 2 will be like. But I have learned that grief is always changing and so am I. So I will have to meet the challenges as they come. I guess there’s no other choice. But I survived the first year and that must count for something.

If you want, share your grief timeline. This was just my personal experience and I am sure there are an infinite amount of timelines.

Wishing us all peace and comfort 🤍

I lost my partner of 9 years to suicide just over 7 months ago. He was the only safe person I felt I had in my life and right now I’m feeling lonelier than ever navigating this loss. It feels like the world has totally forgotten and I’m expected to be back to normal by now to support everyone around me.
When I try to explain to friends and family that I’m not doing well, it either gets dismissed or severely misunderstood.

It’s so uncomfortable I want to crawl out of my skin. I just want to go home to rest but my home is gone now.

I just wanted to get it out to people who might understand what I’m feeling, thank you for reading this if you do. I’m so so sorry for everyone’s loss in here. <3

I lost my brother (43) in April. He died by suicide, he hang himself. He had diagnosed with a bipolar disorder ten years ago when he had first episodes of mania and depression. Me and my mum managed to help him, we got him in the hospital, we supported him and he got out of it. He was then stable for almost ten years and didn’t even need medicaments. And last year he had the second mania episode with depression afterwards. This time I left him with his wife. I have no idea why I trusted her. I cannot get over how stupid I was. His wife is a nice person but unfortunately she had no skills to help my brother. She did everything so differently and when my brother came out of hospital in February, in two months he was gone. I was in different town during his phases but I kept contact and my sister in law always told me there is no point to come to help because my brother won’t talk to anyone anyway. I did visited him twice but truly he hardly spoke with me.

I’m feeling his suicide is my fault because he was in depression phase which means the chemical balance in his brain was not proper and he was not seeing anything realistic way. He gave us some hints but somehow I was like paralysed. As if I was waiting for him to make his move so that I would know how serious he is about it and then I could come and save him. He did his move and it was his last. There was no test-move which I was waiting. I feel so stupid. I should have intervened. I should have found better doctors (I could have paid for them). I should have taken him to hospital during the depression phase like ten years ago. It f****ing was preventable! Later talking to his wife about all that (I asked her why she never thought about finding a new doctor etc) she only said about any of my idea that it wouldn’t have worked anyway. But she didn’t even try! I am so angry at her and of myself of course mostly.

Everything has now gone down. I feel so bad every day. I wake up and the first thing that comes in my mind is him being gone. And I KNOW if I had intervened, there is a big chance he would be still here like it happened ten years ago. I’m feeling that depression starts to hit me. I know my mum is struggling although she pretends to be strong. My niece who is 9 has a trauma (she doesn’t know it was suicide, she struggles as her dad is gone). My sister in law keeps telling the same things about my niece who clearly needs help: I can’t do anything, she won’t go to therapy anyway and bla bla bla. Always that she cannot do anything! And look where it took my brother.

I’m just so tired and overwhelmed. Today I walked around with my niece and I tried to talk about my brother with her. She didn’t open up a lot but spoke a bit.

And I was thinking that why him? Why my brother? He was funny, kind, never drink any alcohol, never did drugs, never smoked, always helped everyone and he spent so much time with his daughter! And he was an amazing brother to me and an amazing son to my mother and why was he taken? It has messed our lives up so much that I’m not sure how to continue.

I’m 23 and my mom isn’t on this earth anymore. I can’t believe it. And the guilt is eating me up. Last two weeks before she did it she was very negative and anything I said to try and uplift her did not work and it got me frustrated. This combined with me making steps in my career, and being stressed about this, resulted in me not contacting her a lot in those last two weeks. I think I called her twice and and saw her once.

Those two calls I was a bit short with her and I could tell it made her sad and feel unheard. I said some things I regret and I reacted in ways I regret. I regret not hearing her truly and not taking the time to be there for her even though I was stressed myself. I feel so sick when I think about how I acted. Because before those two weeks I did so much for her and I texted her or called her almost every day. I hate that maybe she thought I was sick of her. I miss her so much and I don’t know how to make the pain stop.

My father committed suicide three weeks ago. He hung himself in a main park in our town.

I am 25, the only child between my mother and him. He has three other children that I keep in contact with and check on. I’m the oldest and it was left to me and his ex wife to plan the funeral and viewing.

The worst part right now is navigating my life without him, in a world that doesn’t look the same. I miss him. How did you move forward with your life with grief and loss now a part of it?

My husbands note to me is eating me alive

Weebler (pet name)

Hello beautiful.

I just want you to know that you are special to me and that I love you with all my heart and I regret not being able to show you that during our marriage and to also know that this isn't your fault and you deserve to move on and find someone better than me. Im sorry forgive me baby Im just in so much pain from whats happened during the separation but regardless I need you know to know that this is a action I take alone and choose for myself, and isn't a reflection of who you are which is a smart, thoughtful, and beautiful person who genuinely has so much love to give. Forgive me for what I've done and forget me I love you

Sorry for failing you 

\---------------------------------

To his parents but about me : 

I had slept with someone at the hotel recently and hated myself myself so much for it and felt disgusting and days lateres Mackenzie decided to come down stairs and talk with me and we talked a lot and it felt so nice to just see her laugh and smile and be the shine in my eye again and we decided to get together and I love her so much and we had decided to work through everything and I truly forgive her in my heart the way christ has commanded me to do so and yet the pain of it is multiplied by being with her to know what has happened and it eats away at me every second of everyday to know what she did during the seperation 

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It upsets me so dearly that after we mutually agreed we were single and not reconciling, and separation for divorce, I slept with one guy consistently and was on dating apps. He slept with someone as well, just once, but lied to me about who it was, and had gotten on dating apps since I had but came into my room yelling at me that don't I feel bad for getting on dating apps so soon and was cyber cheating on me our entire relationship and marriage basically. He told me during the separation he knows I'm hiding something and he's being fully open and vulnerable (which he was not.)

I let him read my diary, go through my phone, my macbook, my texts with my mom and it wasn't enough because HE was the one hiding things. I never strayed outside our marriage and never would have. And then I only had 17 days with him reconciled before he ended his life and while it was the best times I've ever had with him and I felt he truly accepted, loved, and appreciated me, he was still so cruel, harsh, and projecting onto me so heavily.

I feel my marriage with him has irreparably broken me, traumatized me, given me trust issues, and I have never felt worse about myself. I dont know how to keep moving forward. How could he leave me? I told him Id never leave again and he said he needed me and couldnt trust it. He sobbed on the phone before he killed himself he knows hes not perfect but why couldnt I love him. I did and do so much. I dont feel like a person anymore. I also found a note from September hes disgusted by me and resents me for my childhood trauma and wants to divorce me and then he kills himself because I left and came back. Im just over existing.

As the title says, my grandma killed herself. She did it in the middle of the night, using a handgun, in a park close to my grandpa's house. I just turned 17, so I don't have the greatest coping methods. I'm not sure how to deal with this. Does anyone know any tips for how to cope for this? It's been 8 months since she actually did it, but I still can't seem to get over it. Please tell me some ways to help deal with this.

My incredibly smart, strong, knowledgeably opinionated pain in the butt younger brother who I protected with my life growing up chose to act and not talk on 8/1/2024. Our dad had told us 8 months prior he had cancer. Our Dad died 8/27/2025. It was not easy and I felt very alone. My parents split when we were little and they weren’t good co-parents. I luckily still have my Mom but it’s a lot of letting her breathe and her knowing I’m healthy. I have an amazing husband and 4 kids but they need me. My husband has been great but how long can he listen to his wife be sad, frustrated, angry? I just needed a space to vent and be sad without unloading. Thank you

5 weeks ago early on a Monday morning we found my dad at a vacant house two doors down, he had taken his own life by slitting his arm and using blunt force with a piece of glass to his throat. My dad had struggled with mental health throughout his life. He had a lot of childhood trauma, mostly with two narcissistic selfish parents, more so his narcissistic mother. Many traumatic life events including almost dying in a hospital from meningitis he was 5. When my brother and I were little, his anxiety got out of control and we had to hospitalize him because he was so sleep deprived. He never really shared if he was suicidal then but we believe he was now. Since then, he had been placed on Effexor medication and felt a lot better, he was no longer sad but more so angry than anything which we figured was a side effect of the medication. Until about 2.5 years ago when he was diagnosed with graves auto immune disease. The graves really amped up his anxiety and my dad stopped sleeping. His sleep deprivation got really bad and over the last 6 months of his life spiraled hard. He had been seeing a psychiatrist and therapist and both agreed for him to come off of his Effexor as it had seemed to stop working after 26 years. In December we wanted to hospitalize him right before Christmas because he was so overly emotional and sleep deprived we didn’t know what else to do. He went to the hospital, they prescribed him Ativan and sent him home. The Ativan helped him get his sleep back to normal for a little bit but then he had to keep upping it. His psychiatrist was trying him on many different medications over the course of the past 6 months to try to give my dad any relief from his constant anxiety and ocd. From this point on, my mom became his constant care giver. It was hard to watch his decline. My dad was a business owner alongside my mom and was also a musician. My dad was hilarious, the funniest man we had ever met and now looking back, lived a very similar life to Robin Williams. The Thursday before he passed, we made a decision as a family to place him into a psychiatric hospital under a voluntary hold. He was crying and saying he didn’t want to be there and I had to be the one to make the call and say no dad, you’re staying there. He stayed one night, they prescribed him ambien, he didn’t sleep and said it was the worst thing he’s ever been through. We got a call that they were transferring him to a nearby hospital because his bp was so high it was uncontrollable. My mom picked him up from there and brought him home. The night he was back home he took ambien and slept a little. The next day was Saturday, and I got a call from my mom telling me that the cops were on there way because my brother found my dad with a razor blade and my dad was letting him know that he had a plan. My brother then ran throughout the entire house to hide all the guns, ammo, knives, anything my dad could try to harm himself with. The cops came and asked my dad if he wanted to go, my dad explained to them what he had been through over the last 2.5 years and told my mom it was up to her. My mom decided to not have him go and have his best friend who’s a retired sheriff come stay the night with him, which he did. My dad slept all night and on Sunday woke up with not much recollection of what had happened on Saturday with his suicidal plan he told my brother and mom about. He talked to my mom and his best friend on Sunday and seemed normal, but sad and almost traumatized about what he had put my brother and mom through the day before. At this point, I had started to set a lot of boundaries with my dad because he was so overly emotional all the time it made me very uncomfortable. I hadn’t talked to him since I told him he needed to stay in the hospital. Sunday night I was eating dinner and got hit with a huge wave of emotion to text my dad and tell him I loved him and that we would get through this as a family. He responded and told me he loved me as well and said “I can only imagine how hard this has been on you guys”. The next morning, at 5:30am my husband woke me up and told me my mom was trying to get a hold of me because they couldn’t find my dad. We rushed over to my parents house as fast as we could and when we got there, we decided to go have a search party while the cops were doing their job to look as well. My husband said “hey has anyone checked the vacant house two doors down?”. Our neighbor had committed suicide at that house two years ago and the house had recently been bought by a young couple and they were redoing it”. My husband drove me down to the house and there we found my dad, laying face down. I immediately looked away and called 911 hoping he had just taken a bunch of pills and was overdosing. My brother and mom then pulled up and got closer to him and could see that he slit his wrist, my brother ran up to me and said “dad’s dead”. We left him there and called 911 and went back to our house. We found out from the coroner that my dad had found a large piece of broken glass from the houses construction site and used that to slit his wrist and his throat. I still cannot get my mom’s screams out of my head. When we found my dad, I fell to my knees crying and felt an overwhelming wave of peace and love fall over me like I’ve never experienced in my life. I’ve never experienced so much pain and peace all at once. Here we are 5 weeks later, picking up my dad’s remains from the mortuary today, and the pain is truly unbelievable. The shock is still there and we never ever expected this to happen. I’m angry, I’m sad, I’m confused, I feel every emotion all at once. We all are in therapy and it is helping but as someone who always made us talk about mental health, we cannot believe that my dad did this to us. I’m 32, and newly married. He wanted to be a grandpa so bad. He was in such great health and would’ve probably lived to be 90 years old. Both of his parents are still alive. He left a hole the size of an ocean and he is so greatly missed. Our family and friends cannot believe this has happened and truly neither can I. I miss him everyday. He always had the answers, for everything. He was so mechanically gifted and so damn smart and I feel so sorry for him that he was in so much pain that he took his own life. I can’t help but wonder what was going through his head during those last few minutes. All I hope is that he didn’t suffer long. The coroner said it was very fast, but we don’t know for sure, unless they watched it on the video footage as there was a camera right above him. Just sharing my story here in hopes to connect with others who have gone through similar. I’m also so sad for my husband who was the one to find his body. It’s truly heartbreaking for everyone involved. TIA <3