3 Years. No such thing as distance occurs after this.

First day of Spring.

It is sunny, but the air is cool. Things feel damp, the earth is wet from nights dew.

My heart is still rudely and abruptly stabbed by the memories.

They still happen every day. Lately they are bad, I have to interupt my train of thought in order to stop the feelings of anxiety.

I am on the porch, I am screaming.

I am beside his body.

I am standing laying flowers around his body in our final time spent.

I am kissing his hair.

I am in his bedroom telling him I'll see him in the morning.

Round and round and round.

Three years on and I am faced with the isolating, enraging feeling of being left behind, while others move on with their lives. This is the first time I really feel alone.

Words of remembrance are scarce. Visits while genuine seem also attached to a greater need for the visitor to push on with the rest of their day.

The rest of their day.

People have stopped calling past, electronically, telephonically, bodily.

They holiday, dress their children, eat out. This modern era and its digital cruelty after the death of a child, where you watch the joy of others and their living children, happy they don't know what you are experiencing, bereft of your own ability to join them in first days at school, graduations, birthdays, togetherness.

The first two years are a numbness of disbelief, the third is a cold wind of empty space.

The effects of PTSD complications of suicide are all too apparent, memory loss, flashbacks, ruminating circular thoughts, trouble sleeping, anxiety.

I feel angry for the first time, a sense of fury this is so grossly unfair. It's not a zen space, its claustrophobic and dark and it echos back at you when you scream into it.

Flashbacks. Together Alone, above and beneath. I'm still your friend when you are in need.

As is once will always be, earth and sky... moon and sea....

How to dress and pack an open wound you cannot see.

Three years on I am at work on the day Cole died, an error on my part. A customer remarks curtly.

'you look happy'.

'my son died today, three years ago'.

'oh.........I'm very sorry to hear that'.

Not sorry enough to judge my face out loud.

On the date Cole died I am asked if I am having a shin dig  as I have had visitors.

This is the privilege of moving on. Of being able to forget. Of not waking up crying.

'I can't remember the last time I had a good cry' someone says.

'I cannot remember a week when I have not cried', I reply.

My new normal.

I have celebrated my oldest child's 21st, grieving the absence of his should be turning 18 year old brother.

I have yet another new job, but no boy to come home to and cook for, to listen to his day unfold, in these last hours of what should have been his last year at school. Someone posts a photo of their child on their prep tour of University, in their ball suits, school trips abroad. I stand outside the window and gaze in until it is unbearable and I no longer engage social platforms with the enthusiasm I once did.

I watch my older son long for the communion of siblings and find it in the comfort of my brothers daughters.

'perhaps you should go and live there' I say encouragingly 'it would be nice for you to see them more often'.

He seriously ponders this, and feelings of guilt he could have been more loving and kind in life, as if anything we could have done would have stopped this death from happening.

Three years is a new sort of pain, in an unfolding journey of pain upon pain after the loss of our boy.

More and more children die by suicide in this new world, more parents and families are left to fall into this abyss.

I feel helpless.

I miss my son. There is no end.

24 months. Death Discourses and complicated grief

This year feels worse.

I've come to understand my grief as a series of actions mechanised by post traumatic stress.   My son has been dead for two years and there are no signs my agony will abate anytime soon. Time does not heal all wounds, that I find to be a patent lie.

People still say dumb things to me, or squirm or look awkwardly on when I say my son has died by suicide. Some I think they  don't even understand what I've said. I can at least say it and stifle the stinging sensation in my throat that automatically accompanies my utterance.

Yesterday I worked all day, feeling naked, emotionally spent, eyes filled with sand after an early morning rise and countless tears before breakfast. I walked to my car, exhausted and only when I was  encapsulated inside the metal box on wheels did I allow myself the safety to continue a deep wailing sound on the short drive home.

24 months.

My sisters spend the weekend with us and leave the morning after the symbolic day of my sons suicide, the same day they got on a plane to be with me, with him 2 years earlier. My youngest sister crying with pain of grief at her loss into the phone still ringing in my ears. We band together in solidarity for this moment, sharing turns with our brother, father and my mother for this moment of disbelief we reconcile daily.

Continued feelings of trauma are real for suicide bereaved, wrenched violently from their loved ones. I see it in the writing of other bereaved parents sharing their survival journeys, a series of actions involving high stakes avoidance of anything that triggers painful memories, door knocking, music, sirens, geographical spaces, food, the list is endless.

You learn to manage, you learn to stop crying in public spaces, you learn how to wrangle your feelings into a steel box but the feelings are there, they never leave.

I am sharing the below research as I'm not able to verbalise this any  better or more succinctly. Please read it and increase your understanding of complicated grief in relation to suicide bereaved. All deaths are not equal and neither are the grieving processes that follow them.

'Complicated grief is a bereavement reaction in which acute grief is prolonged, causing distress and interfering with functioning.

The bereaved may feel longing and yearning that does not substantially abate with time, and may experience difficulty re-establishing a meaningful life without the person who died. The pain of loss stays fresh and healing does not occur.

The bereaved person feels stuck; time moves forward but the intense grief remains. Symptoms include recurrent and intense pangs of grief, and a preoccupation with the person who died mixed with avoidance of reminders of the loss.

The bereaved may have recurrent intrusive images of the death while positive memories may be blocked or interpreted as sad, or experienced in prolonged states of reverie that interfere with daily activities. [...]

Parents who have lost a child to suicide can be especially afflicted with feelings of guilt and responsibility. Parents who have lost a child to suicide report more guilt, shame and shock than spouses and children. [...] the death of a child is arguably the most difficult type of loss a person can experience, particularly when the death is by suicide.

Parents feel responsible for their children, especially when the deceased child is young. Indeed age of the suicide deceased has been found to be one of the most important factors predicting intensity of grief.

Unlike other modes of death, suicide is stigmatised, despite recent valiant strides to destigmatise mental illness and suicide. Many bereaved individuals report that it can be difficult to talk to others about their loss because others often feel uncomfortable talking about the suicide. This can leave the bereaved feeling isolated.


The feeling of being unable to talk about the death is often compounded by the perceived need to 
conceal the cause of death. 

Considering that grief is a normal, adaptive response to loss, noncomplicated grief that is not comorbid with depression does not warrant any formal intervention in most circumstances.

 However, in light of the above delineated stigma, anger, and guilt associated with suicide loss, reassurance, support, and information provided by family, friends, and, sometimes, clergy is often not available or sufficient for survivors of suicide loss. [...]

Suicide survivors face unique challenges that can impede the normal grieving process, putting survivors at increased risk for developing complicated grief, concurrent depression, PTSD and suicidal ideation.[...] 

Because of the stigma associated with suicide survivors may feel they are unable to secure enough support from friends or family, but may benefit from attending support groups with other survivors who uniquely share their experiences and offer a haven for survivors to feel understood.'

- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3384446/#__ffn_sectitle

To close, the above information confirms that suicide bereavement is indeed different to other forms of loss. I ask for your understanding, compassion, patience and I ask that you reserve your desire to offer advice or comparison when feeling the need to share as a way to responsively try to alleviate the suffering of the suicide bereaved person.

Our two years without our boy holds my family and myself in a space in time that is a source of great pain and mourning. Please hold space for us, and the countless other mourning families of suicide bereaved. We need your care and understanding to move through these tangible emotional challenges while we miss and grieve for our beloved Cole, our sons, daughters, parents, partners who choose this path.

20 months.

I've woken up at 5am, in some part due to jet lag after a holiday abroad, a holiday I took and enjoyed, but constantly felt the absence and loss of my son for the duration.

It is 20 months tomorrow with Cole gone.

An hour has passed since I woke, spent reading political articles off Facebook, looking at kittens, other people's lives. Yesterday in the car while listening to an unrelated BBC ad involving some historical figure and their lovers death of cancer I started to imagine how they would have ever known without forensic information, I began to imagine how how our bodies become dust without flowing blood and moisture, and as always with anything and everything unrelated, began to imagine my sons body and how it changed in the days after he died. 

It is an impossible trauma to navigate.

I used to read articles written by other grieving parents missing their dead children too, in an attempt to seek solace in our unified desolation. Now I find I avoid mostly all material pertinent to suicide as it is a larger source of pain and post traumatic memory. I can get nothing from it that helps me.

At 6am I think about rising and making the most of the morning, but having just read an unrelated article critiquing Ed Sheerans recent concert I now have the Sheeran song we chose for Coles exit from the church service looping round and round in my head, and the air smells like it did the morning I woke up in the dim light unaware of what he had done  and I am paralysed into the bed, unable to get up because it feels like reliving a nitemare. Early morning is impossible now, not motivational, simply undoable.

Everything and anything unrelated is a potential trigger, to the point where the only way I could stop feeling trauma would be to either have a lobotomy, or take mdma, and that last option is about as appealing as the first. 

Returning home from Scotland last week I walked in the front door, dropped my bags and embraced Coles box of ashes, telling him how much I had missed him, as if the box itself could reply. I weep instantly, uncontrollably, I tell him how much I wish he was here. I took him everywhere I went trying to imagine his thoughts about all the things I saw. 

I sat on his brothers bed yesterday and we talked about the week to come, I saw the face of the man my son is becoming, and stifle my grief that Coles face will not bear the marks of ageing. Now when I encounter his friends at the shopping mall I usually rush off to heave and cry in private immediately afterwards because they are growing taller and changing, a process I feel alienated from, a process I didn't realise would be so difficult to view and absorb.

20 months and life carries on but is also just as difficult in an ongoing, rudely interruptive way as the day my boy took his life. 

I need you to know this, I need you to know that everyone is loved and valued, I need you to know that the cost of your death by suicide outweighs the relief of it, I need you to know that if darkness fills your thoughts in confusing ways when it is dim and you are alone you need to wake people up in the night and tell them, tell them to save your life. 

Please tell them. Give them the chance to save you. I guarantee they will move heaven and earth to try. You are loved, you are loved, you are loved. The hole you will leave will be wider than the universe. 

Two Christmases.

 Dearest boy,

There's a tree in the house this year. our friends gave it to us, and I've decorated it for you. In our old house we never had one, because we were never home for Christmas day.

Theres a wreath on the door.

There are decorations on the table. I have decided to start you a vinyl toy collection, one for each Christmas. I feel funny not giving you presents in your absence. I wish you were here to see all the things.

Despite my ambivalence towards this time of year now, I want you to have everything, a tree, glad tidings, Christmas spirit.

I whisper to you that you are everywhere and can see everything, you are free of the bounds of your body, to go anywhere you want, be everywhere at once, experience everything.

It is the only thought that pushes the agony of your death away, and the longing as your mother to hold you again, to share all these things with you.

I never knew that in 2015 that would be the last time we shared the dining table for Christmas. This year our table grows even smaller as our family battles illnesses amongst its members that separate us while we come to terms with these new realities. Life has continued to change since you left us in ways that batter us and challenge us, especially at Christmas.

There is no philosophical learnings here, other than the realisation that holiday times remind me of you here, and not here, and despite my aversion, I feel more strongly drawn to continuing with and creating new traditions so that you may be remembered for eternity, as our love and grief for you is also timeless and endless.

Your brother and I love you and miss you, we wish you were here in these walls as more than memories and ashes.  Christmas remains, its not what I would call merry, but it is still an important reflection of your importance in our lives, so we keep it close enough to cut, but not to draw blood.

There are still things I can't manage, places I don't want to be, but you are the reason we do Christmas, not the reason we don't.

I love you forever.

Mum.

18 months.

One year and 6 months passes. Time feels slow as it also feels so fast I can't keep up with it.

I feel tired constantly, and always sad, and always agitated.

In my day my son passes through my mind and I have learned to stifle the stinging pain of grief while I drive the car, wander the supermarket aisles, run errands from my job, lie in my bed at night.

A thought will pass into my head and I feel my face drop with the weight of the pain of the memory, a jagged repetitive show reel of his body, my screaming, the morgue, the funeral.

The data dumps from my head continue so I cannot finish sentences, recall describing words or peoples names.

Today coincides with the departure of my partner for work overseas, the departure of my older son to stay with my best friend for a month, even the cat has gone to a cattery. I arrive into an empty nest 5 years too early. It wasn't supposed to be this way, It wasn't meant to happen with such abruptness.

I am here alone with nothing to distract me from my grief. My boyfriend tells me to try to enjoy my time as we embrace and farewell each other this morning, I appreciate his words, but I am afraid.

A trip to the therapist, the chiropractor, the supermarket, a dear friends home, but ultimately to the quiet that should be filled by the sound of my sons voice, and his presence.

I have brought his ashes onto the bed, my eyes are sore from tears. Every waking second I am aware he is gone. Sometimes I wake up and I momentarily forget and I'm freed from this feeling, but its only fleeting.

Sometimes my thoughts around him are dark and distressing, I have to count objects and recite what I see around me to block them out. Post traumatic stress means I feel anxiety and discomfort about sunrise and early mornings, I don't like driving past our old house or anywhere near the street, seeing children that look like him, kids in his school uniform, police sirens, winter, the cold, certain locations, hearses, the hospital, new years, my mothers house, the park across the street from my boyfriends.

And in concentric circles anything that vaguely reminds me of my child in such a way he can no longer be there with us in these spaces, that I can't share with him any kind of reminisence of his life.

With noone here to distract me from my grief or to soothe the raw open wound that still remains I have to find a way to move through the days to come.

Mastery is simply the act of carrying on as poorly or as well as possible so you make it through the thousands of seconds that separate you from the moment you might be together again.

I was asked if I know anyone who has lost a child and to that the answer is not really save one person, but also I never want to because that means someone else has befallen the anguish and pain that we have. It is a loneliness from that point of view I am more than willing to bear.

I try to remember Cole living, to embrace him in my dreams, and to hold him tightly and smell his beautiful hair so I might never forget his laughter and the warmth that he radiated. But this makes me cry even more.

I wonder how it feels for parents who have lost children to suicide before this most recent groundswell of awareness around our language and cultural undertandings of taking your life, how they have dealt with the stigma, the judgement, the insensitivity.

This is such an immense burden of grief. Please be kind in your words and actions to anyone who has lost their precious children to suicide for they need it.

One Rotation

We have nearly made one rotation around the sun without my son.

I still have no established time of death, I am still having flashbacks.

I still don't know why, but I'm a lot closer to accepting that I'll never probably know.

I still can't beleive there is an end date to his birthdate.

In the year since my son died by suicide we have finally begun a national conversation about people killing themselves and why.

I don't have the answers, and if we did they come too late to help us.

In these winter filled mornings I wake early in a futile attempt to get home before he makes that fateful choice, but I am a year too late.

I think about him everyday.

This morning it was the morgue, followed by my sisters singing (again) at his service.

Last week I dreamed he told me he just wanted to be free.

I hope you are free my baby. I just wish you would have told me.

I have met other mothers this last year who are grieving for their dead children.

There is such an enormous amount of heartbreak and pain attached to this form of death.

One rotation of the sun with no reconciliation to our reality that our beloved Cole is gone, and many more rotations to come.

I iron the sheets next to his ashes this rainy Sunday afternoon because life and wrinkled sheets remain the reality of this continued time of breathing and moving until we are together again.

I started writing this blog to share this burden of grief, because there's so much misconception around how one is supposed to recover from death.

For such a natural occurrence we are not very good at dealing with dying, and less good at suicide.

12 months in and my grief remains where it is, it has not developed or lessened, it lingers as a dull pain. I've come to accept this and ask others to accept it too.

I would never have known had I not lost a child, so I can only ask those who are so fortunate not to know to take my word for it.

There is no neat and tidy linear 5 stages, there is only the hole left and the daily struggle to circle its edges and not fall inside it.

Some call this strength, but its got nothing to do with that, its just the reality that you have to learn how to walk with bleeding feet.

I would do anything to have him in my arms again so I could tell him how much he is loved, and to smell his hair and to kiss his face. Instead I will have to nurture my memories.

44.

Two mornings ago I woke early and went to the bathroom. I had two full minutes of complete peaceful thought before I saw my sons lifeless face appear in my memory. This is how most days go.

Last week I turned 44, two days after I marked 11 months without Cole, I didn't say anything or mark the moment because I never forget no matter what day of the week I'm in. Tonight I enjoyed a meal out for my birthday and somewhere in the background music Duran Duran swirled in a new romantic haze invoking teenage memories. I went home and downloaded 'Rio' on my phone, temporarily suspended in time till I imagined my own child self and how she would grow up to suffer the death of her boy and I wished that it was something else she wouldn't have to go through. I turned the music off, unable to continue in the innocent revelry of past before I was a mother.

This time last year he made me French toast rolls in cinnamon sugar, presented lovingly on a plate. I felt so utterly proud of his loving gesture, and his innovative cooking skills because he learned how to do this on the Internet. I thought, 'I've got something right' without knowing we would only share one more month together and he would die. 

11 months feels like 10, and 9, and 8, it feels like the resolution that 12 and 13 will  be no different, and that when I'm an old lady and 11 months is 11 years that I will still feel the same. It is all just mastery, but never really healing, there's no returning from this type of grief. I moved his ashes into the common area of the house, I still kiss them every day and whisper good morning to my darling, I still weep in my car, and spontaneously yet invisibly cried into my chiropractors table, face down, when a particular Cyndi Lauper song interrupted my adjustment on Monday. 

This death has interrupted the fabric of my life, and all I am doing is learning how to control the vicious desire to cry at a moments notice, or a song, or a thought. It is not easy.