Lessons from the other side of Grief
*** Trigger Warning. This post is about suicide and the personal experiences of an individual who witnessed someone dying by suicide. The opinions reflected below are that of the writer, not YourMomCares. If you or someone you know needs help, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is available 24 hours a day. Call 800-273-8255 ***
There are some very dark facts about life. There are some truths you must stare down regardless of whether you want to know them or not.
My college boyfriend passed away by suicide two weeks after I graduated and I was a witness to his death.
That kind of trauma and grief takes time to find peace in; although, I do believe I have found it. Finding peace about this death was a lot of emotional labor. To be quite frank, I know that what brought me the most healing through this pain was myself and my friend. There is little to no research about suicide witness survivors. Suicide is a lonely death. Witnessing one is even more lonely.
One thing that brought me healing was when I realized that trauma and grief are opposing forces. A normal trauma response is to withdraw until you are ready to be vulnerable by your own volition. However, the antidote to grief is sharing in the joy of the memory of your loved one. I was left wondering how to heal when I felt both instincts simultaneously. A huge part of my healing was building a life that involved choosing when I wanted to be vulnerable.
Healing from this came from each microcosm of a choice I have made in the last three years. Each choice reminds me that I can choose when I want to share and that life can happen for me, not to me. However, the most important choices I made were through art.
One great lesson of art is that imagination is rooted in reality. Trauma takes you into a different reality, where you are isolated and unstable. Of course, therapy and grief groups were all helpful in my healing, however, the main thing that healed me was art. My art was a radical allowance and acceptance of the pain and betrayal I felt.
People were uncomfortable with my story because it is so uncommon. No one knows what to do with pain that doesn’t have a roadmap. But when I used art as a way to express myself, I didn’t consider people’s discomfort. I just noticed the truth of my experience-unapologetic, raw, messy, and beautiful. Paradoxically, my creative imagination is what brought me back into my own life. Great art takes not only time, but also unapologetic truth. I wish there was a blueprint for pains like the one I experienced. In today’s society, people want easy answers through therapy, online resources, or support groups. But in my own healing journey I learned that art is how I return to and renew myself. Art and truth, not lessons or meaning, bring me back to my goodness. I don’t have to justify a man’s cruel actions towards me with lessons.
Healing is knowing that while what he did to me will always be hard, I don’t have to live in reaction. Yes, I loved him. But I love myself more. I love myself enough to know I am the epicenter of my own life. It is on my own accord that I shift or move, not because of a man who hurt me.
I also shift and move because of the love of a friend. While I know my late boyfriend hurt me, I did love him. Grieving him was and still is incredibly paradoxical and personal. One of the most personal parts is a friend who bore witness to my pain.
I remember one night, I lay in my bed sobbing so quietly and shaking to my core. I felt so alone. My college classmates all had their own lives to live. I remembered the words of my boyfriend and I thought about how no one should have to suffer alone, so I texted a high school friend of mine who had recently moved back home.
That friend carried more weight than should ever be expected of a person and for that I am grateful. The truth is, she just listened. She took actionable steps to offer me the gift of her humanity in his absence. On the anniversary of his passing, she gave me gifts. I could write about her kindness forever. She is agnostic, but God gave her to me. I know that in the deepest part of my soul. Even though I now move on my own accord, she gave me the strength to do so. These days, I work through what it means to be her friend from a place of healing in which I give myself grace for when I expected too much of her. Moving on my own accord means being her friend because I love her and because we both deserve a story beyond him.
I will never know what it was like to be her and support me. I didn’t realize that until I let go of the expectation that I could get back the time and pain trauma took from me. In that, I hope she knows she deserves to live a life of her own accord too. I want this for her not because of what healing she offered me, but because she matters and everyone deserves that. I find redemption in knowing that healing allows me to live in action, not reaction, to what he did to me. Living in reaction would mean thinking of my trauma as a jumping off point for the rest of my life. Living in action, means all roads lead back to myself, not him or other people who hurt me.
If you have been through something similar or are hurting greatly; here are some lessons that may help you to also come back into your own
If you are at the point where you are too tired to see the lesson or you are burnt out from an endless season of pain, you don't have to know the lesson or the hope right now. Chances are right now that you don’t even know the difference between the day and the moment in front of you. Why expect yourself to make sense of the senseless?
Even if it feels like your pain has led you nowhere, it has led you here. And you have chosen to remain here and this is something worth celebrating! I know the pain of losing a loved one to suicide. Even though they are gone, that doesn’t mean you aren’t here anymore. You being here and staying here doesn’t erase your grief. But it does indicate that despite the pain and complexities of losing a loved one to suicide, there is goodness that still remains in you. Even if the goodness that remains in you doesn’t feel like enough to continue being brave, I’ve been where you have been.I know that your value isn’t measured by how weak you feel, but by the fact that you remain.
If all this good has come from you, you don’t exist just so other people can benefit from your pain and life lessons. Newsflash: You get to enjoy your own existence too!
I have to remind myself that while people may romanticize my pain as a strength to be admired, the wisdom and healing I created for myself is not so I can inspire others. It is so I can create a life beyond what happened to me. If people find me inspirational,I take great pride in that. But my true joy is knowing that I came back to who I am after being hurt.
The cliché “life is hard” took me a long time to accept because I didn’t want to believe that I could lose my innocence along with my loved one. And while I do believe life is very difficult at times, I also believe that it can be a joyful challenge. Not to say that suicide and grief aren’t heavy topics. But more to say that there is a life beyond where you are right now.
Grief has an interesting way of taking peaceful love and wisdom and making it wretched. But the thing about wretched pains is that they community and time heals them if we let them. It is a slow, arduous, and agonizing process, especially suicide.
When bad things happen to you, it doesn’t mean you are bad. It just means sometimes bad things happen. We as a human race often get stuck thinking that life being difficult means we are difficult. Sometimes we think emotions being messy and grief being painful means we are all those things as well. I would like you to know that is not true. You are just going through an understandably bad thing. You aren’t bad. Life is just hard.
That being sad, here’s another reminder:
You don’t have to have a lesson, you don’t have to have clarity or closure, and you most certainly do not have to explain anything to anyone. Your grief is sacred as well as your love for your deceased. You choosing to stay here and sit in your grief even though it feels unbearable is beautiful. I ask that you take a moment to recognize the beauty of your resiliency. Beautiful things don’t always have to be so perfectly pretty.
The only good that came from losing my then boyfriend was the fact that I had him to begin with.I had his laugh. I had his rambunctious energy that confused me in the most joyful way and left me deeply satisfied. I had his quiet pensiveness when he felt his pain or my pain. I had the goodness of a friend who cared for my pain enough to help me when I didn’t ask even when every other friend turned a blind eye when I reached out.
Yes, it hurts to miss him. But the weight of my grief is equivalent to the weight of the love I gave and received from him. The good lessons he taught me used to be hard to remember in the wake of my grief. Now I apply them unto myself the way he did for me. I think of this good; the one I made with the remains of his love and expectantly wait for its return.
Sometimes, grief means you stop learning and you simply keep being. That kind of growth required to survive is less like a tree growing taller, but rather a tree leaning into its roots.
I think life is knowing the difference you make is not measured in your ability to care about every single issue, eradicate every problem, or be the world's superhero. It is to remember your goodness is in the root of who you are and that each pain is simply your roots growing deeper in that knowledge. It's knowing that the true difference is remaining arrogant and defiantly hopeful because you're worth choosing who you want to be in the face of heartbreak. And who you are is brave. To me, that is worth celebrating, even if that celebration is just shedding a tear for all your heartache. You are worth returning to this knowledge: life hurts because we are an unfortunate mixture of truth and heartache. May you become the good from life’s inequities by remembering you are a good thing in the world and no one has the power to change that.
With love from and through the other side,
Briar Rose
P.S - Here is an extra chicken nugget of wisdom for the long road ahead: It is often not people’s patterns that get us stuck in ruthless cycles of hope, but the choices they make in response to our bravery.
May you choose bravery.
Submitted by Keeping it Real Contributor Briar Rose
