I’m not a psychologist, therapist, or a doctor, but I am a person who has lost someone to suicide. Actually, I have lost two people I deeply loved to suicide.
Suicide has become a four-letter word to me. Almost four years ago, I lost my fourteen-year-old daughter to suicide on November 26, 2016. Although it feels like yesterday, I still live daily with the details of that day in my mind. Gradually, you feel yourself healing a little and you start to do some of the activities you used to enjoy.
The sadness is always there in the back of your memory, but you push forward. Eventually you decide to trust life just a little because you have been through so much and deserve to start living your life again.
Then you meet that special person. The one who brings the light back into your world of darkness. You can feel a happiness growing inside of you, flourishing and making you feel alive again, when before you had felt dead.
He has a special charism and charm about him. His smile is contagious, making you laugh at his stupid jokes. You can’t stop smiling and you have to admit that you are quite smitten with him. Realizing that you have so much in common, you find an instant connection with him, wanting to spend more and more time with him.
Have you ever met that one person who everyone always seems to like, because they reach out to you, talking to you when you may have been hesitant to approach them? That person who can talk to anyone – everyone is his friend. You know that he was obviously one of the popular kids in high school, hanging out with the most sought out students?
He makes you feel special, he makes you like yourself again, he makes you forgive those who have wronged you, because he makes you a better person. You actually like who you are because you have a new sense of peace. You want to smile at strangers, as you walk by them because you are genuinely happy.
But then that one day the sunshine hides behind the cloud, as the cloud becomes dark. A darkness evolves, suffocating the light that once surrounded you. You’re confused because you didn’t see this darkness, it wasn’t there one day and then it suddenly appeared.
The darkness is called depression. Your special person who had been filled with the light of happiness has now been engulfed with the darkness of depression. You try to bring the light back out in him, but he can no longer see it. Glimpses of it appear every now and again, but then the light fades, until one day the light doesn’t come back on. And what you’re left with is only the darkness.
Depression is like a parasite. It feeds off you, taking all your energy and light, until you are left with nothing. You’re tired, exhausted, and weak; unable to fight back. You try to fight back, but it’s all consuming, allowing no light to come back into your world. It has taken over – it now controls you. It has won.
Depression doesn’t only effect those who are infected with it, it affects all those around them, who love them. They plead for their happiness to return…if only they could be happy again then they will be okay. But that’s not how depression works. If you lose control of it, it consumes you like a black cloud, suffocating you until you can no longer fight back, so you give up.
And when you give up, the pain you once endured, is now passed on to the next person in line. And that would be me. I lost my fiancé to suicide on September 5, 2020. It is dark again. And now almost four years later, I am having to heal from two suicides, crawling my way out of their darkness and fighting to find the light that left them; stopping the cycle. I will not pass my pain onto the next person. I know the sunshine is out there, somewhere. Where there is darkness, there is also light. Nothing stays dark forever; therefore, I will not give up on those who love me and myself.
We are not alone on this journey called life>3
The Jewels' Angels Foundation, Inc. 