On Grief

  

    I know I won’t ever get over losing Sonya.  The way she died will haunt me, always.

    

    Grief is not a singular emotion or even a process, despite having these stages that supposedly help us learn to live with loss. 

    It’s rather a state in which you are put in because the death of someone you loved dearly changes you completely.  It opens your eyes to a horror you spent your entire life trying to avoid.  Sonya's suicide tore a big, important piece of my heart and it now beats differently.

    Grieving someone dear lost to suicide doesn’t go away, not only because it is too painful and traumatic to recover from (it abruptly ends the innocence of your belief that life is good and that everything will be okay—suddenly you know from experience that bad things happen every day, and that they can happen to anyone, and worse, to you), it also stays forever because it’s unfair. 

    You can’t possibly say, yeah, that’s how it all should’ve ended.  They deserved it.  It was the most obvious conclusion to their life.  I saw it coming.  I knew it.  Makes sense.  

    No, it doesn't make sense at all!  it's just not right.

    Death is our worst fear, the most dreaded fact of life even when it is timely and natural.  But when it comes too soon, and when it’s violent and lonesome, it’s unbearable to try justify or validate.  

    

    The fact that they took their own life because they couldn’t keep on living isn’t something you can agree with.  It's perpetually boggling and forever disturbing.  And when you think about all the events that led to this, you simply can’t find peace.  The idea that a person you adored and needed, appreciated and cherished got so broken by people and circumstances that they found relief in death is absurd, impossible to accept.  

    

    I don't mean being in denial, or feeling angry; loss of a loved one to suicide defies bargain and depression too as you understand that they are gone and you mourn them any way you can, but asking WHY remains futile.  

    Suicide is a rhetorical question containing no answer within, just more hurt and confusion.    

    Because suicide isn't logical.  

    Attempting to examine or analyze it will break your brain.  It wasn't supposed to go that way.  Your loved one was destined for different, nicer things.  It wasn't their fault, but there wasn't a rational, palpable reason for their death, either... 

    And here you sit with the terrible awareness of the morbid sequence of their lives, so starkly contrasting with the light and love you had with them, so cruel and unjust because you needed more time and wished better for them, because you knew them like no one else, and they knew you, but the worst happened and now you are forced to live without them, and relive everything that went wrong over and over, without a hope for relief or closure.

    My aspiration is simple: do right by Sonya, even if she's not here to feel it.  I owe her to tell her story the way I remember it—truthfully and proudly, no matter how much it pains and distresses me—and not as a some sort of therapy for myself or a coping mechanism, but as an act of vindication.  Death took her away from me, but it couldn't take her story, so suck it, death.

    The only thing that could possibly negate the illogical, senseless nature of her death is the life she lived that was full of love for others.  For she was pure love, and I don't care how cliched this sounds.  

    Sonya was many things, but she wasn't sentimental.  

    She never had any use for pity, or for saccharine tears.  She was strong and brave and good, and that's the moral of her story.   

    I love you, Sonya.  

    Always.