Trigger Warning: Suicide, Grief, Death, Related Themes

Last week, the list of people I love who understand what it’s like to get a call that someone has committed suicide grew longer. My heart aches so deeply for them. Another family with a hole so deep just a day before Thanksgiving. 

I'm intimately familiar with that feeling. Just a few days after packing up everything I owned to depart for van life right before Christmas, my stepfather committed suicide. It was devastating for a million reasons. He was just months away from being a grandfather for the second time — a fact he never got to find out before he left this world. 

The weeks after came with a rollercoaster of emotions. I found myself functioning just fine then smacked by this tidal wave of grief. I’d be on a long drive between cities and find my mind wandering to him. Wondering what was going through his mind. Wondering why he thought it was his time. 

The stigma around suicide has always been that it is a selfish act. How dare they walk away from us, from this world, without our permission? I bought into that stereotype for so long. The theft. The choices. I have intentionally worked to unravel those beliefs over the last three years to see suicide differently. For him. For me. In that time, I’ve evolved my beliefs to see that as much as it’s painful for us, maybe it’s freedom for them. This ending is a relief from a pain too big for us to understand, freedom from fear of a future that feels uncontrollable, and the end of a loneliness that feels absolute. 

While I hate to think this world could be so lonely for anyone, I choose empathy over anger. I feel no need to let curiosity wonder why he left this world. I will grieve a little for a long time - mostly for what his grandkids missed out on. I hope he feels no more pain.

Every 11 minutes, someone dies by suicide and someone else learns what it’s like to get the call.

I had to sit with that stat for a minute to understand what role I could play in fighting this. I hope you will too. Because what we’re really fighting isn’t a statistic. It’s a loneliness epidemic caused by fear of a future that feels uncontrollable. It's a fight for keeping the people we love around longer and while we can’t control whatever happens next, we can slow down to show up. The only thing that can cure the world of that kind of loneliness is love. The kind that shows up for the big and little, sends a "thinking of you" message, and shows up for the moments that matter most. A love unending, even in the grief that comes after losing someone to suicide.