For those out there that suffer alone, who say they are okay when they aren’t, who think they don’t matter to anyone, it’s a lie your brain is telling you! Trust me – just this once. Ask for help… please?
You would think 40 years would feel like a lifetime and in some ways, it does. In other ways, 40 years almost feels like yesterday. Forty years ago today, my family received the devastating news that my brother had died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. It couldn’t be….he had just turned 20 years old on the 1st of January. He was not much more than a boy. While I knew that my brother was troubled, or at least as much as a 13-year-old girl can know, it never occurred to me that this is how dark his thinking was. He was broken. Why didn’t he reach out for help? Why didn’t he trust a best friend? Didn’t he want to get married some day? Didn’t he want to see us grow up? Didn’t he love us?
It took me a long, long time to come to terms with his death. I now believe that a person who is in that dark, dark place and sees death as their only option must be in such incredible pain, more than anyone can truly understand. They must feel that there are no other options and the loved ones they are leaving, I suspect don’t even cross their mind. They hurt so badly and they just can’t stand it, not for one more day. While it’s hard for me to comprehend feeling like life will never, ever, ever get better, I believe that is where they are at that moment when they decide that death is the answer.
I know he wasn’t thinking clearly that day because if he was he would have known how loved he was, how important he was, and how so very needed he was. The pain that occurred that day has lived on for 40 years and will no doubt live on for the next 40.
You are not forgotten my brother. You are loved and no longer broken. ❤
