The Choice to Move Forward

While there are a great many lessons that came from the suicide of my younger sister Denise, probably the most profound one was that I couldn’t stop living my life because she had died.

I was twenty-one when she died and when I would speak, I always said that before her death the world was my oyster. I knew I was bound for greater things than even I could see in front of me. But after she ended her life, I felt like the oyster shell had slammed shut on me. The key was I had to figure out how to push it back open, to see the open road and everything beyond that hill in front of me again.

In meeting people in the thirty years since Denise died, I have encountered countless people who have chosen not to move forward. These are people stuck in their grief, stuck in the pain, and many times refusing to budge from where they are. I wasn’t going to be one of them.

I have always known that I can’t change the past which means I also can’t bring my sister back. And when she died, I was twenty-one, I had a long life ahead of me. I wasn’t going to be destroyed by the loss. Life is short (Where have these thirty years gone? Heck, where has October gone?).

That’s not to say it was easy as it wasn’t and some days it still isn’t. As our world continues to evolve, and not necessarily in good ways it seems lately, I have to really reach inside myself and remember that I pried that oyster shell open once and I can do it again. Yet I also don’t want to have do to it again so instead I look up and ahead of me. I look at the view. I see the hope. I see the vista that stretches for miles.

And I remember that’s why I continue to forge forward.

Time vs. Process

We’ve all heard it– time heals all wounds.

If only it were true.

In all years my speaking with people after loss, particularly suicide loss, there have been those who had lost a loved one long before I had and their pain was much greater than mine. If it were true that time heals all wounds, they would have been leaps and bounds ahead of me. Instead, often they had been told to stuff their grief (mostly because it was suicide) into the back of the cabinet and move on.

Watching that pain was an integral reason why I worked so hard to process the loss of my sister, my parents, of my divorce, and the countless other losses that have happened in my life. When people ask how I was able to meet Greg and marry him and have such a good marriage, I tell them it’s because I did the work.

I trudged through the incoming surf and darkness like in the photo of the temple in Bali above. It wasn't pleasant ever and I hated every stupid minute of it, but I knew that if I wanted to go forward, it was what I had to do.

The processing road is rocky, but if you choose to stand still and simply look at it, things might get better for a time, but they’ll come back and eat away at you in a bigger, more painful way. It’s better to push yourself forward. You’ll find that sunshine, you’ll find the rainbow.

You’ll find the happiness. I know because I was there and I found it myself.

The Depths of Grief

This is what grief looked like when Denise died by suicide in 1993. This photo was taken by Pamela Joye on the University of New Mexico campus some years ago for me and when I recently saw it, I realized how much it personifies my grief experience. The path is there, yet I couldn’t see it.

There were no thoughts of telling Denise’s story in that time– I’ll explain how that came about in the weeks ahead– it was all about finding a way forward. And that’s what any grief journey should be, about delving into our pain because that’s how we do find our way out of it, our way forward, our way back to finding meaning and everything else that makes life worth living. It’s also how we find love again.

When Denise died in 1993, there was no Google to search for information on what the suicide bereavement journey would look like. The books available were very limited. And there weren’t a whole lot of support groups either. It was much more difficult to connect with people who had similar experiences; we had to rely on each other in our families where each of us told a different story because we had a different relationship with our loved ones who died. And friends who wanted to help us but didn’t know how.

I heard Garth Brooks on the radio not long ago, when I was driving home from my morning swim at the gym pool. It had been a long time since I’d listened to his music and I thought I’d tune up some on a run. For the first time in a long time, I felt myself take a trip back in time to my own initial grief journey after Denise died.

“What She Doing Now” came on and I remembered running through the snow in Muncie, Indiana, where I was a college student at Ball State University when Denise died. It was the next winter, my senior year, and I had to stop. The pain was so great, I just couldn’t move forward anymore in that moment. I don’t know how long I stayed there; somehow I found it inside me to keep going and return home, but that moment sticks out to me of what grief was like. You go forward, the world turns, daybreak comes, sunset comes, it starts all over again. Somehow you keep putting one foot in front of the other.

You don’t stop missing your loved one. You feel guilty laughing for the first time, for experiencing things without them (although you know it makes no sense because they aren’t alive now). Somehow, somewhere, I found that strength. Then sometimes I had to rest, but with rest comes strength again. And with strength comes movement forward, getting stronger each time.

The Tribute to My Sister

After the event at church Wednesday night for those whose lives have been touched by suicide, a woman placed her circle on the tree and then caught me before I left the church. She told me she had lost her sister to suicide and wanted me to sign her copy of my book, Do They Have Bad Days in Heaven? Surviving the Suicide Loss of a Sibling. The cover was bent back, proof she had read the book, and before we parted, she told me how she tried to pay tribute with her husband to her sister each year. Then she asked me if I pay tribute to Denise.

I’m not sure why, but the question caught me off guard and I didn’t know how to answer. Finally, I said, the book, and pointed to it. She nodded and we parted. But I realized later that the book is not paying tribute to the life I had with Denise. The book is about her suicide, about moving forward and, to me, paying tribute would be about remembering the life Denise had, not her suicide. And the life I had with Denise.

My tribute to Denise is all of this– what I create, what write, everything you see on this web site. It’s a tribute to the childhood we shared, the creativity we explored together through coloring and making clothes for our Barbies on our grandmother’s old Singer sewing machine. It’s the inspiration I find in my daily life.

That’s my tribute to Denise.

The Ember of Hope

As I approach the 28th anniversary of my sister Denise's suicide later this month, I debated what message I would want to convey. I didn't know right up until Greg hit play on the video recording, but here it is, very reflective of where my journey is today.

The Shadow of Sibling Loss

Over the years I have listened to many stories and read many stories of people who have lost siblings. These weren’t necessarily to suicide which means that sometimes they happened in early childhood. My sister Denise ended her life when I was 21 (she was just two weeks from her 18th birthday). At the time I thought I was very much an adult, however, now I understand how young 21 really is.

So when I think about sibling loss in childhood, It seems to me it can extend to about 25 because we’re still trying to find our place in the world (not that some of us every do as that seems to be a major mission some of us are on in this life) and we’re still separating ourselves physically from our families of origin.

There are many stories of sibling loss that weren’t discussed within families, as if the family just picked up the next day and moved on. For the surviving siblings, this was often painful. However, I don’t believe any parent did it out of malice. They had their own pain and were afraid of hurting their surviving child/children more. And there were other families where the death was openly discussed and the person always remembered.

I was lucky that Denise’s suicide and life were fairly openly discussed in our house (I don’t say completely as I was watched my parents struggle to talk about it with each other and like many families that have suffered a loss, in some ways it widened the gorge that already existed in their relationship. What helped, for me, was that we continued to let Denise exist in some way– as she should– even though her time with us on earth had ended.

Now that I’ve spent many years processing her death and while I don’t often talk much about it as I don’t feel the need to, what I mull over in my head is who I’m supposed to be in this life and how her death is part of that. But what I wonder is how much the path has been altered or made even more important to me to find since her death.

I don’t necessarily believe my path is about sharing Denise’s story although I understand that is part of it. Now that I’m continued to process and grow, I see it’s really connecting our childhood and what we shared in a different form through Chelle Summer. But there is also the writing aspect of it, the need inside my head to not just tell stories, but share them with the world. What I don’t know– and I don’t know that I ever will in this life- is if that need because stronger because of Denise’s death or if she hadn’t died, that I might never have pursued it so intensely as I continue to do (because I’m not where I want to be with it!).

I’ve heard the stories of many accomplished people who lost siblings young and how they were able to take their pain and sadness and turn it into something. What isn’t often obvious is how it ties into the loss. Maybe they were aware of it, maybe they won’t. Or maybe they are like me and were able to do something with it although maybe not what they thought it would look like. And then eventually the path wound us back to where we were before the loss.

Still after all these years, so many questions. The shadow is always there and always will be. I am not clouded by sadness in my life. My sister is with me and I know she and my mom in particular continue to keep me inspired. My biggest wonder comes from my drive and how those of us who have traveled this road find the strength to not just keep going, but truly make sure our lives are well lived because our siblings didn’t get that chance or ended their lives before they took off.

Keeping the Dream Alive

I have this memory of my sister Denise. I’m not exactly sure where we were, somewhere in Florida, and we’re playing in the waves. I was in high school and she was in junior high. I remember us laughing and the sense of feeling free that we had, a trip Mom had taken us on when she worked for Midway Airlines.

On this past Friday morning while I was out running, I missed Denise. But as I thought about it more, I realized what I missed is not being able to share Chelle Summer with her because so much of what she and I did together– drawing, making houses and clothes for a our Barbies– and the late 1970s into early 1980s and the styles of that time– form the nucleus of Chelle Summer.

And then I remembered that she is with me. We can’t have a conversation, which is what I felt I wanted when i was thinking about her, but she is still part of this journey. I just wished I could share with her the influence our time together has on what I’m doing today– share it in a way where we have a two-way conversation.

Then I began to think how there probably would be no Chelle Summer if she were here. I probably would be a sports journalist or something similar. While I will never truly know, I’m not sure I would have tapped into our style and fashion history to build Chelle Summer.

The reality is that I can’t bring her back and because of that I’ve tried to embrace the journey as much as possible. This has become more prevalent to me in each passing year and the more I embrace it, the more creative I’ve become. So in a sense Denise is responding by helping me choose what I create.

And that’s enough for me, even on days when I doubt everything, that I am keeping the dream alive. And I won’t give up until I get where I want to be.

The Rearview Mirror: Twenty-Five Years Later

I wasn't going to write about the twenty-fifth anniversary of my sister Denise's suicide (which was Sunday) mostly because I don't feel the need to acknowledge it. But a funny thing happened yesterday and it made me realize that passing the anniversary of her death is so much like much of what else I experience in life: I'm not supposed to write or talk about while I'm going through something but rather after it happens. The writing and sharing for me comes at a different point of the journey rather than in the midst of it. 

While there is always much anticipation with the anniversary of a death, I wasn't feeling that at all. All I could think was how I couldn't believe twenty-five years have gone by. I know a lot has happened, it just doesn't feel possible that we have reached such a milestone. And it is a milestone because I realize many people out there who have experienced a suicide, especially recently, are thinking, "Will I ever get there? My pain feels so unbearable right now I can barely think about the next minute."

And that's where this post comes from because yesterday morning I got up and went for a run with my dog Lilly and it wasn't until about halfway through it that I remembered what day it was. As Lilly and I kept running (up a large, imposing hill, I might add), I also realized that Denise's suicide is separated from the life she lived. While there was a time when her suicide was at the forefront of my mind or even my thoughts of her, it's no longer there because when I think of Denise, I think of everything we shared together. And those shared life experiences are where I focus my life today: writing, creating, sewing. 

Then during my run, I heard one of three songs that I believe Denise sends to me– "Harden My Heart" by Quarterflash. Laugh all you want but this one brings back happy memories of roller skating in the basement of our house on cold, snowy Midwestern days when we couldn't do it outside. Instead, we'd skate circles upon circles across the concrete floor while listening to the radio.

Sunday was a good day, I got a lot done, there were some good basketball games from the NCAA Tournament playing in the background. And somewhere along the line a mantra stuck in my mind:

"Keep writing and you'll get where you want to go."

A message from my sister on the anniversary of the day she might have ended her life, but on a day that reminds me how meaningful she was and still remains to my life. And how much hope I have for the future.