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.

Where Hope Resides

It’s hard to believe it’s the start of August and that Greg went back to school yesterday. I’m always reminded, as we head toward fall, that September is the month we put extra effort into suicide prevention with National Suicide Prevention Month and World Suicide Prevention Day.

But there have also been some deaths lately, a death here in New Mexico that no one is saying is a suicide unless one reads between the lines and the death of Sinead O’Connor who couldn’t seem to find peace in herself and then the suicide of her son that made it even more challenging.

All this together started me thinking on what my message September is this year and I realized it’s going to be much different than usual although not a new message for me.

It’s about where we find hope.

I don’t know why, but so often my head the phrase, “where hope resides” travels through and it did last week as I contemplated these deaths and the emotional pain that these people- and so many others– feel.

Life feels so much more challenging these days than ever before- we remain divided and angry. There has been change that makes sense to some and not to others. Even going to a restaurant has come to feel like a chore when you don’t know if they have enough staff to feed you (another topic for another day). Sometimes finding joy feels sucked away with the vacuum cleaner in this change.

When I find myself getting down, the question comes floating through– where does hope reside? In some way, it does in this photo of sunrise in the rice fields in Ubud, Bali. A new day always means a new start. And no matter how difficult the day before was! There is something about darkness giving way to light. After all, it can’t stay dark forever, the sun has to come back.

Perhaps instead of a message this year, a statement of inspiration, I’m issuing my own challenge to everyone (a good challenge, I’d like to think!): where does your hope reside?

A Reminder as Things Begin to Bloom Again

There is a myth, one I continue to hear thrown out there every December, that people are more likely to end their lives during the holiday season.

No no no. While depression might run more rampant during the holiday because of the disappointment with relationships, sadness over loss, or a variety of other reasons, digging into the numbers, one would see that more suicides happen in March than any other time of year.

March– when things start to bloom, when we get teased with warmer weather, when spring break usually takes place. Yes, that March. My tulips are beginning to sprout and this morning it felt much lighter than it has as I began my swim at 6:30.

For most of us, March is a time of hope and renewal; we begin to feel a surge of energy after the dark and cold of winter.

But for some people, including my sister who died 29 years ago this March, I quickly understood that while I saw hope in things blooming, for her it meant the pain of watching things bloom while her own pain felt inescapable.

Take a step back this month– many aspects of our lives are opening up (while we all step tentatively into them, afraid we might lose them again), but there is still much pain around us. That pain is exaggerated by the site of things turning green and then the first flowers beginning to bloom. As many people feel renewal from getting to switch out the winter coat to a spring one, many others can’t get there.

Check on your own mental wellness this month; make sure you’re doing okay. If you’re not, what can you do to help yourself? And check on those around you and whom you care about. Our pain doesn’t all look or feel the same. If something looks out of place to you, it probably is.

There is hope but sometimes people need a little help finding the color in the tulips and the lighter days.

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.

Be Present

Be present.

Seems impossible for many of us, doesn’t it?

How often do we find ourselves distracted from the moment, even a great one, by something else?

But being present is important, it’s a key to life in many ways, or at least to functioning in life. What we often don’t realize, however, is that not being present is the source of much of our pain. We’re always looking one way or another– in the rearview mirror at what we had– or looking forward to what we want but can’t seem to get. Then we find ourselves in a downward spiral of pain.

There is pain in the present, of course, but present moments don’t last forever. The sun always has to come up, light must return.

Whether we have lost someone to suicide and can’t stop looking back at what we didn’t do or what we will never have, or we’re contemplating ending our lives because we can’t bear to face a future, we need to stop walking one way or the other.

Stand still, be present, look around. What’s surrounding you? Life has pain, it’s a reality, Yet by stopping for a moment and just being, we’ll find our perspective changes. By being present.

That Stupid Word

No no no– I’m not referring to believe. We all know I like that word so much that I made t-shirts and stickers from my painting of it.

We’re two weeks from Suicide Prevention Month, Suicide Prevention Week, and Suicide Prevention Day which means it’s time for me to start addressing not just suicide, but the state of where things are. I dusted my soap box off and I’ll be using it for the next few weeks.

Usually, each time this year I have some sort of message that I believe people should know about. This year, probably in light of everything that’s happened, I didn’t feel anything that hasn’t been said before so much as maybe some things that need to be rehashed.

I also thought about something that is getting better, but still needs more work.

The used of the word “committed.”

That’s the stupid word.

I never felt comfortable using that after Denise died by suicide. It never rolled off my tongue and it took me time, processing, to understand that “committed” in that sense means sin or crime, neither of which she had done.

Denise died by suicide. She believed her pain to be insurmountable and I have never tried to judge that because I wasn’t walking in her shoes.

For many reasons- church reasons, law reasons– the word committed has stung the bereaved in a negative way. The good news is that I hear it less often– less on television, less in the newspapers. The bad news is that I still hear it in my orbit.

There are many things you can do for suicide prevention and there are a number of things you can do for the bereaved. One big one is to change your language and those around you.

Died by suicide.

Seeking a Journey

When my sister Denise died by suicide in 1993, I don’t believe the need to do something for others came instantly. I had a full life at the time of her death– I was getting ready for midterms in my junior year of my undergraduate college degree. It took some time for me to realize that something was missing and I had a skill that could fill that need.

At the time, there wasn’t an internet to connect people and it was mostly by reading books and talking to others (but that meant you had to find others who had lost a loved one to suicide, and in my case it was a sibling which was even more challenging to do) that gave you the connection. What I felt was that there was little available to sibling survivors of suicide and if I were to fulfill a need, it was to write a book and give a voice to what were then called the “forgotten mourners.”

It will be twenty years this coming July since the publication of Do They Have Bad Days in Heaven? Surviving the Suicide Loss of a Sibling was published and sent me on an incredible journey around the world speaking, writing, and advocating for not just the suicide bereaved, but also for suicide prevention.

At some point, I felt as if I had done all that I was supposed to and started to move back to the things that had always been important to me– my writing and then the outgrowth of other aspects of my life, the creation of Chelle Summer. However, I have tried to some little things to raise money and awareness for suicide, not always able to get the results that I would like and I’ve tried to leave that behind.

There has been some good movement in the field of suicidology since I moved onto other things, but I’ve also seen things that make me shake my head and other things that I had started have died because the person I gave the torch to buried it instead. Those stories aren’t for today though. This is about what we encourage people to do after a loss. For so long, it felt like people were encouraged to somehow get involved whether with the bereaved or in suicide prevention efforts.

However, I see that there are many ways we can do things to remember our loved ones, mostly through something that was important to them. Perhaps, if my journey were starting today instead of nearly thirty years ago, and the book had already been written, maybe I would have gone straight to Chelle Summer and using the inspiration of the creativity of my childhood with Denise to build my brand instead.

But I don’t usually look at it that way. If someone were to call me today and tell me that they had lost a loved one and what could they do, I would encourage them to do something that is important to them and/or their loved one. What outwardly might not be helping the bereaved or advocating for suicide prevention could still be helping people, but in a different way.

The important part is that we find a “place” to put the suicide, and remember our loved ones for the lives they lived, not for the way they died.

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.

What do you say?

When my sister died– and it was over twenty-five years ago when there was much more stigma surrounding suicide than there is now– I remember thinking how could she end her life, believing that she valued and cherished life much more than I did. And that also meant people often didn’t know what to say to me.

But there is another time that leaves people speechless– after a suicide attempt.

What do we say to someone who has attempted life? Life is the whole of everything we do and believe and when someone tries to end it, we know it goes against everything we’ve been taught about preserving it.

In the years that I trained people in suicide prevention and in the experiences I’ve had working with suicidal people/attempters, I’ve learned that it’s an opportunity to be there for someone, a time not to speak, but to allow them to speak. Suicidal people are looking for a way to express their pain and when they don’t find it, they might attempt to end their lives.

They don’t need to hear from us how wonderful their lives are and how great they are. They are trying to reconcile feelings inside themselves that we might not have any idea are there.

We have a tendency to want them to stand in a sunny place with us. The spot where they are standing is stormy and they don’t want to move from it until they have an opportunity to express the pain they feel, the road that led them to the attempt, and how much they hurt. It’s like the clouds in the sky continuing to hover until they’ve had a chance to drop moisture on the earth. Expressing the bad allows us to see the good again.

It’s a relief for them to express their pain and sometimes enough for them to move forward. Others might need more help in the vein of a therapist or someone to walk the road for them as they try to find a way forward. There might be other circumstances around the attempt that they need to cope with as well. No matter the depth of their needs, there is a place for all of us to be there for them to some extent.

Ultimately, I think of the founder of the field of suicidology, Edwin Shneidman, who said that it came down to two questions: “Where do you hurt?” and “How can I help?”

Kate Spade: The Initial Inspiration for Chelle Summer

Quite honestly, I'm not sure where to begin. Two of my worlds collided today with the suicide of Kate Spade.

What most people don't know is that I stopped buying Kate Spade products partly because she had sold the brand and each time Greg and I went into one of the stores on a trip, we agreed that things didn't look new and inviting.

However, there was a bigger reason than that: I had started to create my own brand, Chelle Summer. Initially I had wanted to call Chelle summer "Michelle L." and when the lawyers came back and told me that Fossil owned "Michele" with one L, they were clear that I could never win against such a large company. I was so disappointed that I had to come up with a new name but at some point I thought of Kate and how awkward it must have been (even though she had chosen to sell it) to see a brand with her name on it while she might not have always liked what the new brand had to offer. Chelle Summer was born and I quickly realized it was a better name than Michelle L., while also allowing somewhat of a separation from my own name.

When I look back on the time when I purchased my first Kate bag (in this photo), I was facing many challenges of my own trying to move forward after a divorce and two moves across the country. What I didn't see then was that in looking at what the brand offered and her style of which I had been aware of for so long (but couldn't afford to buy), I was slowly realizing what I would want my own brand to be. Kate was the initial inspiration for Chelle Summer (with Trina Turk taking the lead later). Kate made me feel that I didn't have to settle for what I saw in the marketplace, that I could create my own items and I also could choose to wear bold prints and colors.

I obviously don't know what led her to take her own life, but with vast experience in suicide over the past twenty-five years I know that there is never just one answer. It was probably a combination of events and thoughts that made her believe ending her life was her only way to find peace. The irony of this is that early this morning on my walk as I was contemplating my own life journey that's following my surgery this past Friday, I realized that for a period of time I'm not going to find peace as much as I would like to. I'm working to embrace some challenges ahead of me (mostly writing related) to fulfill the prayer to God that I've been asking to help me go forward and be the person I'm supposed to be.

I also understand how as a creative person it can be challenging because you're in your own world where sometimes you can think too much. It's why I work hard to balance my life of running/walking early in the mornings where I have several people that I chat with and why I host so many pool and dinner parties. Those keep me balanced while also allowing me to have that time create and be alone in my thoughts.

I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around her suicide. That's the honest answer. But I also know that life is hard and overwhelming at times. That's also one of the one reasons I post so many blogs and photos about moving forward. I see it that if I have something in my life that helps me go forward, maybe it can help someone else, too.

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.

The Building Blocks of Coping Skills

In the last week, I received several messages from friends who were in some way affected by a recent teen suicide and/or attempt. In November I spoke with a reporter The Naperville Sun– the very newspaper for which I wrote a column on good causes several years ago while I was living in my hometown for a short time.

I'm not going into specifics but there have been multiple suicides at my high school over the last year and much as been said about the concern that the students are feeling too much pressure to succeed and feel unable to live up to that.

In the article above (which was then reprinted in the Chicago Tribune a few days before Christmas) I gave my opinions as someone who grew up in Naperville and whose younger sister died in the same town. In my first book about sibling suicide I cited the environment as what I have always believed to be a factor in my sister's death: the pressure wasn't something she coped with well.

Denise and I were two very different beings, beyond the fact that I had blonde hair and she had brown hair (and that by the time I graduated from high school– which was the end of her freshman year– she also was taller than me). I won't say that I did well under pressure because all the pressure came from myself which is another story for another day. But I thrived in the busy environment of having multiple tasks to complete– school, running, writing and editing the school newspaper. I was involved with the activities that interested me and I believed were important to creating the life that I wanted to have.

But this isn't just about Naperville. Our suicide numbers are up. Way up. We have more resources, we have better medications, we have more crisis lines. And yet we are losing more people to suicide.

So once again I'm hopping back on my soap box.

There's a long list I could go down of which I still believe coping skills are missing from the diets of many young people. Couple that with social media and either a self-indulgence of oneself or the feeling of inferiority that one isn't good enough next to what others' lives appear to be. And don't forget to sprinkle in the lack of personal communication– texting has replaced actually sitting down and having a conversation with the people around us. 

My husband who is a high school teacher and coach and I had a conversation last week and he said, "It's not just coping skills but building on coping with challenging situations." 

Something challenging happens in our lives, especially early like maybe we fall off the bike before we finally actually are able to ride it successfully. Learning to do things and learning how to cope with disappointments (we didn't win the essay contest we thought we had surely nailed), help us the next time we are faced with something especially as they get seemingly bigger and more integral to our lives.

I have often said that high school running taught me much about how cope with disappointment. That pressure I put on myself that I mentioned earlier caused a lot of disappointment early in my life. Now that I'm older (and hopefully wiser) I can see how I have used those disappointments as building blocks to each experience I've been faced with since then. 

However, I should also add that my parents allowed me to make mistakes. They didn't run off to the school and fix everything. In fact, they fixed nothing. I would have been embarrassed if they went to the school to complain about a teacher or situation. That was up to me to figure out.

Finally, it's why my social media is filled with what I create, what inspires me, what makes me happy. Many days can be challenges for a variety of reasons (as I type this I have a bag of frozen popcorn resting a hurt knee– I haven't been able to run much in the past three weeks– one of my seemingly life-sustaining activities). 

As I said in the interview, life is hard but it's also great. We have many opportunities and we never know what's around the corner which is every reason why we should hold on for tomorrow. And we all have an obligation not to just to learn that for ourselves but to pass on what we've learned to others particularly people younger than us. That in turn gives us purpose. 

A Short Time on My Soapbox

I spent the latter part of last week at the American Association of Suicidology conference in Phoenix, my first conference since I handed the presidential gavel off to Bill Schmitz four years ago. I try to fill my days with creating, whether it be through writing, sewing, or other like projects. However, in the recent weeks between multiple suicides at my high school and the uproar of the Netflix television series, "13 Reasons Why," I've tried to stay out of any discussions, believing my time is best spent continuing to throw inspiration out there rather than sitting here typing opinions.

However, I found my soapbox and today I'm offering a little bit of my perspective before I put the soapbox away again.

I haven't seen "13 Reasons Why" and nor do I plan to watch it or read the book. Instead, I'm offering my thoughts about what I believe is missing in our culture– a message that hasn't changed in the four years since I became a past president of the American Association of Suicidology.

We've spent a lot of time and energy looking into why people kill themselves. Yes, it's important, absolutely, but in that same time we still know much less about how people cope and how we can help them cope when they think that the only way to end their pain is to end their lives. What I have learned from the twenty-some years since my sister ended her life and I was forced to face intense grief for the first time in my life, is that no one grieves the same. I also believe that to be true when we are faced with challenges in our lives: we're all going to work toward finding hope in different ways because we are, well, different people. 

What I do believe is that we can do is help people find the start of the hopeful journeys. Give them ideas, help them begin to learn coping skills so that when life hands then a challenge, they know at least how to find hope. It might not feel like hope is there, but it is. Often it's just that the light is so dim we can't see it. We should allow them to express their pain, let them know that we know they are hurting. But then we should help lead them toward the light, even slowly.

We are all faced with challenges and difficulties, some of us seemingly more than others, but learning from them and using them as springboards for growth is what makes us stronger and helps us to someday look back at the road behind us, hands on our hips, and know that we have come a long way. And then continue forward on the road.

Honoring Quietly

About fifteen years ago, I remember sitting in the local support group for the suicide bereaved, this several years after my book for sibling suicide had been published, and we were talking about ways to honor a loved one who had died. A man who had lost his mother to suicide said– as he shook his head– "I have no idea what to do."

I responded, "That's okay. You don't have to know right away." 

Many more losses later I am well versed in this. For me, figuring out how I will honor them is how I move forward, but I also realize that we don't have an answer to how to do that right away. 

However, what I choose to do today is much different than when I lost my younger sister nearly twenty-four years ago. While it wasn't instant, I knew I had some need to help other sibling survivors of suicide, mostly because the world was different (the internet was very limited and there was no social media); we couldn't connect to each other like we do today with a simple Google search. That turned into a book which launched a speaking career and traveling around the world, educating and helping people both with suicide grief and suicide prevention.

For my dad's death eleven years ago, I was still deep into suicide work and inching my way toward a doctorate. I didn't have the time– or energy– to figure out what else I might do. But after my mom's death in 2014, my perspective had already begun to shift and I saw where it tied me back (as I have written recently) to the person I wanted to be growing up.

But also in this time, I have watched people launch foundations in loved ones' names, hoping to raise funds to help people or causes, or where they do walks and run, with the goal of doing the same. 

Recently I saw something someone was doing in a loved one's name and a thought struck me– I don't have the need to be so public about saying, "I'm doing this because of my mom." And then  at a party last weekend a friend and I were discussing this, how my journey in that way has become more private: I don't need to share it all with the world.

And yet what I still share is what I create– my writing, my sewing, my painting. I know that pursuing a creative life is honoring the three family members I traveled with in the station wagon (long after my older brother and sister stopped taking family trips with us). I also know that getting my education (particularly before I married– per her instructions) was a way to honor my maternal grandmother who couldn't go to college because she had to help her brothers financially get college degrees. It was never something I talked about, more something I did. 

Today the journey is about doing without having to say why I'm doing it every minute of the day. Sure, there are aspects I share, especially when I particularly know how they inspired something, but mostly it's about taking time each day to pursue what makes me happy is what honors them and makes my life an authentic one.

My Identity

For so long I had such a need to identify myself as a first, a suicide survivor, and then as the language changed, a suicide loss survivor. It was clearly part of my grief road in the early parts of the past twenty-four years. But I have found myself not disconnected from it, but like the surface of the road beneath me has changed.

I know there are people who will read that and be dismayed that I'm saying that. However, it's a good thing that I say it. I have found that in the years since I have moved on from doing suicide-related work full time, that often people are upset that I am not doing it. But to me, I am showing that you can still have a great life despite all that happens to you.

Traditionally, parents who have lost children have been the ones who have been the loudest voices (and I say that with a  positive note to it!) making suicide prevention a prevention and organizing support groups for those left behind. What I have realized over the years is that they had many years of life before their children died. I was only twenty-one when my sister died and now, as I come up on twenty-four years since her death, I see that I didn't have much life before being hit with the loss. I find today that I don't want my life to be consumed by it. As a friend said to me recently, "You don't have a need to wear the black armband." For a long time, I did feel like I needed to– or wanted to. 

Instead, I see the road much differently today. As my life continues to be filled with losses and the world feels a bit challenging, I'm working to stay focused. Each day I pray that I continue to be creative, to write and sew, and that my sister and my parents help me to stay inspired.

What I couldn't see in all those years of helping others– which taught me so much– that there would come a day that it would swing back to me and remind me of the person I always wanted to be. It's as if I have traveled through the loss to be able to find my way back to my relationships with each of my deceased family members. Now they can help me– although not in the same way as if they were here– continue to create, to sew, and to write. There is only love where they are now, no pain of anything that happened here in life. But it was my journey to get where I could see beyond the pain so that the four of us could have a relationship without it causing a block on my end.

And they could remind me of who I always wanted to be. And help me make that happen.