Surviving Suicide Loss: Lessons in Life and Grief 12 Years Later
Trigger Warning: Mentions of my experiences with mental illness, suicide/suicidal ideation, and losing a loved one to suicide.
When I was 17 years old, I attempted suicide.
I’d been in therapy for about 4 months at that point, miserable and struggling with the worst depression I’ve ever had while trying to mentally survive living in a house with my abusive stepfather.
Thankfully, I wasn’t fully committed to ending my life; mostly I just wanted to get caught so I could get more help that I didn’t know how to ask for. Instead, when I failed at doing the unthinkable one weekday morning in a bathroom stall at school, I pulled myself together and went to class, as if nothing happened. I didn’t tell anyone for months, including my therapist, and several important people who were part of my life then still have no idea to this day.
I wish I could say that I didn’t still struggle with suicidal ideation at 31, but unfortunately — despite years of progress in therapy and a prescription antidepressant—that isn’t true. My depression comes and goes throughout the year with varying levels of severity (and Pre-Menstrual Dysphoric Disorder doesn’t help either) and it’s often compounded by whatever global catastrophe we’re trying to muddle through during any particular week of the year.
However.
I can say that I have never again seriously considered acting on my ideation. Why?
Because two years after my attempt, I found out what it was like to be on the other side of it.
My best friend Brittany was about to start her sophomore year of college when she died, but I’d been close to her since the second grade, when she moved to my hometown (though I always insisted she moved in the third grade and this discrepancy in our memories became a running joke between us).
When I met her, she was short and freckled, a perfect match for her sunny disposition and spirited personality. She was so small when we were young that for at least the first few years that I knew her, she was constantly (and hilariously, I might add) hiking up her jeans.
Her favorite colors were orange and purple — the latter she would end up buried in — and she was comically terrified of ants in a way that people are afraid of spiders or snakes.
There were a lot of aspects about her that I admired — being around her was like stepping into the sun, and for as long as I knew her, she was confident in a way that I wasn’t until I reached adulthood.
Brittany lived right around the corner from me so we rode the bus home together every day after school. On the days I wasn’t brooding while listening to my Discman and pretending I was in a dramatic movie, we sat in the back of the bus and played M*A*S*H and Concentration (IYKYK).
In middle school, the two of us and our friend Kady crafted many a choreographed dance to Hilary Duff and Britney Spears in Britt’s basement — something we never quite grew out of, apparently, because Brittany and I had bedroom dance parties to Lady Gaga and Miley Cyrus well into college.
I still can’t hear “Party in the USA” or “Just Dance” without thinking about her.
In high school, I spent many nights sleeping over at Britt’s house where I beat her butt in Wii pong while she kept me fed in my preferred teenage snack diet of Mountain Dew and brown sugar cinnamon pop-tarts. On the nights when our other friends joined us, we taught ourselves the Soulja Boy dance (yes, that sentence does make me want to curl up and die in embarrassment, thank you) and created absurdly dramatic sketches that we recorded on a camcorder.
We were clearly, um, a wild bunch.
Brittany’s parents became like second parents to me, and I often spilled things to her mom that I didn’t know how to talk to my own mother about.
In school, she wrote me silly poems when I was sad, made me laugh like no one else could, doodled in my notebook during class, always listened when I jabbered incessantly about my favorite ship on Law & Order: SVU (Elliot and Olivia, for the uninitiated), and constantly swapped terrible Your Mom jokes with me. This was one of our favorites, in the spirit of Harry Potter and Mean Girls:
Nice wig, Albus. What’s it made out of?
Your Mom’s chest hair!
When we were old enough to get jobs, we both worked inside the only mall in town (RIP). On her breaks from her shift at Burlington, she visited me at McDonald’s for a few minutes, just to give me a hug and order a large root beer.
Like anyone else, our friendship wasn’t perfect. She was a firecracker prone to mood swings and eventually my depression was bad enough that I began isolating myself a bit from her and the rest of my friends. Occasionally, we were mean to each other like only middle school-aged girls could be, usually through a passed note in the hallway. But most of the time, we were solid as a rock, and the notes she wrote me looked more like these:
After we graduated high school, Britt commuted to college about 15 minutes outside our hometown while I moved 2 hours away to Ithaca. We stayed close through texts, Facebook wall posts, and cookie-baking sessions when I came home for the holidays.
A couple of days before Fall Break our freshman year, we lost our high school friend Sara to epilepsy quite suddenly. It was my first real loss, and it was…surreal. I had no idea how to even begin to process it — all I knew was that I needed to find a way to say goodbye so that my head could grasp what was happening.
Her warm hand clasped tightly in mine, Brittany and I went in to Sara’s viewing together. I know a lot of people find viewings to be horrific — and I understand their perspectives — but I’ve found that it forces me to face a reality that I would struggle to comprehend otherwise. It is difficult, but it’s also final and helps me move through the grieving process.
Looking back, there aren’t quite any words to describe knowing that my rock, my best friend of 11 years standing beside me that day, would be the one I’d be looking down at in her own casket less than a year later.
August 4, 2010 started off as any other unremarkable sunny day. I was still in my pajamas at noon, laying in bed and listening to music when I got a call from Ashley, Brittany’s sister.
They found her in her room, having quietly taken her life in the middle of the morning when her family was home. She made two separate attempts that morning — when the first one wasn’t successful, she moved on to her second choice.
She wasn’t able to be revived.
The shock and confusion came first; Brittany wasn’t depressed as far as I or anyone else knew (I later learned through her own writing that she had been masking for a long time). I always thought if either of us were to go that way —
Well, it wouldn’t be her.
I didn’t know how to make heads or tails of any of it, so I shifted into some type of problem-solving mode. I drove to my best friend Elizabeth’s house so I could break the news before she heard it from someone else. I paced the floor in her kitchen and called a few of our other close friends, the ones that made up our favorite sleepovers, our high school lunch table crew. I even called our old high school itself because we’d always been a small, close-knit community of students and teachers.
I couldn’t tell you anything else that happened that day.
It took about 24 hours for the shock to wear off and for any real emotion to kick in. I’d been putting off talking or seeing Brittany’s parents because I was scared, maybe because I knew deep down that’s what would make it real. And sure enough, the tears finally came as soon as I stepped through the door and saw their faces.
The weeks following are a blur even now, odd for me as someone with an elephant-like memory. There are flashes of staying busy and seeking comfort with my friends, falling asleep in movie theaters, eating pizza in bed while watching Friends, writing a eulogy that I gave at Britt’s funeral, and trying my best to avoid some of the drama and blame being thrown around.
I have a lot of compassion for the person I was then and while I don’t blame my younger self for how she dealt with it, I wish I could’ve protected her more from the fallout. I was a heartbroken 19-year-old looking for answers, and while I never got the why (as most never do, and the answer is rarely simple anyway), I did get everything else.
I read the notes Brittany left behind, and heard every detail about what she did, how she did it. There’s so much inside my head that sometimes I forget that I wasn’t actually there with her in her room when it happened. I regret asking about any of it — and oftentimes I never asked at all — because they’re details that I’m forced to carry for the rest of my life.
Three weeks after she passed, I was already back at Ithaca for the first day of classes, trying to navigate a life and a space where no one else knew her. It was hard for a very long time, and there were several days in that first year that I thought the grief would suffocate me. Days where I hoped it would.
This year marks 12 years since her death, a gutting reminder that she’s now been gone from my life longer than she was in it. It’s funny though how grief evolves with time. I think about her every day, but more in a “she crosses my mind” kind of way rather than a “shit, this hurts” kind of way.
But in other respects, it’s still just as painful as it was then. I dream about her regularly, about every month at least, but they’re rarely a comfort. Each one is usually some iteration of her being alive and faking her death because she didn’t want to be friends with me anymore. Bleak as hell.
Maybe there’s some psychological thing going on there that I should work out in therapy, but regardless, the monthly visits are tough pills to swallow that often throw me off for days at a time.
And then there’s trying to cope with the knowledge that there’s so many people in the world who will never get to know her the way that I did. And even those who knew her and loved her will never know her as an adult, or see her make her own life for herself. She’s forever frozen in time at 19 years old.
I consider myself lucky in the respect that I have so many incredible physical reminders of both Brittany and our friendship — not just the notes and photos I’ve sprinkled throughout this post, but videos I can replay when I fear that maybe I’m forgetting the sound of her voice. Again.
It feels stupid to sit here and say that I learned something from all of this, as if it’s some ridiculous after-school PBS special. Brittany’s death wasn’t fated; it wasn’t God’s will. I’ve never been someone who believed there’s a reason for everything; there wasn’t a reason for this.
But her death did force me to confront the reality and implications of suicide, and the ripple effect of devastation it leaves behind. And maybe you’re reading this with a duh expression on your face, like “Yeah, no shit,” but it’s such a life-altering grief that you cannot possibly begin to fathom or even come close to putting words to unless you’ve been through it.
And so, on my bad depression nights or PMDD episodes when I’m crying in bed wondering how the hell I’m going to make it through another day, she is a large part of what gets me through.
Because even though she’s gone —
She’s still saving my life.
*****
If you or someone you know is struggling with suicidal thoughts or a mental health crisis, call or text 988 or visit 988lifeline.org to speak to a trained counselor.
