Member-only story
The Secret World Of Suicide Survivors
This story is part of The Establishment’s series on PTSD Awareness.
I have replayed the scene in my brain thousands of times.
It takes place in the house we lived in at the time, which was situated on a corner of a busy street where many people awaited their buses. The small TV in the living room was showing The Great Mouse Detective, one of my favorite childhood movies. I was watching it from the sofa — I haven’t viewed the movie since.
This is where I was the moment I was told my brother had shot himself. I let out such a terrible shriek that the strangers outside the window stopped talking. For a brief moment there was a pure, unadulterated silence.
I remember a bolt rising from the top of my head, expanding to the hot furnace that was my skin. I rushed to my room where I slammed my fists into the walls, tore blankets from the mattress, and began swinging my arms, hitting anything and anyone in my path. I screamed so hard that I was left without air. I was given a valium to numb my body into sleep — it was a sleep fraught with terrifying images of my brother leaving. I heard bullets bursting in the air; my sheets were sweat-filled the next morning. There was a sense of drowning, of falling, of being completely shattered.
