In February of 2020, the month of my brother’s death, I went to a suicide survivor support group.
I remember the moment that pushed me to make the decision to go: I have this acute memory of being on all fours, losing my breath and sobbing uncontrollably, knowing that this was all too much. I was at my partner’s house and he looked alarmed, out of his element. And I knew. I knew that this was all far too much to be able to process, to shoulder alone, that I probably needed some support.
I also thought, this is not fair to require that all of my support of my partner and friends. I knew I needed other support and resources. So, I looked up a suicide survivor support group to attend.
I recall being in a haze when I went. As I said in a previous entry, my body was throbbing with stress hormones. I think I spent the next few months just feeling like I was in a dream-like state. This was surreal, this couldn’t have happened. This couldn’t be my life…again.
In that foggy state, I remember observing the others in the room. It was heavy, the air, with pain, with grief. The way that people carried themselves, and moved through the room. You could easily spot those who were there because they lost someone and the others who were their to offer their support. They carry their bodies differently. Before we even started, people’s faces were tear-stained with blood-shot eyes and blotchy skin patches.
I tried to listen for as long as I could and just be there, getting an understanding of the structure and layout of these group meetings.
But, soon, the inevitable sharing circle began.
It is a surreal and bizarre, and darkly comical experience to be the aberrant at a suicide survivor support group. After all, we are all there for a shared purpose: we have lost someone close to us to suicide. A father. A husband. A daughter. A friend.
When it came to me, I had to share that for me and my story, it was a two-fer...two-for?
Now, I fully admit that that is a whole lot to mentally digest. Empirically, I get that.
Still, it was so strangely ironic and darkly comical to be looking around for members of a support group, with similar-experience souls and kindred spirits. But instead, to see saucer-size-wide eyes, when for—just a moment—these grieving, wounded souls are temporarily snatched from their own reality to size up another, who had this twice over.
I say that not as a pity party, but as a statement of fact.
It got very, very quiet. They all faced me and gaped.
And then, they looked even more confused. I think it was because I was calm.
Of course, I wasn’t on the inside. I was a tightly wound bundle of nerves and tsunamis of cortisol. But I appeared composed. You would have thought I had it together.
I probably appeared to be unfeeling, unfazed. Though I was not.
The complete truth is that I had strained relationships with my brother and father. My brother had been angry, spiteful, and mean to me before he died. We always had a tumultuous relationship. We never got along. Did I want him dead? Of course not. But he also needed professional help that he did not get. He was making horrible life choices and even though he cut me off (for the umpteenth time in many years), I knew it was like watching a car crash in slow motion…watching someone self destruct.
Any death brings forward complicated feelings….which is why experts have presented to us those named stages of grief, in neat little boxes as though it always works that way, we move forward in a nice linear fashion completing one before moving on to another, not looking back.
That’s with any death. So, how much more with suicide?
One of the coping and healing parts of my story is to allow/own my feelings on the deaths of my family members, which—to be quite frank, involves elements of relief. I watched my family members make many many bad choices over the years. I couldn’t save them. They never permanently adjusted their lifestyles or got the help that they needed. I don’t blame them, but this is simply a truthful statement. And when someone—even someone you love—makes those self-destructive choices, knowing that that worst has already happened, can be a relief. Especially when you feel like you’ve been existing on that precipice for so long.
It is a constant burden and weight on you and your life. Especially for someone who cares too much and has boundary issues. (I would make a terrible therapist.)
So part of my acceptance process was that I realized that I no longer had to wait for the other shoe to drop. I no longer had to worry. There is a peace, there is a relief.
Not that that is all there is. If it was, it would be so much easier, and I would probably sound like a sociopath and unable to feel for relatives who were in such pain that they ended their lives, utterly hopeless, and I am not. On the contrary.
So yeah, all of that to say that I was not going to be one of the ones in the suicide support group who considered getting my deceased loved ones’ ashes in placed in a lamp to display in my living room, or to mix them up and ink them into a tattoo on my body or to wear them in a vial on my neck.
I had to suppress my facial expressions when some of them shared these ideas for their tributes to loved ones. Because…Wow.
Perhaps needless to say, I did not go back to the support group.
Now, truly, I am very glad such places exists, that there are spaces for those who need them. And, I am certain the environment and atmosphere of these meetings varies all the time, depending on who attends and which group leads it, where it is, etc, etc. Such efforts of suicide survivor support groups are vital for those who need those resources, a sense of community, a way to process, cope, in hopes of healing. But it wasn’t for me.
Being a rara avis, (fancy Latin term for odd duck ? Literally translated as weird bird), having this association with me/about me is quite odd really, as I dwell on it and what it means.
It is such a strange thing to realize I am probably more of a statistical anomaly because of the suicides in my family than any other thing about me. That I will ever do in my life. The only thing that would set me apart from however many thousands of others with similar demographics.
Because I had spent so many years fighting not to be defined by my family, to rise above, this doesn’t always sit well with me, as I previously stated.
But it is what it is. It is reality. And I am working on acceptance.
To do so, my coping mechanism, in addition to advocacy and support from loved ones and books, is to charge my way through these difficult experiences with hefty doses of raw, dark humor.
I think about certain comments I make, thoughts I have and jokes I make would seem deeply inappropriate at times to some. But there is so much heaviness, so much sadness, that I carry. Like a pressure cooker, sometimes you have to release the steam.
We all cope in different ways. We all grieve and manage life’s pain in many ways. My family members often times chose self-harm in the manner of alcohol abuse, cigarette abuse, over-eating, drug abuse, over-spending, etc. In those relative terms, dark humor doesn’t seem all too bad. Or, as my mother would have said: “not too shabby.”