****Trigger Warning: discussions of suicide, death, grief. Please only read if you feel comfortable doing so. If you are feeling suicidal, please skip to the end of this post and contact the national helpline for immediate assistance. Remember, you are not alone!***

The beginning of October is a challenging time of year for me. I am met with the reminder of losing a loved one to suicide. Somehow, it has now been four years. It feels simultaneously like just yesterday, and like a lifetime ago. You can read some of my previous posts about grief in the early days – but even now, four years in, it is still a continual process of grieving.

About a month ago, I went to a documentary film screening about a woman whose own mother died from suicide when she was a little girl. I knew it was going to be incredibly challenging for me to watch, and I was a bit worried at the beginning. Was I ready to watch a film about this? At the same time, I felt called to see it. The film focused on the woman, who is now a grown adult, trying to piece together what her mother’s life had been like before she was gone. It was a really beautiful, raw, moving piece.

At one point, the film highlighted the coroner’s report with the date of the mother’s passing. Somehow, it was the exact same date (though years apart) of when my loved one passed too. I gasped in the theatre and started bawling. In that moment, it felt like the film had somehow been made just for me to connect with. I truly can’t find the words to describe how moving that experience was.

Do I think that particular date is perhaps cursed? Maybe. It presents a challenge for me to navigate each year. Though grief doesn’t go away on the other days of the year, it feels particularly charged around this time. I consider how the past few years have been since they passed. I consider the future. Most importantly, I consider how to honour their memory.

One way that I choose to honour their life is by truly living my own. Life is short and we only truly get one chance, we don’t get a do-over. And not all of us get to live all of the life that we may have desired to live. So whenever I feel as if I am getting complacent in my own life, I am reminded of just how precious life truly is. I remind myself to never take this life for grated. To take risks and do all of the things I want, and then some.

Honouring their life can also be a celebration, too. So I’ll eat Mexican food on your death anniversary, because you loved it. I’ll raise a glass to you, because you couldn’t resist a cold one. I’ll connect with friends, because you had a loving heart and so much to give – and I want to keep giving, too. I consider celebrating these moments a way of honouring you, and I hope if you were still here, you’d think the same.

Another big part of honouring their memory is ensuring that I do not fall down the same road. This means prioritizing my mental health is absolutely essential. I like to think I do that in a lot of ways, but therapy is one of the biggest. I have been doing a lot of work in therapy over the past few months. Right now, I feel stronger in my mental health than I have in a very long time. Perhaps the strongest since this entire journey of grieving. It’s a surprising feeling, to be honest. And brings some guilt, too.

Shouldn’t I still be feeling horrible? Shouldn’t I still be stuck in grief? Any sense of feeling better or good or even joy brings along with it the guilt that I should be feeling negative emotions instead. But, I try to hold space for both.

In my reflections last year, I talked about grief feeling like a fog that rarely lifts. Thankfully, today it feels like that fog is lifted more often that not. For that I am very grateful. Don’t get it twisted – I’ll still never be the same. But I am beginning to see a future ahead that is more grounded than what I could have imagined at the start of my grief journey.

With that said, I like to think of grief as grieving. The ‘ing‘ to me means that is is always happening, always in motion, in a constant state of flux. I think that is perhaps the best way I can describe it. Grief may hit the hardest at the beginning, but grieving is a long (perhaps lifelong) process. Though I may perhaps be starting to make it out the other side of the brutality of grief itself, grieving will continue to be present. I can imagine it will continue to change and fluctuate as the years pass by.

And so, I will keep writing about it. Suicide should not be something anyone has to go through, or something that anyone has to cope with. I hope that if I continue to write about it, and talk about it, we can continue to reduce stigma and boost mental health support. You are not alone. There is support for you. Please use the resources below whenever you need them:

• Canada has a list of mental health support resources, both provincial and national, at this website.
• You can contact the Canadian Mental Health Association for ongoing support via their website, https://cmha.ca/
• If you are navigating your own grief, you can use this helpful resource that discusses normalizing grief: https://www.normalizegrief.com/
• If you have also lost a loved one to suicide, you can browse this PDF guide that discusses Hope and Healing after Suicide: PDF guide

***If you are contemplating suicide, please seek support immediately. Canada has developed a Suicide Prevention Hotline that is available 24/7 when you dial 9-8-8. Do not hesitate to call them if you are struggling. YOU ARE NOT ALONE!! ❤ ****