Three days after Joe died by suicide I attended my first survivors of suicide support group, a term or concept I hadn’t even contemplating existed but was glad to have located and attended. More than once I had heard a phrase there like, “The first two years were the hardest.”
I swallowed hard, “Two years?” Wondering to myself, “Will I feel this horrible for two years? I don’t know if I can take that much pain for that long.”
I had also come to think that, like all prior hurts in my life this would be like a ramp sloping down from left to right on a timeline. Just endure the steep upper part and it would progressively get less and less difficult to experience.
That was not to be the case.
Now two years on I wonder, have I built up a numb layer of scar tissue around my heart as a protective coating? Have I done the large part of my “grief work” and now it is just a dull aching bit of maintenance work to do from here till the end of my days?
It would be so much easier if any others who knew and missed Joe would openly talk with me about their process, feeling, experience.
A couple of authors have helped me make it through this long dark path. Martin Prechtel and his work, The Smell of Rain on Dust: Grief and Praise published a month before Joe’s death. The other is John O’Donohue, primarily his book and audio book Anam Cara.
Listening to Anam Cara read by the late author hits home on so many fronts including those around death.
Recently upon listening to O’Donohue while riding the ferry to/from work he was talking about the notion of being able to tell a not-yet born baby that soon he would have to leave this place he’d known in the womb, push through a tight passage way and be out into the light on his/her own….something that would sound like death to the baby. This was so like the way Prechtel describe this transition. Both then used this transitional phase to describe what is likely with death.
It is those of us left behind in this mortal world who hold these feelings of loss while our loved ones have made that mysterious transition to that which we can not fully grasp with our limited minds.
Do I think Joe’s suffering ended that fateful day? Yes.
Those of us who loved him miss him.
I could talk so frankly with him and Joe with me. It is hard to notice that when engaged with another I don’t know so well I’ll have some thread of, “Yeah, that is interesting but what I’d really like to be doing right now is talking with my brother and not you.”
I ride the ferry and look over the railing watching the wake of the boat make waves and remember all the time Joe and I spent in the ocean, playing in waves to where when you closed your eyes to sleep that night, wave after wave would appear in my mind’s eye.
There is no right way to honor this 2-year anniversary. I just notice what was and what has come to be. And I believe that Joe is with me in spirit, not just in memory.