Friday 16 December 2016

I don't know who I am: life after my brother's suicide

My younger brother, who would be turning 41 this Sunday, violently and messily completed suicide almost 9 months ago. Since his death I have been on an exhausting, sometimes terrifying, cycle of emotions and thoughts and reactions to what has happened. And I just do not know who I am anymore. I don't know how to feel, what to think, how to react, how to be, what to say, what not to say, and what to do.

One minute I am walking around with a big strong smile, telling the world that I am fine, that my brother is now at peace, that i have so much to be grateful for, that life goes on for those of us left behind, that the world is beautiful, that the spirit lives on. This is what I want to hear, and this is what family and friends and neighbours and people in the butchers want to hear.

However, out of nowhere, while cooking supper, or brushing my children's hair, I get a sudden and sharp stabbing in the stomach that is so powerful that I can't breath. My brother is dead. And he died by his own hand. It is final, and it is very real, and surreal in equal measures. My physically healthy, handsome, intelligent, sweet, loved and loving brother, saw no other way, than to kill himself. And I'm not going to see him again. I'm not going to hear his voice, or hug him, and tell him that he was one of the most significant and important and loved people in my life.

I feel deep despair and darkness. I isolate myself, because the world carries on, and this doesn't feel right. I tell my friends to leave me to grieve, and then feel angry and alone when no-one is there. I feel an unbearable sense of guilt for not being able to stop this tragedy, but also livid that my brother has left me in this truly horrific way.

But then my seven year old comes home from school excitedly wielding a snowman made out of a sock, and my heart sings. And my ten year old makes me roar with laughter with one of her impressions of 'a Londoner' and in that moment, I feel pure joy again, and so very grateful and blessed for all that I have.

I don't know who I am anymore. For the first time in forty years I am brother-less, an only child, and this is completely alien to me, and wrong. But I do know that I am so very lucky to be a mother, and a wife, and a daughter and a friend, and that one day I will hopefully be me again too.

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