Reality hits: My brother's suicide

It's been eleven months since my brother's suicide.  Today as I cooked a roast dinner, the realisation that my beautiful little brother brutally took his own life, hit me like a truck, and I fear I will never recover.

In the beginning, the situation felt utterly surreal and unreal and like something that doesn't happen to you, and so you just plough on, sort of on autopilot, acting out how you think one should behave when your brother, who you loved and adored more than anything else on earth, has hanged themselves.

You know he's not around anymore, but mostly catch yourself thinking that he will walk back into the house and say 'hi, what's all the fuss about, i'm here, you silly mare, everything is fine.'

But today, it slapped me in the face, as I cut up the potatoes to roast.  His voice in my head, saying 'you always cut the potatoes too small - big roast potatoes are nicer.'  I actually don't agree with him, but the fact that I can't argue this point with him anymore, makes me literally feel like my heart has been ripped out and stamped on, and squeezed, and then chucked over a cliff.

My brother was my best friend.  I recently stayed with an old friend who reminded me of this.  She said 'You lived with him in adulthood, you did everything together, he was your best friend, you adored each other.'  And she's right.

But the last ten years of his life had been tricky between us.  I had my first beautiful child and had post-natal depression, and meanwhile he was becoming unrecognisable.  Completely unbeknown to me, he was suffering from a severe mental illness, while I was trying to negotiate parenthood and get a handle on my PND.

My brother and I suddenly didn't understand each other and a massive ugly wedge pushed itself between us.

But just before he took his own life, he came to me, and things were different.  He was softer and less angry and he opened up to me.  I really thought i was getting my brother back - I had missed him so so much.  I was over the moon, I felt re-connected to him, and felt that we were moving forwards again.  My heart was singing.

And then a couple of days later, the police arrived at my house at 2.30am, to tell me that he had hanged himself at the most special place in the world to both me and my brother.

Now, almost a year later, the pain and realisation of my brother's death gets more and more intense, and it is utterly unbearable.  I am in utter disbelief.  I just want to hold him tightly, and tell him that small roast potatoes work much better than big ones.