"You never think it will happen to you or your family" Guest post by: Breigh Ricketts

Warning: This guest author's brother died by suicide & had mental health challenges. If that is difficult for you to read or process, feel free to skip this post.

I had a brother, Brandon, who was about 2 years older than me. I looked up to him, and we shared many of the same friends upon my entering high school. Brandon had a lot of Mental Health issues that dramatically altered his personality. During those times there was no way of knowing how he would act. Nevertheless, there were still so many days where he was an awesome big brother that I looked up to, but Brandon had a secret, a secret that he never confided in about with anyone. He no longer felt he had a reason to live.

On December 6, 1999, Brandon removed a gun from the safe in my parent’s bedroom, a safe that my parents were unaware he had the code to. He walked across the hall into his bedroom, put the gun to his head, and ended his life. What he did not realize, and was unable to fully fathom, was that in the moment he surrendered his will to live and took his own life, he took with it the life of our family’s as we knew it.

You never think it will happen to you or your family. You hear of suicide and although sometimes it might hit just a little closer to home than others, you can never understand what a family goes through during this horrendous time, unless you are personally touched by it yourselves. Immediately, the grief sweeps through you! You begin questioning everything you knew, everything that had happened, and you ultimately wonder if there was something more you could have done. You watch as your family members each retreat inside themselves, retreat to a place that is unreachable, a place in which the shattered pieces of your lives lie.

Slowly, time begins to “heal” the wounds inflicted by the blast that took that life from yours, but let’s be honest, healing is not the word that best describes what takes place in the days, weeks, months, and even years following the death. You never really get over the loss, the grief, the guilt, but instead you learn how to live with it, how to cope when the grief sneaks up on you. Seemingly random events can occur that shoot the memory of the one you lost into your head, and suddenly you are taken back to that night. It could be seeing someone with a resemblance to your loved one while walking the halls at school in the weeks after the death or 20 years later, seeing your 15-year-old son and thinking how you cannot imagine this world without him, while simultaneously remembering what your own parents had to go through. The grief, if left alone, can consume you. Grief has a way of trying to swallow you whole; it can take all your joy and make you feel so alone. It is such a powerful force, but a force that cannot be ignored.

The best advice I can give to those who have experienced loss of a sibling, loved one, etc. is talk, remember, feel, and, honestly, embrace the hurt. So many times, we want to put on the brave face by trying to shut down the grief without living it, without having to experience it, but that is like applying a band-aid to a wound requiring more treatment. Grief is uncomfortable, painful, and overwhelming, but when you take the time to allow others a chance to walk with you through it, you begin to come out of the fog. It is not immediate, nor pleasant, but given time you learn how to walk alongside the grief instead of being consumed by it. There is no time frame on grief, which means you cannot rush the process. Give yourself grace and time, and slowly you realize you no longer dread those memories that used to cause pain because now you can remember them with fondness.