my father's suicide Archives - So About What I Said

Monday, March 15, 2021

My Father’s Suicide: 18 Years Ago

I know I say this every year, but time really is a weird thing! It’s the only thing I know that can feel both long and short at the same time — years somehow never feel like just years in the literal sense, which is something I’m continually grappling with in an effort to. So when I think about how last week marked 18 years since my father died from suicide, my mind still can’t comprehend how much time that feels like because it actually feels like a long time and like it just happened yesterday.

I’ve thought a lot about the passing of time and how you experience that time after a loved one dies from suicide; maybe I’ve even spent too much time thinking about it sometimes? All I know is that maybe time feels weird because a part of you never really left the moment your loved one died. Although I’m physically here in 2021, there’s still a part of me that never left March 10th, 2003. There’s still a part of me that’s the scared, frightened 21-year-old who doesn’t know how she’ll go on living without her father and just can’t believe that any of this is real.

It’s sort of like living in two parallel universes and something tells me that it will always be that way. But maybe that’s not necessarily a bad thing? Maybe it’s not so bad to “walk between” these two worlds, to have one foot in the past and one in the present — it’s a way to link the two perhaps? At the very least, I can’t help but feel like it’s a way to keep my dad with me, which is all I’ve ever wanted since the day he died.

And speaking of keeping him with me, something interesting happened last week. I’m usually not one to believe in signs, but last night, a drawing of my dad and me fell down! This beautiful illustration was given to me by the talented artist Brooke Costello and I love it because it feels like a part of my dad is still with me whenever I look at it.

I guess what I’m trying to say is this: If you’re somehow looking down on us, Dad, I hope you’re proud of the people we’ve become!! We miss you every day and wish you were here with us…

Thursday, March 12, 2020

My Father’s Suicide: 17 Years Ago

My father died from suicide 17 years ago this week — forever making March 10th my least favorite day of the year. And, just like clockwork, I find myself asking the same question again this year: How has it been so long?

But that sort of question is only natural any time you lose someone you love, isn’t it? And it’s especially true when you lose that loved one to suicide — one of the most sudden and cruel of deaths. After all, the world you’d known for so long (in my case, 21 years) is rocked and abruptly shifts forever; it’s a swift and painful jolt to everything around you that was once the bedrock of your life. What was once familiar and comforting is now foreign and confusing. What was once light and airy is now dark and heavy.

My father’s suicide is the demarcation of my two lives: Life with my dad and life without him. I feel like I’m looking at someone else’s life when I look at old childhood photos. There were times I was so angry with the world, but looking at these family photos just makes me miss him right now. For so long, I resisted feeling those conflicting emotions. How could I feel something like love and anger at the same time? I mean, I had to choose one, didn’t I?

Thanks to my wonderful therapist, I’ve come to embrace ALL the emotions, especially the conflicting ones. She helped me see that it’s OK to feel seemingly two opposite emotions together at once. All those feelings are part of the grieving process and we all know that grief takes as long as it takes.

Life with my dad was always an adventure — full of seeing, doing, exploring and discovering. He made sure that my disability didn’t stop me from experiencing everything this world had to offer, whether that involved carrying me to the water’s edge, holding me up so I could play a video game in the hospital or holding me on the merry-go-round.

I wasn’t always so open about my father’s suicide, but I’ve realized that silence only contributes to stigma. It’s important to say it and to talk about it. Thanks for always letting me talk (err, write) about it…

I’m grateful for those memories every day. I love you so much, Dad. You were the greatest…thank you for everything you taught me!!! xoxo

Wednesday, September 25, 2019

My Essay on The Fix: “Let’s Talk About Suicide”

My newest byline was such an important one for me to write, so I’ll just get right to it today, friends! September is Suicide Prevention Awareness Month. I knew I wanted to write something, but I wasn’t quite sure what. After I thought about it for a bit, the idea seemed so obvious and it became my fourth piece for The Fix…

In 2019, it seems like we already know so much about suicide. It’s easy to look up statistics and, unfortunately, it’s rare that a day goes by without at least one headline or mention on the news. We know all the facts, don’t we? Despite all that, though, what we rarely do is talk about suicide. We don’t have open conversations about the people we’ve lost and what the suicide of a loved one leaves in its wake. Maybe we’re scared. Maybe the topic just makes us too uncomfortable altogether.

For whatever reason, we just don’t talk about it.

As you already know, I’ve never been like that. I’ve talked about losing my father and I’ve written openly about it. A lot. Some people say that I shouldn’t talk about suicide and while that may be the right choice for them, it’s never been the right choice for me.

Here’s an excerpt of the piece, which I hope will help us all to start a conversation about this hard-to-talk-about topic…

There’s a catch-22 when it comes to suicide: People are reluctant to talk about it because it’s a sensitive and deeply personal topic, but it remains a sensitive topic because people don’t talk about it. So we find ourselves tip-toeing around suicide altogether, which doesn’t help anyone. For years, I’d find myself at a loss for words whenever someone would mention suicide, so I’ve been there.
That’s why I’ve been trying to change suicide’s shameful stigma. For the last 16 years, I’ve been vocal, unafraid to talk about the very things people don’t want to talk about. In the beginning, I talked about my father as a way to process my grief. I saw it as a way to keep my father’s memory alive, but as the years went on, I began to realize that my talking about his suicide wasn’t just for me. Sure, it may have started out that way, but the more statistics I read and the more stories I heard, the more I learned how many people are affected by suicide. I began to feel a responsibility to share my story.

And, it looks like my story might actually be starting a conversation — or, at the very least, getting people to think about suicide in a different way. Today, my piece is among the most popular articles on The Fix! That, friends, makes me incredibly hopeful for a future with less suicides stigmas and more compassion and understanding. Are you with me??

You can read the full piece here and I’d love to hear your thoughts. Feel free to email me anytime at mellow1422@aol.com and let’s chat! And of course, feel free to share my essay on Facebook, Twitter or even your local refrigerator. If you share on Twitter, be sure to tag me @melissablake so we can connect! I can’t wait to hear from you! Love you all… xoxo

[Top photo via Unsplash]

Tuesday, June 25, 2019

My Essay on The Fix: “Please Don’t Tell Me How to Grieve”

I published my second piece on The Fix last week about something that has always baffled me — this notion that there’s a “right” and “wrong” way to grieve. Grief is such a personal journey, so why do people think it’s OK to tell others how to do it? These are the words I wish someone would have said to me 16 years ago.

As I’ve mentioned countless times on this very blog, I never understood this whole idea of grief-shaming until my father died. While his death was traumatic, hearing people tell me how I should grieve was just as traumatic. Please, please, don’t be that person!

Here’s an excerpt of the piece, in which I also talked to a therapist who specializes in grief to get an expert’s take and advice…

I learned pretty quickly that talking about death on places like Facebook makes some people uncomfortable. We may be a society that lives our life online, but for all the sharing we do on social media, there’s still this stigma associated with posting about our grief and the loved ones we’ve lost. It feels like an unspoken rule of sorts: grieve in silence. Don’t talk about it.
But here’s the thing about grieving: You’re never going to please everyone. You’re never going to grieve the “right” way because there is no right way to grieve. That’s something that took me a while to learn and understand. At first, I was afraid of what people would think or how they would view my grieving process, which included writing about my father’s suicide regularly on my blog. I even began to feel as though I needed to hold myself back and not talk about it, but you know what? That wasn’t good for me. In fact, it stalled my grieving process, and that wasn’t healthy.

Tuesday, May 7, 2019

My Essay on Glamour: “To Cope with My Father’s Suicide, I Had to Learn to Love My Grief”

Please forgive me, friends!! I’ve been remiss in sharing my new bylines on the blog, but as we get closer to the slow-down of summer, I’m planning on sharing ALL THE BYLINES. Translation: Get ready for a heavy dose of relationships, disability and pop culture — you know, my classic wheelhouse! First up: My November piece on Glamour about losing a parent and grief.

Survivors of Suicide Loss Day was in mid-November and my piece was timed perfectly. As I remember my father, I’m glad I was able to write about grief for one of my favorite publications. I wanted to look at what it’s like to lose a parent to suicide in your early 20s, which is something that isn’t talked about very much. There aren’t books about it like there are for widows or children, and there’s really no label for losing a parent at that age. I felt like I was in limbo — no longer a child, but at the same time, not a full-fledged adult.

So I tried to give voice to that — to be the resource and reassurance for someone today that I didn’t have back then. This one was one of the toughest to write (I started writing it in March 2018), and I hope it helps someone.

Anyway, here’s an excerpt of the piece, which, even after 16 years, was still incredibly therapeutic to write. It helped me continue to heal, process and, of course, honor the relationship I had with my father…

No grief book could tell me what it would feel like to see reminders of my father: birthdays, holidays, little girls holding their dad’s hand. Even worse, there was no way to prepare myself for what it would feel like to graduate from college and not pick out my dad’s smiling face from the crowd as I accepted my diploma. When a loved one commits suicide, they’re both everywhere and nowhere.
The most distressing and concerning thing about being left in the aftermath of a loved one’s suicide, I came to realize, is that it decimates your sense of identity. I was no stranger to feeling different—growing up with a physical disability, I was used to feeling different from my peers—but my father’s death brought with it an entirely new sense of isolation. I suddenly felt like a stranger in my own life, isolated from the person I used to be.