An unexpected conversation triggered another wave of the storm, just like the rainstorm outside the window right now.
A cousin told me about a friend who lost his son to suicide. At the funeral, amid unimaginable pain, he said something simple yet profound: “You have to go through it to get through it.”
Grief after suicide feels different — heavier, more tangled. It carries sorrow, shock, guilt, unanswered questions, and sometimes anger that has nowhere to land. There is the ache of missing them and the torment of wondering what more could have been done. The mind searches for reasons, for signs missed, and for a way to rewrite the ending.
But the truth in that one sentence is that there is no shortcut. You can’t go around this kind of grief. You can’t reason your way past it or numb it without paying a price. You must walk straight through the waves of it — confusion, self-blame, love, heartbreak — repeatedly.
And slowly, almost imperceptibly, surviving each wave becomes a way to carry them forward with you. Not in the same way as before, but in a way that lets you keep living.