This is my first post, and it's pretty nerve wracking sharing this with you. I'd like to thank my amazing friend, Ellie, who inspired me to begin sharing my writing.
The name of this post refers to me acknowledging that this it not the beginning of my journey since losing Jordan. I have written in the months preceding this, but only now feel ready to share. One day, I might share some of the things I've written earlier, but for now, this is where I will begin.
Since losing the love of my life to suicide four months ago, I have woken up every day with thoughts of what I did wrong, what I could have done differently, how I could have saved him. These thoughts aren’t only there when I wake up; they follow me through the day like a headache you just can’t shake. “This is your fault,” they tell me. “You are to blame for what happened to Jordan”, “You should have known’.
Living like this is exhausting. Sure, rationally I can talk about these thoughts, challenge them, tell myself that they are ‘just thoughts’. But it’s like I’m living inside of them, totally lost swimming in a sea of guilt and shame. When I’m in them, I see no way out. I am drowning. I talk and I talk and I talk, but still, they consume me every day.
This morning when I woke up, I saw a post on a page for people who have lost partners at a young age. I began thinking about the difference between losing someone to suicide and losing someone due to a physical cause. When we lose someone we love to something physical, something tangible, something that seems so out of our control, we (rightly) assign responsibility to the illness, the accident, the cause. However, when we lose someone through suicide, we look to ourselves for the cause. What did I do?
It got me thinking about this daily torment and suffering. Processing the trauma of what happened and continuing to grieve for the person you’ve lost is nearly impossible. I say nearly, because I am still here and I make it through each day (although sometimes I don’t know how). And yet, on top of this, we blame ourselves. I use the term ‘we’ here, because I know I am not the only one who feels like this after losing the person I love to suicide. I know that many of Jordan’s own friends and family have these feelings too. However, when they question anything they did or didn’t do, I absolutely, unequivocally don’t think they have any reason to blame themselves. I tell them that they did everything they could; that nothing they said or did could have changed the outcome. And yet, I think there is reason to blame myself.
There are many awful illnesses out there that take people away from us too soon. Depression is one of them. Depression cannot be seen with the naked eye, particularly in those who have lived with it for years, who become masters of shielding their pain from the world. Depression isn’t written as the cause of death. But surely the person felt that to end their life was the only way to end their pain? Depression was responsible.
Thinking in this way helped me to think about my own feelings of guilt and responsibility. I was with him every day, he was my partner and I thought I knew him better than I know myself. It is natural that I will think about how I didn’t know and how I could have saved him, because I did not want this outcome. I did not choose this. I did not know that depression would take my partner. Jordan and I had conversations where I tried to reassure him that HE was not depression. Depression was external from him, something that came over him and made him think in this way. I know that’s not how it felt for him, but I desperately wanted to help him see that he was the loving, funny, compassionate man that me, his friends and family knew and saw through the clouds of depression.
I believe that when we lose someone to suicide, it shakes us to the core. It disrupts our whole sense of being. Somewhere deep inside of us, we believe that we can predict our lives, predict what will happen in our world. Like I had done, you envisage your future and believe that everything will be okay, things will work out no matter how difficult times get. You make plans, you create the illusion of order and control to ease you anxieties about the uncertainty of life. Don’t get me wrong; I think we should do this and it’s totally normal. If we didn’t, we would crumble. Life would be unmanageable and we would have no idea how to survive. Hence, when suicide touches us personally, we do crumble. Life does become unmanageable. The worst thing we could ever think of happening has happened, and we didn’t have control over it.
I know that Jordan knew how loved he was. The people in his life acted out of love towards him. We all did everything with the intentions of showing him that we loved him, that he was worthy, that he was special. However, we weren’t able to be there to stop him when his thoughts took over. We didn’t know what he was thinking. We didn’t have control. I hate this most of all, because I would do anything to have been able to prevent this and to help Jordan to find happiness in life.
I read a book this week called ‘The Choice’ by Edith Eger, which I actually randomly picked up from a charity shop pre-lockdown in a manic attempt to get enough books to see me through. I tend to like fiction books about WW2 and this seemed like an incredible story. However, I didn’t realise two things: 1) It is written by a Clinical Psychologist (which I’m training in currently) and 2) It’s a true story, not fiction. I couldn’t have picked up this book at a better time. This week has felt incredibly difficult at times. No triggers other than my own thoughts, and lockdown meaning more time to get sucked in by them. I needed some hope, for someone outside of my circle to tell me that I might feel ‘okay’ again one day, that I might experience happiness again. I have never gone so long feeling so unhappy at my core, and not being able to see a time where things might feel at least a little better again truly terrfies me. It gives me the tiniest insight into how someone might feel when they are experiencing depression, but my hunch is that this still doesn’t scratch the surface of what Jordan and so many others have gone through.
So, back to the book. It follows Edith Eger, an Auschwitz survivor and Clinical Psychologist. Her story is incredible… unbelievable in so many ways and I would urge anyone to read this book. We all carry things from our past that are so difficult to let go of, that hold so much pain and continue to cause us suffering. I know that for me, I have strong and deep feelings of not being good enough. I have always been a perfectionist and highly self-critical. I unconsciously seek out ‘evidence’ to confirm these beliefs about myself. I strive to be ‘better’, and chastise myself when things go wrong. These beliefs have come to the surface since losing Jordan, and they’re hard to tolerate on top of my grief and sadness. These beliefs lead me to think that I am going to continue to do things wrong, continue to bring pain to myself and to others. Just yesterday morning my cat was sick and I convinced myself that she would die, and it would be my fault because I wasn’t watching her in the garden to see what she was eating. I could cognitively tell myself that this wasn’t true, I was catastrophising and panicking because I couldn’t lose someone else (yes, to me she is a 'someone'). I couldn’t be to blame for the loss of my cat as I felt I was for the loss of my partner. You might think this sounds a bit farfetched, but it was true. The links were clear to me. I was scared of not protecting my cat like I felt I didn’t protect my partner.
Reading Edith Eger’s book has given me some powerful messages, and I’d like to share them with you. This is if for you if you are currently struggling with your mental health in any way, if you have thought about taking your own life, or if you are in pain following the loss of someone you love:
1. “How easily we are seduced by the fantasy that we are in control, that we were ever in control, that the things we could or should have done or said have the power, if only we had done or said them, to cure pain, to erase suffering, to vanish loss. How easily we can cling to- worship- the choices we think we could or should have made”
- When Edith arrived at Auschwitz, they asked her if her mother was her mother or her sister, as this determined whether she went in the left line (unknowingly to the gas chambers) or the right line (to the camp). Edith was 16. She did not know what the consequence of this answer was and she innocently answered that the woman was her mother. Her mother was sent to the left line and died. Edith felt guilt over this, but she was not to blame. The Nazis were to blame, but she continued to live with these feelings her whole life.
2. “The choice to accept myself as I am: human, imperfect”
- Edith talks about having the choice to forgive herself, to forgive her flaws and her innocence. She makes this choice so she can continue to live her life freely and commit to helping others, rather than to live consumed by guilt, taking her life away from her and not being able to be there for the people she loves and the people she works with.
3. “ What if blaming yourself is just a way of maintaining the fantasy that the world is in your control?”
- Edith said this to a patient who blamed herself for her childhood sexual abuse. It’s an extremely powerful message. To blame ourselves is to believe that we have control, which, however painful it is, may feel less threatening than believing that we don’t have control.
4. “ We want so much to understand the truth. We want to be accountable for our mistakes, honest about our lives. We want reasons, explanations. We want our lives to make sense. But to ask why is to stay in the past, to keep company with our guilt and regret. We can’t control other people, and we can’t control the past”.
- This was actually directly from Edith’s work with parents who had lost their son to suicide. It spoke to me in a very powerful way because losing Jordan doesn’t make sense, and we don’t have the answer to why this happened.
5. “Acceptance isn’t going to happen overnight. And you’re never going to be glad that he’s gone. But you get to choose a way forward. You get to discover that living a full life is the best way to honour him”.
- I’m not here yet, not even close. I am still just surviving, getting through each day. And that is okay. As Edith said, acceptance isn’t going to happen overnight. However, it made me think about how I can honour Jordan and his life, how I can live according to his values and principles and make him proud.
I could go on with many more messages from Edith’s book. It is so raw and honest that it’s impossible not to connect with her as a fellow human being. This book gave me some hope. It helped me through a difficult week. It helped me to manage the daily challenges of my inner world.
I hope that this article reaches out to others, whoever you are and whatever situation you are currently in. I want our voices to be heard, the ones who are left behind after suicide. I hope that by speaking out, and in my future career, I can make some difference to others’ lives. This will be my way of honouring the man that I loved, who was taken from us far too soon.