light outside the wolf: words after mum's suicide: an introduction: on writing about mum's suicide

words poured out of me after my mum committed suicide on march 16, 2013. i scrawled endless words--memories, love letters to her, thoughts, angst--onto the pages of endless journals. while i had to keep going to work, keep doing chores (though my husband admittedly probably did laundry and dishes for a year after she died) and keep being a normal human being on the outside, in my journal i could fall apart, and fall apart i did.

nothing prepared me for losing my mother to suicide, despite the fact that, at a certain point in her mental illness, my family and i knew that's where it was all heading. we knew it was going to happen. we tried to help her get better, and i know that she tried too, but she didn't get better.

i expected to be sad when she died, i expected to be lost, but i did not expect the intense self-loathing, crippling grief and completely shattered confidence. i did not expect the grief to draw and quarter me, i did not expect it to destroy me so thoroughly for a time. 

i always knew i wanted to pay tribute to my mother in words some day. she was the first person to believe in me as a writer, and, as you'll see, writing about her, sharing her story, became one of the things i began to understand would make what happened better. plus, i am angry that we lost such a beautiful person in her; i am angry that the world goes on while the person i loved, love still, is gone. some mornings i want to wake up and tell the birds "stop singing! don't you know who died?!" of course i don't want the birds to stop singing--i just want everyone to know that we lost this special, magical person. i want her to be remembered. 

and each time i've heard about someone taking their life after that day my mother died in march 2013, i've felt the growing need to share my story. this past week, the scales finally tipped when a friend's sibling died from suicide and a personal hero of mine, anthony bourdain, died from suicide as well. what follows are my raw memories and meditations after mum's suicide. it's the story of army crawling through a slurry of gray that i thought would never end. it's only been five years. having lost someone dear to me, i am aware that there will be moments and emotions that rear their heads like a vaulting horse forever--and yet, i'm still here.