Thirty years. Sometimes the years fly by easily and some years, with every milestone of celebration in your new world without them, the pain comes back.
Sometimes when I try and make heads or tales of it, I come up short of truly understanding where I sit with everything. The memories of my father, no matter how few I have left, are vivid, but the few memories I have left are just that-so few and far between, anymore.
Ben being born the day before the day my father died, always left a certain reminder of what there is to really live for. It leant a certain levity to the anniversary. After all-we almost lost Ben when I was pregnant, and I bargained with my dad to take care of him, should he not make it. It seemed like his gift that Ben be born the day before, to heal the parts that were still broken in me.
Watching Ben fight so hard to live, flipped everything on its head for me, this year, and reminded me of the actuality that existed surrounding our dad’s suicide.
Ben’s brain worked to tell him to keep pushing forward and helped his body fight to get better. His brain is perfectly healthy and helped him mentally work through what he’s endured, and my father, while physically healthy in every way, had a brain that wouldn’t let him live.
In thirty years I’ve learned a lot about suicide and mental health. I’m forever grateful for the relationships I’ve formed with people who have shared their stories and some information I’ve learned I wish I didn’t know.
The amount of mental pain I know my dad must have experienced shifted my thoughts of, “how dare you give up”, to, “I’m so glad he stayed as long as he did. That must’ve been painful to live like that”.
Gaining that perspective wasn’t easy. The anger and the shame attached to suicide left me distant from my dad, even in his death. Forgiveness doesn’t always come easy. Over the years it did come and I hope with time it will for others who have experienced this type of loss. The knowledge of understanding mental health and its complexities is a gift in dealing with grief.
When I look at Ben and the overlap of his life and dad’s death, I have to believe that Ben’s a little bit of dad, reincarnated. That somehow, he’s the living form of the way dad would’ve loved to have lived. If life gave him a second chance, this is the way he would personify existing to the fullest.
I can’t know for sure how dad would be if he were alive today, but I have to think the lessons I’ve taught my children about the power of their minds and the importance of human connection has created a space where they can always feel safe to fight whatever it is they’re faced with.
Teaching my kids to live and giving myself permission to do the same, even after extreme heartbreak, is the greatest lesson I learned from my dad’s death.
Thirty long years of heartbreaking, significant, beautiful lessons and I wouldn’t trade any of them…
sharkmomma 