A Heart Rearranged.
Losing someone to suicide isn’t something you just “move on” from. It changes you. It breaks you open and shakes your insides loose. It drags you into questions that have no answers and pain that has no name. That’s what no one tells you about grief - the kind that changes the shape of your body, the sound of your voice, the way you carry yourself through the world. You learn to walk with the weight of it, like a shattered spine. You learn to breathe around the sharp edges, but you do not ever go back to the person you were before. That version of you died the moment they did.
Nothing has been the same since my brother died by suicide, and I still don’t know how to exist in a world that couldn’t hold him. A world that felt too heavy for his heart, too loud for his mind, too unkind for his soul. I can’t explain the kind of emptiness that settles in after a loss like this - the way the silence rings louder than any scream, the way guilt weaves itself into your DNA, or the way time can both harden and shatter you all at once. There are still days I fall apart unexpectedly. Still days I want to crawl out of my skin. Still days I ask God why it had to be him to die. Why it had to be me that lived. There are days when I still scream at the sky. At the silence. At myself. Days when I’m consumed by guilt. Days when I hate how the world kept turning when his didn’t.
Suicide is the mother of all “shoulda, coulda, woulda.” You find yourself trapped in an endless loop - I should have seen the signs. I could have called more, asked harder questions, checked in on him more. I would have given anything to take his pain, to trade places, to go back and rewrite his ending. But there’s no winning in that torture game. Only echoes. Only agony. Because when someone you love dies by suicide, the mind becomes a haunted house of missed chances and imagined rescues. And yet deep down, some part of you knows: love did exist. You did show up. But it still wasn’t enough to save them. And now you’re left trying to save yourself from the wreckage of what if.
I can’t tell you how often I go back to the last moment, the last text, the last call on that damn glitter aisle in Hobby Lobby - trying to trace the line between life and death, wondering what I missed, what I could have said, what I could have done. But the truth is, when someone you love dies by suicide, you don’t get answers. You get echoes. You get fragments. You get a thousand versions of what-ifs that never settle into anything solid. And you carry those questions like sacred burdens, because it feels like if you let those go, you’re letting them go. People will still ask how I’m doing, and sometimes I say “better,” but what I really mean is, I’m different. Grief doesn’t go away. It doesn’t get smaller. You just learn how to carry it - how to survive it. And some days, survival is the most radical thing you can do.
I’ll never stop grieving him - not because I’m stuck in the past, but because love like that doesn’t die. Grief like this doesn’t heal. It hollows. It becomes a second skin. A language only the broken-hearted can speak. Love like that echoes. And sometimes that echo is deafening. This isn’t the kind of grief you move on from. It’s the kind that becomes part of your identity. It rewrites your faith, your relationships, your sense of safety. It’s the kind of grief that lives in your bones and hides behind your smile. The kind that teaches you how to hold both beauty and brutality in the same breath. And yet somehow, despite it all, you wake up. You keep breathing. You keep going - not because it’s easy, not because it gets better, but because their love never leaves you. And because your love for them refuses to die, even when they did.
If you’ve lost someone to suicide, I want you to know: You are not alone in this hollow ache. You are not crazy for replaying the last conversation. You are not weak for breaking down at random songs or smells or even when you randomly find glitter on you because it reminds you of that last conversation where you’ll forever feel like you could have said more. Your grief is not too much. Your anger is valid. Your questions are holy. The way you miss them, the way you still ache for their voice, their laugh, their presence, is a testament to how deeply you loved. And that love? It doesn’t vanish. It becomes a thread that ties your soul to theirs across dimensions. It becomes the fire that keeps you alive on the days you want to disappear. It becomes your prayer, your promise, your purpose. This kind of loss is not linear. It’s not clean. It’s a lifelong unraveling and reweaving. And I’m still trying to make sense of a world where Chris no longer exists - where his laugh is just a memory and his presence just a phantom feeling in the room.
So I keep writing. I keep speaking his name. I keep showing up in the mess of it all. Because his story still matters. And so does mine.
If you're in the thick of this kind of grief, I see you. I’m with you. I love you.
You never get over it, you never really have to. But you do have to keep going.
You just learn how to live with a heart rearranged. And one day, without realizing it, you learn to live with it in a way that honors both the pain as well as the person. And somehow, that does become enough.
