After the celebration

After the celebration, what do you do….after all the people are gone… what do you do? After all the required decisions are made…what do you do? After….what do you do after you lose someone…You find yourself lost with no one to help you. It’s not that people are not offering help or offering guidance… its just that you find yourself asking what’s the purpose? Why am I here? Why does anything matter anymore?

You take it one step at a time but head first. You feel like a ping pong ball and that is how your life is going to be forever. Losing Sara has exposed how vulnerable I really am.  How truly weak I really feel…how scared I really am… I have learned a lot about myself that I didn’t know like I shake when under serious stress. All the time now, I shake and I can’t help it. I panic and do stupid things …I break out in stress rashes everywhere, I have horrible heart burn all the time, everything taste like mental,  I wear my heart on my sleeve, I am very sensitive, I cry a lot, that I to have been silent before and that I too have chosen not to share my pain with others. I to have decided to hold in my feelings to not burden others.  I've done it in the past, hold in my pain so that I don’t burden others…but that is what needs to change. It's not a burden to talk about how you feel or things you think. 

 Even now while I go to work every day, I put on the biggest smile that I can find. I smile though the pain. If you didn’t know me personally, just looking at me it may be difficult to see the magnitude of my loss. If I didn't blog looking at me you couldn't imagine the pain that I am in. I find myself forcing jokes and laughing at work so that no one has to feel my pain. I have only felt like this for less than a month and if Sara's struggles felt anything like my last few weeks, I wish she would have SPOKEN up. As I have personally learned that there are ways to cope. There are ways to find peace. There are ways to get things out of your head. There are ways to see hope. There are ways to find a different choice.

Jason and I jumped right into searching for help, for answers, for anything that would support us. We made phone calls to doctors to hotline numbers to anyone who might be able to help. We looked and called for anyone that would be able to help us understand. We googled and searched for help. We set up appts with therapist. We found every support group in the area and spent the next two weeks running from one to another. Trying to find our place, trying to find something that felt right or the same. We tried compassionate friends, we tried SASS, I joined every suicide group on facebook, I could get into, we were trying to find answers and how to help each other through this.

You find yourself asking each other "can we get through this?" Does someone get through this? There were groups set up so it appeared that people were getting through this but how and why. With each group we found different stories, different pain, different yet similar; we were all suffering from a loss of great magnitude. We are pieces of our former selves forever changed. Forever different. Different is supposed to be good but this different was not good. This different was foreign. This different only happened to other people not to people like me. This different was not my reality and yet it was and now will forever be my "new different" They say you change and find a “new normal” but I feel anything but normal. This is my new different and this is not the choice that I wanted. As we googled for the why's and how’s and what we missed…signs and symptoms…statistics ....of course we went through her room to find answers. What I found was more confusing and left me with more answers. So we continued to search for ways to help each other and with my new different. Someone told us about the Solace house. I can’t remember who but some one.  It's the place where we found hope rather than pain. We found people who help carry you when you are too weak to carry yourselves. 

What we learned is that Sara didn’t have any of the normal signs. What we learned is that we had to try everything until we found what helped us the first month.  We found a therapist and we found a group to belong to. We are finding our way through our new different.  It’s the worst imaginable but we are finding our way together and with the support of our family and friends.  We are willing to try anything and everything to give us the tools to succeed at getting to the next moment. We will never be the same, we will never move on, We will never forget that day our lives changed forever….we will continue to speak up and we will continue to find our way. We will continue to show that we are weak at times, we are strong at times and we will continue to SPEAK up on behalf of our daughter. We will not see it as a burden but a honor to have the opportunity to share and SPEAK UP!!!!

ASK-Asking Saves Kids so have those hard conversations and keep having them. 

SPEAK!!!!!Suicide Prevention Education Awareness for KIDS. 

It starts with just one person having a conversation without being afraid to SPEAK UP!!!!!!