2 month mark My own personal struggles

So its been 2 months since her death. Before she died, life was so different. My life seemed so happy and all together. Every little thing mattered and every detail planned out. I had it all family, friends, new career, wonderful life. All my shit was as about together as you could get in my world. What I have learned is that life will never be the same and that it can change without notice or reason. Life means something different now. Things will never go back to normal. Even I can be broken beyond repair. I have always been the "Rock" for so many people throughout my life. Since I have walked in the valley of death, I bring courage, strength and wisdom...or at least I thought I had lived through the worst. I have survived and lived through anything that someone could throw at me. I was the poster child for broken shit to no fault of my mother and shit that was so fucked up it happened in the movies...from being molested as a child, to losing my dad to suicide, to losing a step dad to suicide, to watching my mother emotionally die every day while she tried to save my brother from cancer while having to leave me behind to no fault of her own; to whoever would take me,  to blaming myself for my friends death from a car accident, to losing my grandma who was the last link I had to my dad, to feeling abandoned as a child, to having family who turned on you with lies and stories that ripped your heart out, to being raped by a friend, to mental eventually physically being abused by a boyfriend, to being poisoned and starved almost to death, to being picked on in high school, to getting into fights, to drugs and alcohol, eating disorders, eventually feeling so worthless that I tried to OD on medication. I was given Paxil to cope and balance my moods. I didn't feel as though I had the right to live when every one that I loved left me in one way or another. I felt that I was being left on Earth to be punished. I felt alone in the world. I didn't want to die, I just didn't know how to ask for help or what to do help with the pain that I was feeling. I didn't think that others understood what I was going through. I had experienced more heart ache than one person should ever bare. As soon as I took too much medication, I reached out to my mother for help. I knew that I didn't want to die, I just needed to know how to cope, find hope, how to live with the demons. Since that day, I have not tried to take my life. I have been in and out of counseling all my life. I reach out to take medication when the need arises. I am very self aware of my limitations.  It took time to find a good therapist and I had to fire a few along the way but was worth the effort. I have overcome every thing that has been thrown at me, I carry each scar. I am not unharmed by any means. The wounds that I have carried for the last 34 years of my life have been very deep, some so deep that I have never told anyone about most of them until now. Even as I share the demons that attacked me the first 30 years of my life, nothing prepared me for the demons, I fight now every day. If there is anyone who has lost every thing and fought to keep everything, I would consider myself the winner of that sucky fate. But even at its worst, I was able to find some sort of good out of the fiery depth of hell that I was walking in. But nothing in 34 years prepared me for this night July 30th, 2015

Nothing would have prepared me for this fate. Nothing I have been through gave me any coping skills or life lessons that I could fall back on when you lose your child. After 8 weeks, things are still feeling like its not real. Most of the time you can trick your mind into thinking that she is just at her dads house or she is just busy with home work, but as the days turn into weeks, that day dream turns back into the nightmare that is your new reality. This new reality sucks. You can only trick your mind for so long...I find myself fighting with the school district about bringing awareness to others. Schools want to teach our children everything but how to cope and help themselves when they have exhausted all there coping skills. We as parents hid death and suicide from our children as its its going to protect them.  I find myself trying to explain to people who want to pretend like this could not happen to them, my life was a good life and my daughter was a good child, while they sit there and ask me a million questions as to why? So many times over the last 8 weeks, I get asked if there were signs that I missed... Do you know how that sounds to a parent to a mother who lost her child? "What did you miss?" Please put yourself in my shoes. I didn't miss anything because we as a society failed her. We as a society tell kids to hid there issues and there problems. We don't give teachers the tools to help them other than the basic core curriculum.  We as a society can talk about Cancer, STD, Teen pregnancy, transgenders, same sex marriages, but we are afraid or ignorant to talk about suicide and mental health. If you are afraid to have the conversation with your children or you are not talking about it, then you are part of what was "missed." That doesn't feel very good when I put it like that does it. Well it doesn't feel good when someone asks me what I missed as a mother. Suicide doesn't pick the family. Sara didn't choose this to hurt me or her family. She didn't know how to reach out for help. There are not always going to be signs and symptoms so its your job as a parent to ask those questions. You think its uncomfortable to have them with your kids, imagine living with the regret that you never did. Imagine having to decide if your child's tissue can be donated to help others or will you bury them or cremate them? My reply was "What the fuck are you serious? No you cant touch a hair on her head." is what I remember screaming in my head...the reality is that no one is exempt from this choice but you can play a huge role in bringing awareness and having the conversations that need to be having in the home and in the schools. The reality is that suicide isn't decreasing. It's increase by 500% in the last few years. Since 2011, it's only becoming more and more of an option for teens 10-24 years old. The reality is that its time to make a change in our future generations before there are less of them around.  As I live and breathe, I challenge you to make a difference. I challenge you to have those hard conversations, again and again. Having them one time isn't like a check list of one and done. Mental health is an on-going check up and check in that needs to be done. I challenge you to share my story on your facebook and get people talking. If you really want to make a difference, read and share my blog.  I challenge you to reach out for help if you to are struggling. Do not be silent. You are not alone. There are more people suffering from mental illness then there are people who are not suffering. Look around your work, your home, one in four people suffer at some point in their life. 

"Sadly, the vast majority of suicides result from underlying, untreated, mistreated, or unsuccessfully treated mental challenge---often including major depression. The stigma/silence that surrounds any constructive discussion about mental challenge provides the first strike toward suicide. Few want to admit to having mental issues. Even fewer care to discuss them. The second strike is born by the shame, humiliation, and/or hopelessness felt by the person with thoughts of suicide---and the desperate need they often feel to keep such feelings and thoughts secret. The third and final strike occurs when the person is unable to see any path but suicide to relieve their mental torment.

   Suicide is not about choice-it is about lack of choice. One cannot make a choice if one is unable to comprehend that a spectrum of other choices exists. It is not the case that those that die from irrational suicide make a bad choice, the wrong choice---a tragic, final “choice”---they simply follow the ONLY path they are able to understand that will end the mental pain they feel. Of course, we, as survivors, see the multitude of rational choices that could have been made.

   Bottom line--most suicides do not result from a ‘choice’--they most often result from an illness process that robs the deceased of the ability to make a rational choice. The deceased did not ask for the illness, nor did they understand or choose the consequences. Our society does not blame people who die from cancer, heart disease, kidney disease, liver failure, or stroke for ‘choosing’ their deaths. It is long overdue that the burden of blame, shame and ‘choice’ is lifted from those that die by suicide. Most did not want to die; they simply needed to escape from pain. Their illness prevented any glimmer of a choice." Al, Remembering Warren