Today is World Mental Health Day and anyone that knows me, knows how much the subject means to me and why suicide prevention is a topic close to my heart. To try and remove the stigma and encourage everyone to talk, I’m sharing a very personal memoir here on my blog this morning. It’s called The Sun Will Shine Once More, and I would be so grateful if you could share it across social media and with anyone you think might benefit from reading it.

The Sun Will Shine Once More

On October 29^th, 1990, my father shattered my world. Brass casings with pointed bullet tops were a familiar sight. I paid no attention to them. I’d often sit watching him clean and polish his prized possession, setting the scope, and readying things for the hunting season. I went once or twice too. 6am, scurrying around in the dark, trying to be as quiet as I could. We didn’t shoot any deer. Looking back, I’m glad.

Target practice was different. That was Dad and me in the empty quarry. Him with his rifle propped, aiming and twiddling with the scope settings until he hit the little piece of paper way off in the distance.

During target practice I stood to the side, earmuffs covering my delicate ears.

“To drown out the noise,” Dad said.

They didn’t.

Each shot ricocheted inside my skull. Bang. I jumped. A knee-jerk reaction. It still happens with fireworks. The beautiful array of colours bursting in the sky and inside my entire body clenches. The amazement on my children’s faces as I struggle to hold back the tears. It’s like a lightning bolt through me, a split second of fear and then it’s gone. I smile and cheer along with them.

I find it strange how the noise didn’t deafen me that morning. Do walls absorb sound? Maybe it did deafen me in a way. I don’t remember the screams that erupted from my sister or the words that fell from her mouth as she came through the kitchen door. I’m in a vacuum when I remember, all noise sucked away. I remember her arms wrapped around me in a hug so tight, she felt like part of me. She’s never hugged me since. I don’t hug either. Perhaps it’s a defence mechanism? I tense and my body freezes when someone wraps their arms around me. My breath catches as if waiting for my world to fall away.

My husband likes to remind me that hugging me is like hugging a brick wall. I smile, hiding the truth from him. My brick wall as he likes to call it, is my armour, like the elven chain mail in the Hobbit, light and almost invisible, but still impenetrable.

Time ended with my sister’s arms clinging to me. My mom said I was running around the back garden screaming like a headless chicken when she arrived home. I don’t remember.

Few memories exist. The days that followed blurred into weeks. Displaced fragments and a pain that can never be explained is all that exists. Blurred images bounce around my mind and at times I try to reach out and grab them. To hold them before they slip back into the ether. I used to imagine them coming back, like a dam breaking its walls, flooding everything in its path. It terrified me. What had my subconscious hidden? What was it not allowing me to see?

I was removed from the small chapel at the back of the hospital. Banging on coffins isn’t allowed. They refused to open it, to show me proof that my father lay inside. Closed coffin and no goodbye. Strange that I worked in that same hospital for ten years and when I left it was of my own accord – the birth of my son.

I was removed from the burial at the graveyard too. I refused to throw a white rose into the deep dark hole. The blackness wanting to swallow me whole. I don’t know what happened to my rose. I don’t know who took me away. Faces are non-existent in my memories. I see only shadows and a mound of earth.

I’ve always had a fascination with roses. Every colour blooms in my garden. Red, yellow, pink, orange, and my treasured white rose bush. They remind me of him, and I like to think that as my white rose bush blossoms each year, I get to give him so much more. What good is rose thrown into a dark pit? It withers and decays. My roses grow, the flowers opening their petals to the bright sunlight.

We didn’t talk about it when death visited our home. The pain was too great, overshadowed by the fear of upsetting one another. I lived in silence. The mention of my father a reminder of the devastation he’d caused, and yet, I longed to hear stories of the man who moulded my world. I longed to listen to tales of the happy, fun, loving character he was. No one spoke of those times. His death was shrouded in a black cloud which the sun could never breakthrough.

Music died too. His cassette tapes in perfect order on the shelves, either side of the stereo, gathered dust. No one dared touch them. I often sat in the sitting room on a Saturday night when the house was empty staring at those little boxes that contained my childhood. Dire Straits, Neil Young, Simon and Garfunkle, the Eagles, and Bagatelle. So many memories contained in such little things. A certain song, certain lyrics, music became so much more. In a silent home, music is a luxury you can’t afford. It’s my luxury now. Finding those old songs and smiling as the words play out. The fact that I remember all the lyrics is sometimes strange, but I guess they are embedded in my heart and like love, they never die.

Grief smothers. It squeezes the air out of you until you are nothing but a shell. A walking corpse trying to find your way in the world of the living. You see the smiles, you hear the laughter, but they don’t belong to you anymore. The first time a smile breaks out on your face, the first time laughter erupts, it feels, for a split second, like the summer sun beaming down. You close your eyes and breathe it in. But it only lasts a second before the razor-sharp claws of grief rip through you, tearing your insides apart one slice at a time. The searing pain reminding you, that sunshine is no longer yours. The smile disappears, the laughter silenced, as guilt slips its hand around your heart and squeezes. You’re not supposed to be happy anymore.

The loss of vocabulary is another thing, words erased from your language database. They feel foreign on your tongue. Like French, or Spanish, or German, you know them, but for you, they’re denied. My word was dad. Gone in an instant. Estranged to me as time passed. I remember hearing my friend say she’d get her dad to pick us up from wherever we were and the jealously that curled inside me. I wanted to say that word. I wanted to pick up the phone or walk into the house and be able to utter that magical syllable. I wanted my dad to drive me somewhere, anywhere. Death erases words. Mom, Dad, brother, sister, wiped out like a passing tornado. Remnants scattered but never recovered.

The birth of my daughter brought the word back. How alien it felt on my tongue, a word that had been forbidden for so long. I’m sure I stumbled over it the first few times, memories trying to dislodge themselves from the deep recesses of my mind. I’m sure I cried in isolation too. I’d been given a reprieve, a chance to speak once more.

It gets easier, like any foreign language, the more it’s spoken, the easier it becomes, and fluency arrives when you least expect it. One day you struggle to get the syllables right and the next it’s like you’ve spoken them your whole life.

In 1990, suicide was a sin, something to be ashamed of. For me, it left a dreaded fear. Fear of meeting new people, fear of being asked questions, fear of ever having to speak about it. Suicide comes with an uncomfortable silence and an awkwardness. No one knows how to respond. It also comes with guilt. When someone asks you about your lost loved one and you say they died from suicide, it’s like a big hole opens up in front of you. There’s the awkward silence and the shame. Shame that you mentioned it and made the other person uncomfortable. If you said they died in a car crash or of a heart attack, people reacted with sympathy. They were sorry for your loss. When you uttered the word suicide their faces fell, and you felt like you had to apologise. I lied so many times. It shouldn’t have been that way.

It’s different today and I’m grateful for that. We talk endlessly. On social media and on the news, suicide and mental health are discussed. People are encouraged to talk, to reach out. Survivors share their stories. Those left behind share their grief. They support one another.

I often wonder, if encouraging people to talk helps. How can they speak about the voice that torments them inside? The voice that tells them the world is better off without them. Is it even a voice? I don’t know.

I know how loneliness feels. I know what a world without your loved ones feels like. I know the emptiness and the unanswered questions, but is that enough?

I know that with death comes grief and grief is the same for everyone no matter the cause. It’s a slow agonising torture that feels like it will never end. In a way, I guess it doesn’t. It slowly integrates into your being becoming a part of you. You learn to live with it. It can take hold unexpectedly, crippling even the strongest when they least expect it. It serves to remind and at times protect. It makes you cautious.

You know the destructive power it weaves, and, in its own way, grief makes you grateful for the time you have. It makes you appreciate those you love and if you’re lucky enough, like me, you’ll get to experience happiness once more.

I retrieved the word that was stolen from me and passed it on to an amazing man. I see the delight and pride in his eyes whenever my children call him. I wonder did my dad feel this pride too?

I learned to laugh and smile again without the claws digging into me. I learned to feel the exhilaration course through my veins as tears of joy stained my face instead. I learned to treat grief as a trusted companion in my life and instead of allowing it to walk in front of me, I took its hand and walked by its side. There are times when I falter and grief steps in front of me, and there are times when I allow it too. Times when I want to remember and cherish the thirteen years I got to spend as my father’s daughter. Times when I want to remember his laugh or his songs, or the fact that I once had this most treasured person in my life.

Death may have taken him from me. Grief may have crippled me for years. But I learned to live again and now, even on the darkest of days, I know the sun will shine once more.

The End

For anyone suffering with mental health issues or anyone that just needs to talk, I am always here to listen. You can reach out by email, Facebook, Twitter, whatever works for you. Please don’t suffer in silence.

Until next time,

Keep reading and writing,

Amanda