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Showing posts from December, 2018

Seven Years

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The  15th December 2018 marks 7 years since my brother, Martin, died by taking his own life. 7  years is a weird space of time - short yet long, not recent enough for grief to be thought of as fresh, but not so long ago in my life to feel far in the past.  I’ve taken some time to think about what I’ve learned about being bereaved by suicide over these years. I speak for no one but myself - these are my own thoughts and experiences.  1. If a person dies, they are lost to many, to a community, but the individual experiences of the loss are so important. One person does not have to, indeed can’t, feel the effect of a person’s death in exactly the same way as others (others who have their own memories and thoughts). On the Christmas Eve after Martin’s death,  his  friends invited my Mum and Dad and I down to his favourite pub, to join in reminiscing. There were so many people there, the majority of whom I did not know very well ( some not  at all), yet here they were talking