by Melissa A.F.

Created on: March 15, 2009   Last Updated: March 17, 2009

My father left this earth when I was just entering the first grade. My life was just beginning and he chose to end his.

I never actually knew it was a suicide at that time. Explaining suicide to a first grader is not an easy task and my mother chose to save that story for a time when I was a little older and could better understand it. This made my case a unique one; I dealt with general loss at the age of five and found out about the suicide at the age of twelve, quite by accident.

Everyone knew my father committed suicide due to the fact that it was all over the news and then spread through our small city like wildfire. My mother was able to keep the details of my father's death from me for years, but inevitably parents talk and kids listen. This lead to my friends asking me about it and me finally questioning my mother. Seven years after it happened, I was forced to face my father's death all over again, this time as a suicide.

I am now an adult and through my father's choice I have learned many lessons. My grieving experience was a unique one, as I honestly felt like my grief process lasted for years due to grieving first his death and then his suicide. I can safely say trying to understand a loved one's diseased mind when your mind is healthy is a great task and something that will take time and cause frustration and sadness. To come out on the other end though, the place where there is peace and understanding, you need to face those feelings. Until you are willing to do that then you will be stuck.

I feel that just by choosing to survive we are doing our suicidal loved ones a service. It is truly our job as those who have experienced suicide to educate and extend our hand to others who need it. Suicide will never be an easy thing to understand and once we recognize that the grief process can begin. As a survivor, you will never fully understand what your loved one was thinking or why they did what they did. Accept that.

Once you are accepting of that fact, understand that there is nothing you could have done. All the love and compassion in the world will not keep someone alive if their agenda is to leave. If someone of diseased mind cannot find peace on this earth, they will seek it out; this is suicide. We have to remember we do not live in our loved ones shoes, we are bystanders who watch them try to exist. Existing is not living and therefore existing can breed hopelessness.

Do not be afraid to feel. Cry, scream, write your loved on a letter saying everything

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