I could barely breathe. My heart pounded in my chest, and I didn’t know if I even wanted to breathe.
Every mom’s greatest fear became my reality — my son died. He had taken his life.
I was ten hours from home, on vacation with my oldest daughter and her children, when I received the shocking call from my husband.
Never would we have imagined such a devastating loss.
Suicide was a word other people discussed, cried over, and otherwise grappled with. It was never a word I needed to consider. My life had the picket fence, the green grass, and the stuff dreams were made of.
Until that day, five years ago, when the world I knew crumbled at my feet.
In the tapestry of my life, a string had been pulled, and in the aftermath, it unraveled with overwhelming consequences. Our family grieved this tremendous loss in individual ways. Some leaned in to one another by talking about their grief. Others pulled away and kept to themselves. All of us felt deep heartache.
Initially, I was in shock. Then, the busyness of the funeral preparations left me with no time to feel. Eventually, after life went back to normal for everyone else, I found myself in a dark, lonely place — feeling split wide open and spilled out, terrified I’d be there forever. The unanswerable question of why pierced every thought and crushed my soul.
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