"Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day” Surviving in the after

In the eye of a hurricane, there is quiet. 

The day it happens, the day your hurricane hits, you feel everything.

In the days that follow you feel everything and nothing, but now people ask you if you’re okay. They ask how they can help, and they ask you to let them know whenever you need something.

In the after, nobody asks. But you’re still inside that hurricane, only now you have the questions. Questions that others don’t understand or don’t want to hear. Because they haven’t felt what you’re feeling, and they don’t understand how after all this time you still don’t feel okay.

After suicide loss, ‘okay’ doesn’t really exist. At least not in the way it did before. You don’t exist in the way you did before and that is scary. 

Those who have never experienced suicide loss think the immediate days that follow are the worst. But that soon you begin to feel better. You move on, you make peace, you forget the pain. But for me, surviving in the after was the worst. When the noise stopped, and the people went away. When their name was spoken and replied to with pitiful glances and awkward gulps. When the time between when I saw them last and now grew ever bigger; that was the worst. Realising that this is how it is now, that they really are gone. Having to wake each day to a world where they don’t exist anymore. 

I lost my best friend to suicide in August 2021. It happened while I was at the summit of Yr Wyddfa, watching a couple get engaged and joining in the cheers. Three months later, I lost another friend to suicide and the world that I had been trying to right once again turned upside down. Enduring such grief at just 22 years old felt impossible to me. I had to fight the urge to break down in tears and scream this isn’t fair because that felt selfish, that felt unhelpful. But it wasn’t selfish. And allowing myself to feel would have been the best thing to do. But I was facing a pain I hadn’t expected to know, and so I had no guidebook to show me the way through.

It’s been almost four years, and that world is still not the right way up and I’m starting to accept that it never will be again. Because things don’t go back to normal after such a momentous loss. They can’t because something, someone that was integral and essential to your way of being has vanished. 

So you try to figure out a new normal. 

This is where I struggled because in the wake of my loss I felt so different on the inside but on the outside nothing changed. The postman still delivered letters. The cats still sat on the garden walls as I walked to work. The leaves fell from trees, I did food shops and driving lessons and sent in uni assignments on time. This upside-down world functioned the same, but I didn’t.

I felt so much anger. But I had never been an angry person, and I wasn’t even sure what I was angry about. I didn’t know anyone else who had lost someone to suicide and so I had nobody to turn to. Nobody to ask am I allowed to feel like this? Did this happen to you too?

And so came more and more questions that I didn’t have the answers to. But now after four years, lots of reading, lots of crying and lots of writing, I have some answers. 

The biggest, nastiest question I faced was

Why did they do it? 

I ruminated over this question. Poked at it like the bleeding gum under a missing tooth. Even when I wasn’t running my tongue over the gap I knew it was still there. I considered so many hypothetical situations, creating scenarios I knew weren’t true, but my grief convinced me were. It’s still unsettling, it still feels wrong, but I’ve learnt that the answer to this question is radical acceptance. A radical acceptance that you don’t know. And you won’t ever know. No matter how much you think or wonder, no matter what steps you retrace or situations you revisit. The answer is there is no answer. Knowing a why won’t bring them back and it won’t make you feel any better.

In the face of loss it becomes easy to blame ourselves because we need to make sense of the situation, we need to find a reason. If we blame ourselves we can regain some control.

But blame can’t change what happened, it only makes us struggle more.

Without someone or something to blame, we have to accept that life is unpredictable and that can be scary. After a traumatic loss the last thing anyone wants is uncertainty. This led me to the next uncomfortable question that sunk its teeth into me

Did I do something wrong?

Should I have done more? Why didn’t I call them that day? Why don’t I call all my friends all of the time, why don’t I check in more…

This overwhelming panic that I suddenly had to save everyone. To make sure everyone was safe and well and happy all of the time at every expense of myself. 

Acknowledge that guilt is a natural part of grief; that you are not the odd one out in this feeling. As Neil Hilborn says ‘this isn’t to say you’re not special, this is to say thank god you’re not special.’

It’s a mean feeling to have to feel but it passes. I wish someone was there to tell me that this question was a natural reaction, that it doesn’t make me a bad person for thinking it. 

Once the anger and guilt started to shy away, there was one massive question that I had been avoiding.

How do I cope?

This wasn’t the type of loss I could forget. We were so young, I still am. There will always be reminders of my friends; in the places we use to go, in the plans we had made, in the photos blue tacked to my bedroom wall. There are graduations they didn’t attend, weddings they won’t have, songs they had half written and incomplete paintings. 

I am learning that grief never goes away, we just grow around it. We learn to carry it in our back pockets rather than in our hands for all to see. I learn to cope by staying close to the things that remind me of my friends; the cafes they liked and the music they loved. We become the things we loved the most about the people we miss the most, and in that way they live on. 

Learning to laugh again is a sign of strength. Life can be long; you don’t want to spend it full of sadness. This doesn’t mean you forget. This doesn’t mean you don’t still get sad. But it means you allow yourself the grace to accept that you are still here and there are infinite possibilities for you.

Know that you’re allowed to feel angry at the loss you have faced. You’re allowed to feel hurt at the lack of help you received. You can tell people that their poorly thought out ‘jokes’ and throw away remarks are distasteful. This is your loss; this is your grief, and nobody can tell you how to feel. 

I found ways to keep my friends alive. I write. Poems and stories. Some of them are true, capturing their spirit and their character. Some are imagined; wonderings of what they would be like on their 25th birthday, the music they would create and the people they would become. I write them birthday cards and keep them in a draw. This isn’t denial. I know what I have lost. But it is a reminder that they were real. That I knew them, and I loved them, and they made me who I am.

So while things will never go back to how they were before, that doesn’t mean that the after will always be terrible. 

There are many days I have left to live and who knows what I will do with them. What I do know is that the pieces of me that were born thanks to the friends I lost will be there, and that in itself is comforting. 

The level of matter in the universe has been constant since the Big Bang. In all the aeons we have lost nothing, we have gained nothing.

Everyone I have lost is still with me.