Suicide Grief

I was working on another post when my friend Karen posted this, which I hope you'll read.

Karen and I have been friends for quite awhile, "meeting" with a small group of bereaved moms online to talk about our losses.  Karen's gorgeous and gifted son Joey died a few months before Josh did, of a complication of epilepsy unknown to his family until that awful event.

I'll admit that when I first read her post, I was a little disheartened.  We have talked so frequently and with such intimacy; how could she not know what it is like, to lose a loved one to suicide?  

And then I remembered.  Much as I rail against that phrase that so often comes my way ~ "I can't imagine" ~ it actually reflects an honest truth.  People can't.

I go about my life.  I love my surviving children, I try to recognize their pain, and I celebrate their triumphs.  I sobbed through my daughter's graduation from her master's program, realizing that almost no one there knows the courage and determination it took her to complete that work.  Probably even she herself doesn't recognize what she's done.  I have wonderful work to do, all of it a great gift of God.

But there's not a day that passes that I don't ask: How did I not know?