I came across this post on an amazing Facebook page. Wear Your Heart on Your Sleeve for Suicide Prevention. I wanted to share with everyone. This is a year for healing, coping and learning to live a different life. Losing my brother is defining me right now and I don't want this tragedy to define who I am.
This year I resolve to:
1. Not put a time limit on my grief. Loving someone means loving them for my life time whether they are physically present or not.
2. Tell their stories, the happy and the sad they will live on through me.
3. Teach others that they cannot “make” me cry, tears are only an external expression of how I am feeling all the time.
4. Understand that crying or otherwise expressing my pain is healthy and normal. “Doing well” means expressing my feelings.
5. Understand that others will not understand my pain and it isn’t fair to expect them to do anything but listen.
6. Recognize that asking for help from those that love us is a really a gift that we give to them.
7. Help others, reaching out to others in pain will help me to heal.
8. Do something nice for myself everyday.
9. Know that if today I can not do everything that needs to be done, tomorrow is another chance to get it done.
10. Cry when I need to, laugh when I can and to not feel guilty about either one.
11. Let go, bit by bit, of the guilt, regret and anger that can be so damaging.
12. Take a risk and let others into my life and heart.
13. Take care of my physical, emotional and spiritual health.
14. Reinvest in life a little bit each day…
Especially at work, I'm embarrassed by my tears. I feel I should buck up, deal with it and go on with normal business. This is something I'm really working on. I tell myself, 'crying is normal, crying is healthy.'
One of my close childhood friends lost her sister in a tragic car accident. This is how she explains loosing a sibling..
The only way I can explain loosing a loved one to someone who has not is like this: When it first happens you feel like there is a giant boulder on top of you. You can't move, can't breath or think. But eventually the boulder gets a little smaller. Then one day it becomes a pebble in your pocket. It's something that you will always carry with you but It's a lot easier to cary on with.
I couldn't have said it in a more perfect way. She also gave me a poem.
"I would like to beg you to have the patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live with them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer."
