What My Late Sister’s Journal Taught Me About Emotional Healing

Her final gift to me

A knock at the door.

Two men in suits are standing on my front porch. They introduce themselves as policemen, confirm my identity, and ask if they can come in.

Oh shit. What did I do to deserve a visit from the cops? The last couple of years of life flashed through my mind like lightning. I can’t think of a damn thing. Nervously, I invite them to come in. We all remained standing.

Them: “We regret to inform you that your sister Mary Jo passed away today.”

Me: “WHAAAT? No, you must have the wrong person.”

They confirm her name and address.

What the hell? My sister, two years my junior, had always been healthy and actively involved in life. A well-regarded leader of many Sierra Club outings, and on the leadership council of the new-age church we both attended. It was difficult to imagine that she had passed away “just like that.”

The cops gave me a few moments to process this, adding a few details like “she died at her home” and “her body was found this morning.”

I imagine my eyes were as big as saucers. After picking my jaw up off the floor I asked what had happened.

“A neighbor called the police this morning when they heard her car running in the garage for a long period, and she didn’t answer the door. We had to break into the house.

It appears she took her own life. We found her sitting in her car, with a garden hose from the exhaust pipe into the closed window.”

“We have moved her body to the morgue. We suggest you contact them, here’s the number.”

“She left a suicide note on her kitchen counter. Here are the keys to her home. Here’s our number, in case we can help or if you have further questions.”

They extended their apologies and left me with my shock and tears.

I was positively dumbfounded. My sister Mary Jo had always projected an image of happiness, success, and independence to everyone she knew. To all outward appearances, she was living a vibrant life. She seemed to have every reason to live. Could it be possible that she’d take her own life?

The back story

Our birth family had never been close. Love and nurturing were never our parents’ strong suits. They had both come from dysfunctional families. They managed their own brood the best they knew how, but they were in way over their heads. I, my three brothers, and one sister came away from childhood with deep emotional scars. (Though I didn’t realize that for many years.)

Consequently, my siblings and I had gone about our lives completely independent of one another. We came together only at Christmas time up until our mother died. Besides that, we rarely saw or talked to one another.

Mary Jo and I had a slightly closer bond than we shared with our other siblings. While the others had struggled with finances and bipolar symptoms, she and I had created reasonably rewarding careers and “successfully” hidden the effects of our anguished childhood from the world.

When I was at the lowest point in my life — ten years prior to MJ’s passing — I had been contemplating suicide after a series of emotional traumas. I had sought her advice out of pure desperation. There was no one else to call.

What she suggested at that time started me down a new path in life. Over the ensuing ten years I had been guided to a personal growth path that had elevated me emotionally as well as spiritually.

I owed her my life.

I wished she had given me the same opportunity to help her.

But that was not her way.

The Personification of the Independent, Successful Woman

Mary Jo had earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in marketing and business — with neither encouragement nor financial assistance from our parents. She had built a successful brand marketing career with two different Fortune 500 companies.

After 20+ years in that field, though, she had grown tired of the pressure. She resigned from an executive position to study horticulture.

Following her studies, she had landed the ideal job she had envisioned: landscape design work for a prominent local landscaping company.

This is about all I knew about Mary Jo’s adult life. It gave me exactly zero insight about why she would take her own life.

Investigating the ‘why’

I was driven to discover why my only sister, and someone so widely regarded as a successful, independent woman, would ever commit suicide.

I gained valuable insights from 20 years of daily journals I found at her home, and from talking with people who seemed they should know her.

MJ enjoyed the artistic process of visualizing and drawing landscape designs by hand. Her most recent journal, though, showed that several months after starting her first job as a landscape designer she was fired. She had been unable to master a landscape design computer application used by her employer. I read about her frustration that she could not “get it” no matter how she tried, and the resulting stress of worrying about losing her job. After she had tried and failed over several months to adapt to computer-aided design, the company dismissed her.

It was the first time in her uber-successful business life she had ever had such a setback.

I hadn’t known about that. Turns out, few others knew, either.

• Her minister was a personal friend of mine. I thought perhaps MJ had sought her counsel with her big job setback. Nope. She expressed surprise and sadness, and spoke of the contributions MJ had made at the church — conducting planning and organization work with eagerness and skill.
• Her journal showed she had been seeing a psychologist weekly. Her counselor was the wife of one of my friends, so we had a passing acquaintance. I called her to share about MJ’s suicide. She was aghast. She was professionally reluctant to share anything about their sessions together until I appealed to her as a friend, and promised to hold our conversation completely confidential. Then, she acknowledged that MJ had had been depressed recently. But that was not unusual based on their history together. In their previous session — just a few days before her suicide, MJ had withheld the fact that she had been fired.
• I discovered that she had seen a well-known psychic on occasion — most recently, about two weeks prior. I’d had some previous business dealings with this man, so I called him. He too was astonished. “Bob, just a few weeks ago I had told her I saw a wonderful job offer coming soon! Why would she leave with that ahead of her?” Her journal showed that she had, in fact, received an ideal job offer. Because she was afraid of failing again, though, she turned it down.
• In her suicide note, MJ named her best friend the executrix of her estate. I called to share the bad news, and seek her insights. The rest of the conversation was punctuated by sobs and deep sighs, as she processed this traumatic news. She and MJ talked by phone every week. She didn’t know MJ had been fired from her job, nor that she was feeling any more depressed than “normal.” (I would later gain greater insight into that ugly truth as I dug into more of her years of journals.)

Aside from her psychic, it seemed MJ had told no one about being fired from her job. It seemed she was ashamed about having been fired, and so she intentionally hid it from others. Apparently, it had affected her deeply and shattered her self-confidence — to the point where she had turned down an apparently lucrative job offer.

I would later come to interpret her job loss as the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back.

Messages from beyond the grave

From her journal entries, I found several recurring themes. Repeatedly, over 20 years of journals.

I recognized them instantly. They were messages that originated within our family of origin. I had excavated those same self-limiting messages from the shadowy depths of my psyche over the prior ten years. I had invested more than 1,000 hours in emotional support circles and dozens of deep healing processes. I became aware of most of my self-sabotaging inner messages, and healed many of them.

Seeing them in MJ’s journals was a walk down memory lane for me.

I found it curious that these 20 years of journal entries were so repetitive. Each journal entry was written as if it were the first time she had noticed various recurring themes from a week, a year, or ten years earlier.

To paraphrase the key repetitive themes that I recognized:

“I am afraid to retire because I don’t have enough money to sustain myself. I’m afraid I’ll become destitute, and die alone and penniless.”

Our father had always struggled financially, and his mindset about money was always that it was in short supply. He demonstrated that he was cheap (well beyond frugal) — with allowances, groceries, family entertainment — you name it. MJ and I subconsciously adopted those messages: “there’s never enough money, so it’s best to be cheap” — even though we had each been far more financially successful than our father.

The account statements we found in MJ’s home indicated her retirement savings were well over $1 million. Letters from her investment account manager assured that she was well-suited financially to retire whenever she chose to do so — without any major lifestyle changes.

But her subconscious “never enough money” message spoke louder than her financial advisor’s words. It wouldn’t have mattered if she had saved ten or twenty million. It wouldn’t have been enough for her to feel secure.

“Nobody will ever love me. I’m unlovable.”

MJ had been married for about ten years. Her husband divorced her because she had always been a control freak. Over time, he grew damn tired of being controlled.

She had later dated a few men, but no other serious relationship materialized (perhaps for similar reasons?)

Over-controlling is a compensatory strategy for feeling out of control. She felt unloved and unlovable. While we were growing up, our dominant father often intimidated us with his anger to demonstrate that he was in control — and not us. Punishments and groundings were a way of life for us.

Consequently, MJ and I had frequently felt our lives were out of control. We had both adopted an inner message that we were unlovable because we never saw love modeled by our parents. We were subconsciously needy of love beyond that which anyone could fulfill. And thus, every relationship ended as a failure.

“I’m the smartest mind in the room.”

As I read this frequent theme, it was clearly disconnected from reality. MJ had worked among some of the world’s brightest marketing minds in two separate premier consumer products companies, both renowned for their marketing prowess.

Don’t get me wrong. She was smart, self-motivated, and successful. But this clearly was a narcissistic, grandiose self-perception that went beyond what you’d call normal.

This is overcompensation for “not enough” messages we had adopted throughout childhood. Regardless of how good our grades, or sports performances, or how well we performed our household chores, our parents heaped on the criticism rather than praise.

The Big Cover-Up

Mary Jo had never become aware of these self-limiting messages. While she journaled about their effects near-daily, she never got to excavate the messages at the cause. Though she had people in her life who could have helped her explore them, doing so would have required that she trust and become vulnerable, and momentarily drop her carefully cultivated persona.

She never did.

Looking at the bark of a tree, you‘d never know that termites had been eating away at its core for ten or twenty years. But when a big storm comes along the tree no longer has the strength to stay standing.

MJ’s big storm was being fired from her job.

In the final month of her life, her journal entries became more self-critical and ominous. One read: “I’m a failure on so many levels.” Another said “How can (brother) Bob be so happy and positive, when he’s gone through a bankruptcy, a foreclosure, and a divorce all in the last year… and I’m sitting here with pain and depression and failure?”

The valuable message

When I reflected on the self-limiting messages in MJ’s journals, and contrasted her suffering with my own experience of the previous ten years the clearest message emerged:

Vulnerability is absolutely fundamental to emotional healing.

We both had years of emotional distress as children growing up in an unloving, dysfunctional family. Fortunately, I had discovered a way out of its later-life effects.

My own emotional exploration required that I become vulnerable with others who wanted to support me. Without trusting and feeling safe I could never have opened to the support that was there for me to examine and heal those self-limiting messages identical to those of my sister.

There were plenty of support resources available to Mary Jo. But she’d never allowed herself to become vulnerable with them. Her subconscious messages sabotaged her throughout her life. And eventually made life so painful she decided to end it.

Had she been willing to be vulnerable to those who cared for her I suspect she’d be happily retired today, instead of pushing up daisies.

Rest in peace, Mary Jo. Thank you for showing me the contrast between the liberating effect of vulnerability; and the personal hell of not doing so.

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