What Your Suicide Felt Like to Me
My Personal Perspective
What your suicide felt like to me.
It felt like the world stopped turning.
It felt like someone killed me at that moment that she said those words: “Jason hanged himself.”
It literally felt like the world had stopped.
But the world didn’t stop.
The world as I knew it stopped.
The person I was before I heard those three words ended.
But the world kept going, somehow never changing, somehow still expecting the same level of everything that I had always been able to give.
But what the suddenly annoyingly, rudely fast-paced world didn’t seem to comprehend was that your suicide meant a new reality for me.
A reality where I’m no longer capable of giving the things that I used to.
I felt empty.
I felt like a stranger to myself.
What your suicide felt like to me was the death of everything.
Like someone had ripped the carpet out from under my feet and stood there wondering why I fell.
What your suicide felt like to me was somebody dragging me behind a car until I didn’t have any more bones that weren’t broken and then wondering why I could no longer walk at the same pace I used to.
Like someone drained every drop of blood from my body and then wondered why I couldn’t stay awake.
What your suicide felt like to me was that somebody replaced every drop of my blood with concrete and wondered why I was completely frozen.
Like someone had set the entire world on fire and I was the only one who could see it.
What your suicide felt like to me was the lack of trust in anything I had ever believed in.
An intense fear that everyone I loved was going to die.
What your suicide meant for me was that I stopped trusting myself . . . And everyone else.
I was no longer the strong person I had worked so hard to become. The independence that had been such a big part of me no longer felt like it was possible, or even important.
What your suicide felt like to me was that there was no point in trying to do anything. It was too late.
But at the same time, I needed to prove myself more than ever.
To prove that I wasn’t going to die by suicide.
To prove that there was nothing wrong with me or my family.
And then I realized . . . I don’t need to prove that because there was never a need to be ashamed.
You died by suicide, Bubba. But you lived every one of your 43 years with love in your heart. You were (it’s still almost impossible to write about you in the past tense) a good man. A truly good soul.
What your suicide meant to me was that I no longer have a brother.
But I do. When people ask me how many siblings I have, I still say two.
Because we will always be three.
You are just as much our brother as you ever were, and we love you just as much as we ever did.
You are missed. You are loved.
You are my brother.
That is the one thing (in my world) that you dying by suicide can never change.