Tomorrow, March 18, marks the 18th anniversary of my sister Denise’s death. I’m writing tonight because my schedule is a little full tomorrow for which I’m glad. I have a day of errands and lunch with a fellow survivor, Meredith, who lost her teen daughter to suicide last year. I see tomorrow as a day to celebrate Denise’s life and I hope that in some way Meredith will see that one day she, too, will not feel the need to mourn how her daughter died but rather the life she lived. Tomorrow also marks the official “turn” that Denise will have been dead longer than she was alive. Everything about this time of year takes me back to the March day– the NCAA basketball tournament where I was covering the Ball State-Kanas game at the time when she died, corned beef and cabbage the night before she died at my parents’ house, the greening of spring with the trees beginning to bloom. I know she’s with me, I know that she walks my path of life with me, encouraging me every step of the way as she did when she was alive (something I didn’t realize until long after she had died). I can’t take it all back because I can’t bring her back. But I’ve also come to understand that while many people believe that her death completely changed my life, it’s not true. While, yes, it did alter my path, but I am who I am because of life events that occurred long before she died. Her death only solidified my need to motivate myself and make the most of each day given to me.
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[...] Tomorrow marks the 18th anniversary of my sister Denise’s death, the entire reason for my writing Do They Have Bad Days in Heaven? and starting this web site. To read more, click here. [...]
I love your closing sentence Michelle. As a fellow traveller who has also taken up (or been caught up in) the cause of helping others bereaved by suicide, sometimes I am troubled by the idea that my father’s death determined something about my life for me that would have been very different had he not killed himself, but your observation about us being the people we are independent of our loved ones was very helpful to me, and I appreciate it (and I am grateful for all of the work you do on behalf of survivors everywhere). FJC