I have just returned from attending the funeral of a friend. It is Thursday 8th December 2016. She took her own life on Sunday 4th December. On Saturday she was here with us, walking, talking, partying, today she is dead.
This has affected me more than I thought it could. She is not a close friend, just someone I knew through a motorbike club, just someone I didn't get to know well enough. I am suffering the usual anger and hurt on behalf of the grieving family left behind that I have felt before upon learning of the suicide of others. But this time I am feeling an incredible grief also for this woman.
I am realising how blinding and self encompassing this trapped inside sadness is. She was only 45 with 4 stunning young daughters and some mokopuna (grandchildren). How could she leave them behind. My eyes fill with tears just writing about her children and grandchildren, and it shocks me to my core that she felt SO BAD that she only wanted to take herself away from their love.
A friend of the deceased read a poem/eulogy at the funeral talking about how it is to be at that point. Her husband and some friends had committed suicide and she had felt suicidal in the past. She spoke of the deep sadness and how the lower you feel, the more you don't want others to sense how you feel. How you know that no-one can help, understand, pull you up out of it. Because you know this you are driven towards removing yourself from the world.
We now (others more so than I) struggle on with guilt, anger, sadness, disbelief, trying to make sense of the loss of this beautiful individual.
The world is a little grayer today and I pledge to myself to listen more, follow my intuition more, care more, spend more time with others, get to know more people beyond my current friends, be aware, and act if I ever have any inkling that someone is on this path.
I'm now heading to my friends house to hold her baby, it's the only thing that I can think of that will help ease the sadness I feel.
