When Loss Rewrote Everything

Sometimes, I just want to shake people and scream, "you saw the moment it changed! You watched it get dark!"

You saw when the light shifted in my girls. You saw when grief moved in. You saw what losing their brother did to them.  But nothing changed with how you interacted with them and loved on them.  

And yet somehow… it became something they were expected to “handle” quietly and privately.....without making anyone uncomfortable.

People need to know that suicide doesn’t just take ONE life. It shakes the ENTIRE foundation of a family! It rewrites safety and security. It alters identity. It alters a version of God they thought they knew and could trust. My daughters didn’t just lose a brother. They lost normal. They lost ease. They lost the version of themselves that existed before that day.

And in the middle of that, they felt pushed to the side.

They have voiced it themselves so many times. They have said they felt overlooked and sidelined......like the focus shifted away from them at the very moment they needed people to lean in closer. From some of the very people who were supposed to love them and help them, they felt distance instead of covering.  Some even refused to reach out to them because of their bitterness and resentment towards ME.  

That does something to a young heart, you know?

Instead of someone saying, “This is trauma. This is pain.  This is grief. This is a wound that needs care,” the focus shifted to their reaction, their choices, their coping, and their behavior.

It’s easier for people to critique what they see now than to acknowledge what broke them then.

Pain that isn’t addressed doesn’t disappear. It shows up in different clothes. Sometimes it looks like distance. Sometimes like independence or isolation. Sometimes it looks like decisions you don’t understand. 

But underneath it all points to the same thing......loss, pain, grief.

What they needed was life spoken over them. Compassion, gentle strength, someone brave enough to say, “I know this changed you and that makes sense.”

Instead, too often, they were expected to be strong in silence.

I won’t pretend the choices don’t matter. Because they do....but healing matters too. Understanding matters. Calling out the pain matters.  Without those things, their healing is HINDERED.  

Because when you ignore the wound and only see and speak on the behavior, you miss the heart entirely.

And......I refuse to miss their hearts.