Learning the Language He Spoke

It’s been fourteen months since my brother took his life, the darkest thought I have right now isn’t loud. It doesn’t scream or demand. It simply exists. It sits with me in the quiet hours and refuses to move. I don’t want to die. I just don’t want this life to continue. This one. The one where everything still looks familiar but nothing feels safe. The one where grief has rearranged my nervous system, my faith, my sense of time. The one where I wake up already tired of surviving.

I spend hours staring at the ceiling, wide awake in the dark, bargaining with nothing. I don’t sleep. I lie on my back staring into darkness, watching shadows shift, listening to the house breathe around me. My body exhausted, my restless mind won’t let go, my chest heavy in that familiar way that feels like drowning without water. I don’t cry every night anymore. Sometimes I don’t cry at all. Sometimes I just lie there, counting breaths, counting shadows, counting reasons that don’t quite land. I replay memories, conversations, moments I didn’t know were precious until they were gone. I don’t even think in full sentences anymore. I just lie there, asking the same question over and over without words: What is the point of staying?

I remember assuring my therapist I wasn’t suicidal when I first started therapy. And that is true. I’ve never wanted to hurt myself. I’ve never made a plan. I’ve never crossed that line. I’ve never wanted to actively leave my children behind. But I also told her that I wished I wouldn’t wake up. That if I could just go to sleep and not open my eyes again, that would feel like relief. Not peace. Not joy. Just relief. Like finally being allowed to set something unbearably heavy down.

At the time, I didn’t understand the difference. In my mind, wanting the pain to stop felt separate from wanting life itself to end. I thought there was safety in that distinction, something that kept me on the “okay” side of the line. I told myself grief just made people tired. That trauma rewires sleep into escape. That exhaustion can sound like surrender without actually meaning it. I believed I was simply worn thin by loss, by carrying a world that suddenly felt heavier after Chris was gone. I remember saying those words almost casually, as if I were confessing to insomnia instead of something far more fragile. I don’t want to die. I just don’t want to wake up. And my therapist didn’t look shocked. She didn’t panic or correct me. She just nodded gently, like she recognized something I didn’t yet have language for.

Because months later, after sitting with my grief long enough to start asking harder questions, after replaying memories and conversations and warning signs over and over… I found myself talking about Chris. About the way he struggled. About the things he said in passing that didn’t sound like someone planning to die, just someone impossibly tired of hurting. I told her how none of us thought he truly wanted to leave. How it never sounded like a desire for death so much as a longing for relief from whatever storm lived inside him.

And imagine my shock when she told me… that’s the same thing.

There’s a strange loneliness in that space. Because it doesn’t sound like what people expect suicidal thoughts to sound like. It feels softer than that. Sadder. More tired. Less dramatic. More dangerous in its own way because it hides behind responsibility and morality and love for the people you’d never want to hurt. I love my kids too much to leave them. I love too deeply to do something that would fracture the people who still need me. Recently, reluctantly, I’ve started to realize I don’t want to die. I want this life to end.

It feels important to say that out loud, because grief after suicide lives in this strange, unnamed space. It’s not always the dramatic urge people imagine. It’s quieter than that. Heavier. It’s the wish for relief without destruction, for rest without consequence. It’s the ache of staying alive out of love while secretly wondering how long you can keep doing that without breaking. It terrifies me to realize how thin that space can be. How suffering disguises itself as exhaustion and how exhaustion can masquerade as surrender. How a person can still love deeply, still smile, still make plans for tomorrow, and yet feel so overwhelmed by carrying their own mind that disappearing feels like mercy.

I think about God a lot in those hours. Or maybe I think at Him. I stare at the ceiling and wonder how a God who is supposed to be good could let my brother suffer the way he did. How He could let Chris fight so hard and still lose. How He could let me feel him slipping even when I didn’t have words for it yet. And then, how He could leave me here afterward… breathing, functioning, raising children while everything inside me feels permanently altered. If there really is a God, I think surely He wouldn’t allow this kind of ongoing suffering. Surely He wouldn’t keep someone alive just to ache like this. Surely mercy would mean an ending, not this endless continuation. I bargain with Him in the dark, not for joy or answers, but for release. For some sign that this isn’t all there is now.

Chris is everywhere in these thoughts. In the quiet. In the guilt. In the unanswered questions. I think about how close we were… how deeply I knew him, how instinctively I felt his pain even before I had proof. I think about the two times before when something in me knew something was wrong, and how helpless that knowing ultimately was. And I wonder what it means that he’s gone and I’m still here. I wonder why he was allowed to rest while I am still fighting my way through each day. I guess the truth is, I do fear that these thoughts mean I wanted to die, too. That wanting out of this pain is the same thing as wanting to disappear entirely. But somewhere in the middle of another sleepless night, something shifted… not gently, not cleanly, but honestly. I don’t want to die. I want the life that was built around losing my brother to end.

I want the version of me who wakes up braced for impact to stop existing. I want the way grief lives in my nervous system, not just my heart, to collapse. I want the reality where everything I do is shaped by what was taken from me to finally loosen its grip. I don’t want nothingness. I want change so radical it feels like an ending. I want the version of my life where my brother is gone and everything else stayed the same to stop existing. I want the constant vigilance, the heaviness, the sense that I’m surviving instead of living, to finally release me. Chris’s death didn’t just take him. It froze everything else in place. It locked me into a version of living that is defined by endurance instead of desire. And what I want, what I have wanted all along, is for that to be over. What I want isn’t death. It’s transformation. I want the life that was built around loss to crumble so something else can grow. I want the identity that was forged in trauma, abandonment, and survival to be allowed to retire. I want to stop waking up already tired of the day ahead. I want to stop measuring time in “before” and “after” and start experiencing it as something that belongs to me again.

And that realization, that I don’t want to disappear, I want change, has been both devastating and grounding. Because if what I want is for my life as I know it to end, that means there is another life I’m still hoping for. Even if I can’t see it yet. Even if I don’t trust it yet. Even if I’m afraid to want it too loudly in case it disappears. It means the part of me that keeps breathing through the nights, that keeps showing up for my kids, that keeps telling the truth in therapy instead of pretending I’m fine, that part isn’t trying to escape existence. It’s trying to be reborn.

Grief after suicide does this strange thing where it convinces you that the pain is permanent, that the shape of your suffering is fixed. That this is just who you are now: the sister who survived, the daughter who lived, the granddaughter that carries on, the aunt that keeps going, the woman who carries loss like a second spine. But maybe the unbearable part isn’t being alive. Maybe it’s living in a life that no longer fits.

I don’t want to follow Chris into death. I want to carry him into a different life. One where his memory doesn’t crush me under its weight. One where loving him doesn’t feel like a life sentence. I want a life that includes my brother’s love without being ruled by the way he died. I want joy that doesn’t feel like betrayal. I want rest that doesn’t feel earned only through exhaustion. I want to wake up and feel curious again instead of bracing myself for another day of managing pain.

I don’t know what that life looks like yet. But the fact that I want something, not nothing, feels important. Fourteen months ago, survival was the only goal. Now, quietly, cautiously, I’m realizing that survival isn’t enough anymore.

And maybe that’s not a wish for death at all.
Maybe that’s the beginning of wanting to live.

I don’t want to die. I want to stop living inside a version of myself that was built solely to endure devastation. And admitting that, naming the difference, feels like standing on the edge of something terrifying and sacred at the same time. Because the truth I can’t unlearn now is that I have spoken the same exhausted language my brother did… and I am still here trying to rewrite the ending.


Author’s note
Originally written: 11/23/2019 - Realizing I spoke the same exhausted language as the brother I lost.

I wrote this piece from a place I can still remember with uncomfortable clarity. The exhaustion. The bargaining. The quiet confusion of wanting relief so badly that existence itself felt negotiable. At the time, I didn’t yet understand that grief after suicide reshapes you at a cellular level. I thought healing meant someday returning to who I was before. I didn’t know yet that there is no “before” to return to… only a life you slowly learn to inhabit differently.

Six and a half years later, I can see how much of this piece was written by a woman begging for permission to keep living without pretending she wasn’t shattered. I wrote about what I wanted then… relief, transformation, a life not defined solely by survival…  without knowing whether those things were actually possible. And somehow, quietly, over years instead of moments, pieces of that life found me.

I am surrounded now by people who do not rush my grief or treat it like something with an expiration date. People who understand that losing Chris didn’t become smaller with time; it simply became woven into who I am. His absence is still present, but it is no longer the only thing defining my existence. Grief is coded into me now, part of my emotional language, part of how I love, part of how deeply I notice the world… but it is not my entire identity anymore.

The most unexpected change has been permission. Permission to have hard days without shame. Permission to laugh without guilt. Permission to miss him without feeling like I am failing at healing. When the people around you stop expecting you to “move on,” something inside finally unclenches. You stop fighting your grief and begin living alongside it.

I don’t wake up every day braced for impact anymore. I don’t measure my life solely in survival. The things I longed for here, safety, understanding, room to feel without apology, exist in ways I once couldn’t imagine. Not perfectly. Not permanently. But truly.

I still miss my brother. I always will. That hasn’t changed.

What has changed is this: I no longer want my life to end in order to escape the pain. I have built a life spacious enough to hold both love and loss at the same time. And maybe that’s what healing actually is… not leaving grief behind, but learning that it can walk beside you without convincing you to disappear.