You’re still here -- Living after suicide | Amy Biancolli | TEDxAlbany

you so this is how it feels to lose someone to suicide in the first moment it's just a void it's airless lightless senseless hopeless all you can feel is a crushing weight that presses out all potential light err hope and sense the first moment is a millisecond that lasts forever because it's timeless in the second moment you breathe and you say oh my god I'm still here oh my god I'm alive this person I loved was dead but I'm still here and in that second moment you grasp all that's been taken from you and you say what am I gonna do how is this gonna work if I'm still here if I'm still living how is this gonna work and that second moment can also be a split second and that also goes on forever I was 11 when my father attempted suicide he was 67 an older father he was very accomplished an author a music critic a man of great love and life but he was addicted to sleeping pills and he was depressed and he took enough sleeping pills my mother always said he took enough to kill a horse it didn't kill him no it put him into a coma for nine days and when he came out he went into a psych hospital for six months pure talk therapy never made another attempt he had some dementia some brain damage but he never made another attempt but when it happened what I remember is my mother's face as she told me it's not your fault I remember her looking squarely at me this fixit gaze she was determined that I should understand this it's not your fault it's nothing you did and I don't know at that age whether I believed her was even capable of believing her don't know I don't remember that part whatever member is her telling me it's not your fault and in 1992 17 years later my older sister Lucy also a beautiful accomplished educated classically trained pianist she killed herself she od'd on psych meds she had been sick for years she had made one previous attempt she finally finally did it in 1992 she was 31 I was 28 and my mother and I knew enough to say to each other and we said to each other it's not your fault it's nothing you did we both knew that we had loved her as well as we could as much as we could that we couldn't have stopped her from killing herself we knew that we had tried and we knew that we had to say it's not your fault we also knew we had to try to believe it I don't know that we did three years ago my husband Chris my beloved husband of 20 years lept from the roof of a parking garage not far from here he was also beautiful and accomplished he was an author a journalist a man of great life in love and still he jumped for six months he had spiraled into insomnia anxiety depression and nothing nothing worked and when he died I told myself only because I knew I had to tell myself it's not your fault I knew I had to say it I also knew I would never believe it I would never believe it I would always have to say it because I knew the guilt would hit me I knew the guilt would never leave but I knew that the rational part of me had to recognize that the guilt was irrational and so I told myself and I still tell myself more than three years later it's not your fault the human irrational emotional part will always feel guilty the rational part says Oh God the guilt it's not real in the second moment that second moment when you realize all that you've lost I remember this after my sister died and after my husband died there's a paradox because you recognize all that you've lost and at the same time it's the first moment of hope because you say I'm still here I'm still here I'm gonna keep moving forward through time and space I'm gonna keep living I'm going into a future without my beloved sister without my beloved husband you're supposed to go through life with your sister and your spouse you're supposed to get old with them you have all these shared memories with them from the past but you're also supposed to continue creating memories with them and I'd lost all of those future memories but in the midst of that horror that moment of horror was also the first moment of hope because I saw that I had a future it was a future without my sister and my husband but it was a future and it was terrifying it's a terrifying thing to realize you're still here how is that future gonna gonna work how am I gonna march into this future that which has a scope I can't comprehend I can't see it all I can do is go through the moments the first moment the second moment they return they always come back at you third moment tears it's not fourth moment tears it's not fifth moment laughter if you're lucky enough to have friends who'll laugh with you you'll laugh every occasion the weirdness just hits you you laugh the first week after my husband died and died on a Monday on Friday I called Social Security to see about benefits for me and my three kids right so in the course of answering all these questions about my marriage and his death I get asked this question have you remarried four days after my husband's suicide I burst into laughter it was a godsend it was a bolt of life from the light from the darkness light and life from the darkness okay that's all I could do it all comes down to all you can do I'm not an authority on grief I'm only in a already on what happened to me and I can tell you what I did I got out of bed that's actually a pretty big thing to do after a suicide you get out of bed I swore a heck of a lot I cried more tears more snot I laughed when I could I got my kids out the door to school I went to work tried to go to work tried to do whatever I had to do to get through today I talked I talked a lot I talked about the grill the the grief the irrational guilt I talked about all of that I talked about anything that made sense to anyone who would listen I talked about things that didn't make sense cuz we have to talk about suicide I said aloud I won't kill myself I said that to my kids I won't kill myself that was something I could do so it was something that I did do and they had to hear it because we all have to say that to each other after a suicide because we all feel guilty I made a list it's gonna sound corny but it was my list so other people can make lists that sound corny to other people but it made sense to me it was a way of dealing with the lack of sense in my life and lack of order Liv it's obvious right I'm still here what choice do I have give got me out of my head got me to think and do something other than fixate on my own guilt love that seems obvious right I'm gonna love my kids I'm gonna love my family I'm gonna love my friends but after a suicide it's a terrifying thing to still love because you could lose again so I had to actively tell myself to love and to open myself to love maybe even make new friends new loving relationships and that was scary laughs thank God Gro because if I am still here I can't be static I have to look at myself I have to keep changing if if that's possible assess my own failures flaws foibles try to move on learn it's related to grow again anything that not so much got me out of my own head but put other things inside my head besides my own guilt the things I couldn't control what could I control well I could expand my world I could acquire new skills one of the things I did after my husband died was I started taking jazz violin lessons because I'd always thought about it and I finally said I'm gonna learn jazz violin and I still quite haven't but I'm working at it pray I'm Catholic I pray someone else on their list might write meditate or read poetry or write poetry I mean I wrote pray be grateful count my blessings I can't control the horrors that have happened what I can do is look at my beautiful children my health my life my friends my family be grateful be present it's all I have I can't go into the past I can't see into this terrifying future make music again I love playing the violin it's healing I like to sing gets me doing and thinking about something other than that knowing guilt have faith and stand up straight because I'm a terrible slump er and I need to remind myself constantly stand up straight so as afterthoughts at the bottom of this list which I wrote out on a scrap of paper and stuck on my my fridge door still there I still see it several times a day at the bottom I wrote exercise because it's a major mood elevator and I also had to keep myself healthy for my kids and finally don't wear red in photos because I had a really unfortunate incident with a red raincoat in a photo and I don't want to repeat it ever okay I actually considered putting on a red shirt today and I let no no no so this helped me control the uncontrollable this list because the moments kept happening the moments of Tears the Munsell it's not the first moment the second moment they kept hitting me and I couldn't control those moments we have this idea or rather hope that grief will be orderly we all have internalized the Elisabeth kubler-ross stages of grief denial anger bargaining depression acceptance and those are all components of grief but in my experience at least there's no order to them grief is a monster it hits you whenever it wants to it hits you it hits you out of order sometimes it hits you with everything all at once you think you're avoiding everything then it all comes back and hits you you think you're done with one component like I'm done with the anger and then six months later you're throwing dictionaries around the room so in the midst of a whole hat you think well what can I control I can't control that and after a suicide you control even less because you've got that awful guilt that just slams you and it happens and everyone who loses someone to suicide in the aftermath I should have made a phone call I should have said this instead of that I shouldn't have said that at all this is what I should have done oh my god something I could have done might have saved their life oh my god that's that's what happens after guilt after suicide the guilt and the guilt happens after the guilt too so and on top of it after suicide aside from the guilt you've got these unanswered questions their mysteries their utter mysteries their unanswerable why did my sister have to suffer so why did my husband have to suffer so what might have changed in their treatment what could we have changed in their treatment putting them on meds making sure they never went on meds what in my interaction with them what might I have done why can't I go back and why couldn't I do anything how could I have stopped them why do people have to suffer you can't answer those because suicide never makes any sense that's the horror of it it never makes any sense we want to make sense of things that happened to us and we can and part of dealing with that grief is saying I have no power over it not just I have no power over all that happened but I have no power even over this grief it's gonna do what it does what can you do what could I do what did I do well I got the sense of life as a process of self reinvention I realized that I had to reinvent myself whether this was conscious unconscious a little of both I don't know but I had to figure out a new way of being because I had so little control over what happened to me what happens to any of us I had to focus on the things over which I did have control it's like someone who loses a leg and first moves through space in a wheelchair and then on crutches and then finally with a new leg a prosthetic they learn how to move forward and it's the same after any trauma you just have to refigure yourself out your light has gone off straight off script so you have to play it by ear and I did that with my kids I'm still doing it with my kids I'm still doing it with myself my husband had a huge personality mine is not small but his was huge he was charismatic he was the planner the leader the hatcher of an instigator of an adventures he was the one who supervised chores he was the one who really was firm about discipline he was a huge personality and I I found myself trying to decide by doing sort of triage like can I do this should I do that what's the most important thing should I start trying to instigate adventures myself how will I be in the aftermath we all have to reconfigure one thing I did my oldest daughter was on a gap year in Ecuador and I took my younger to the Easter after my husband died to go visit her and it was very healing and it continues to be healing this idea of moving forward and trying to learn new things at every stage with the people we love and trying to be new people with the people we love when I came back I started writing this book and I'd written a book after my parents and sister died all within the same two years and as with that book this one became a way to kind of create my own narrative to make my own self and what happened to me makes sense I had to tell my own story I'm a writer so I did it with a book you don't have to be a writer I don't think I think the creative process of sorting through grief is one of creating a narrative and I found it enormous ly helpful many of us all we can do because there's so much out of our control in life I I can't go back in time and stop my husband from jumping I can't do that I can't go back in time and stop my sister from swallowing those pills and curling up on her bed I can't go back and and and give her the phone number of where I was gonna be that weekend so she could call me I can't go back and give my husband a longer hug before he went off to work that morning I can't ever get rid of my own guilt I know that I know what's gonna hit me I know it's irrational but I know what's going to hit me I can't ever answer the questions why that happened had happen to him what on earth that could have been done it's a mystery all that I can do is keep plotting forward taking the moments as they come living each moment choosing to live each moment to the fullest and so I make dinner at night I go over to the fridge and I see it I can live I can give I can love I can laugh I can grow I can learn I can pray I can be grateful I can be present I can make music I can have faith and if I remember to which I usually don't it's not very often I can stand up straight you

Channel: TEDx Talks

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Length: 18min 20sec (1100 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 06 2015