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Returning to My Core

I often think that if my deceased younger sister heard people say that her suicide defines my career path and who I am, she’d burst out laughing. After all, I was the sister who put the tape down on the floor, the closest I could get to having my own room. I thought I was being kind when I taped Denise a walkway in and out of the room.

But there are other aspects of my life that most people don’t know about: the novelist I dreamed of being from first grade on, and the young adult fiction novel that several major publishers looked at in the late 1990s— at the same time that I was seeking a publisher for what would become Do They Have Bad Days in Heaven?: Surviving the Suicide Loss of a Sibling, propelling my career in a different direction than I had anticipated.

Nearly 20 years after her suicide just two weeks before her 18th birthday, when I was 21, I am closer than ever to the core of who I was before she died. I never intended to do the work that I’ve been doing for the past ten years. My goal was to create a resource for sibling survivors of suicide since I’d felt my siblings and I were so isolated in the years after Denise died.

I knew there were other siblings like us out in the world, but without the Internet as it exists today, we didn’t have access to one another. I never anticipated that life would take me around the world to meet and walk with people on their grief journeys. Becoming president of the American Association of Suicidology wasn’t part of the plan, nor did I ever think I would get a doctorate. I simply wanted to bring sibling survivors of suicide together.

Somewhere around the 15th year following her death, though, I saw that I had left behind my novelist dream.

It wasn’t done on purpose, but mostly because I was busy doing the suicide-related work. Each year I meant to pick up the young adult fiction manuscript and work on it, but time always got away from me. There were too many other things to do. Finally, one day I realized I didn’t want to wake up 20 years later, not having accomplished my dream. I knew that my sister would have agreed with me, recognizing how important writing was to me.

I set off to finish my first fiction project, publishing The Australian Pen Pal in the summer of 2011. (The young adult fiction project I refer to above remains unpublished at this point).

As the year went on, though, and my life began to transform, other changes took place. My marriage ended, and I could sense life was taking me on other geographic and emotional roads. More than ever, it was important for me to return to the core of who I am. I could see I had done all I could in the suicide and grief world. I found myself wanting to talk about things other than the emotions of suicide, grief, or how to ask someone if he or she is suicidal. I saw that telling the story of something that happened to me at 21 was starting to feel strange at 40.

I worried about backlash as I attempted to leave a field I had worked so hard to move forward in for more than ten years. But as I began to tell my fellow suicide bereaved, they applauded me. “The best message you can pass along to someone who is grieving is one of happiness, and that you can have a full life even after a loved one dies,” they said. “You’re offering a signpost for other bereaved.”

I am not 100-percent sure what’s next. I’m working on several projects, but part of me remains open to something that I might not yet be aware of. I do know that as I take this journey during my last year as president of AAS, my view of grief and suicide grief has changed. I don’t know that I would write Do They Have Bad Days in Heaven?: Surviving the Suicide Loss of a Sibling the same way if I wrote it today. I see that for a while, suicide and grief, and my sister’s death, will remain as part of my work. However, the possibilities of what’s ahead are endless. Each time I let go of something I created or helped build, I am happy to see someone take it and run with it. That frees me to be the Michelle I always was supposed to be. This nearly 21-year journey taught me more about myself than I could have learned any other way, but now it’s time to take my core and be who I’m truly supposed to be.

 

 

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Comments (2)

  • How can I get a copy or buy your books? Our son committed suicide 22 years ago and our sons do not talk about.

    • Dear Janet,

      You can Google it and see if you can find it that way or check Amazon. The title again is, Do They Have Bad Days in Heaven?: Surviving the Suicide Loss of a Sibling, by Michelle Linn-Gust. Hopefully, you can find it that way.

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