Don’t Fight The Raging Torrent

I have been spending time reading accounts of those who  have lost a loved one through suicide on  “Alliance of Hope: for suicide survivors“. Reading accounts of those who lost a loved one to suicide when they are in the beginnings stages of grief and guilt ridden brought me back to my early days of trying to survive Aaron’s death. The emotions, grief, guilt, confusion, anger etc is so intense you think your going to die yourself. There are times you think it would be easier to give up than have to endure for another day. You can’t see the future and you can’t know that it happens to all of us who lost a loved one.

To me it was like being thrown into a raging torrent of water that was headed for a waterfall and there was nothing I could do about it. To try to swim against the current was impossible and the reality of  going over the edge of that waterfall was a reality that I didn’t want to accept.

That is what it is like in the beginning. You find yourself in this raging torrent of water, sweeping you down stream, knowing that you will be unceremoniously dumped over the edge and down into the river below. Your survival instincts set in trying everything to find a way to stop your forward progress. A tree branch, a log, brushes peeking up over the water’s surface. Anything to stop your forward motion so you can figure a way to get back to the safety of the shore.

That is the problem in the beginning. We weren’t  prepared for this terrifying ride, we didn’t plan it, it wasn’t in our life’s itinerary so we didn’t know how to react.

If we were prepared or had the advantage of hindsight then we would learn quickly that there is no branches to grab onto, no brushes to stop our forward progress. We were headed for the water fall and its drop and there wasn’t anything we could do about it. What we didn’t know is that we would survive the drop, we would survive the undertow and the waters would eventually stop its tumultuous washing machine like churning on course to our new destination.

We try in the beginning to fight something that is greater than us not realizing we have been set on a path that we never asked for, taking us to a destination most of us never knew existed nor a place we really didn’t want to go.

I say this with over six years of travelling that river, making it safely over the water’s edge, surviving the drop ino the raging torrent of water that would sweep me down stream away from the comforts of my old life. A journey I didn’t ask for. I am still travelling down that river knowing that I will never be able to go back to where I started.

It wasn’t an overnight acceptance, even when the waters eased I still looked for a way back to the way it was.  It actually took me six and a half years to understand this and accept my fate, a fate that has brought me to realizing that my life not only will never be the same but that I was put in this position so that some day I may in some small way help those who are struggling to survive suicide navigate their way down stream.

We who have travelled through this raging torrent know that once you have been thrown into the deep end there is no going back. Life will never be the same but as a consolation to those who are at the beginning stages of this river’s journey there is a place where the waters calm and flow at a more leisurely pace.

You can never go back and  once you get far enough down stream away from the danger of the river’s raging torrent, you will understand more fully the new path you have been put on.