The Will to Live: How I Chose Life After Loss

I read that love and death change all things. My brother, Will, died. He took his own life, and he irrevocably changed mine. Time moved the slowest it had ever in the days after his death. We huddled together as a family in a state of shock, trying to comprehend something that is incomprehensible. I looked out endlessly onto the fields that surrounded our family home where we were taking refuge and felt my brother there. Our people were with us in any way they could be - they brought homemade pies with handwritten instructions for cooking; sent letters with their memories of Will and expressing their love for our family; shared books on loss with words that might help us where they couldn’t. I was deeply moved by the human capacity to face such darkness with such courage and compassion. My family home felt heavy with death, and it wasn’t long before I was ready to return to London. But when I got back to my empty flat, where I lived alone, the silence felt louder than it had before. As I sat on my bed, I wondered where my grief was. I had cried with my family, but mostly it was a reaction to witnessing their pain. It was seeing the people I love the most shatter and not being able to hold them together. It wasn’t about Will yet; it was about what was in front of me. In the weeks after his death, I manically filled up my life to escape that silence. I spent hours on the treadmill to the point of complete exhaustion, so I had no energy left to think or feel. I went on dates. I was relieved to look into eyes that didn’t have sympathy in them. I hosted dinner parties. People couldn’t believe I was capable of it; they reassured me I didn’t have to. I felt there was judgement in their voices, but maybe it was love and I was just hearing the judgement I had for myself – carrying deep shame for the way that I was continuing life as if my brother hadn’t just died. What that said about me as a person. In those weeks, I felt observed. Like the world was watching with bated breath and waiting for me to unravel. Outwardly, I was coping. The only tell was my weight, which was rapidly falling off, and my eyes, which had lost their light. My body spoke for me in a way that I couldn’t yet with words. I lived with my grief below the surface for a long time. Never far away from any moment. Numb. Doing the motions of life, but not really there. It was like I was watching myself at a distance from outside my own body. Looking in the mirror, I no longer recognised the person staring back at me. I didn’t know it at the time, but this is called dissociation - an involuntary detachment from reality when pain is so overwhelming and vast that it’s not possible to process. Then I started to feel. Relentless anxiety and complete despair. This was most compounded when I was driving. It was the only place that I was alone with myself and where it didn’t feel possible to escape what had happened. I cried and screamed from a place within me that I didn’t know existed. But it was only when I went through a catastrophic romantic break up and was standing at my brother’s grave on the second anniversary of his death, sobbing because I knew my parents had lost two children that day, that I knew I had to heal. It was only when I had nothing left and there was nothing to hide behind, that I did what needed to be done to become unstuck. I was not ready before that exact moment. I was existing until I was strong enough to live again. To choose life, even though he didn’t. If I could speak to that version of me, here are the things that I would say. You are not broken and in need of fixing, you are wounded and in need of healing: I feared my grief was so infinite that it would consume me if I let it in. That I would find something so broken within me, it could never be repaired. But I came to understand there is a part of me, and a part of us all, that can’t be broken. In Will’s death, I realised the depth of my resilience, the height of my courage and the wholeness of my spirit. Feel your feelings: It was a long journey back to myself and avoiding my grief was the very thing that kept me stuck in it. Dr Gabor Maté is a leading expert on trauma, and he wrote that healing is not getting rid of pain but developing the capacity to hold it. Over time, I learnt to hold my pain. And while that pain hurt like nothing I had ever experienced, I realised that it passed through me if I made space for it. Now, I experience the pain less frequently and less acutely. But it’s still there and will always be, and that’s okay. It rises up on Will’s birthday (that hurts me more than the anniversary of his death); each time I’m asked how many siblings I have; anytime someone says ‘committed’ suicide (suicide stopped being a crime a long time ago). But I let the emotion come when it does. And then it subsides, and I continue to live. You cannot selectively numb - by numbing my experience of pain, I was numbing my experience of joy too. Now, I feel and notice joy in the everyday like never before. I am also grateful to feel anything because I have experienced what it is to feel nothing. It shows that I am alive, and I understand what a privilege that is. The worst time in your life will show you the best people in your life: Bessel van der Kolk writes in The Body Keeps the Score that traumatised people recover in the context of relationships - people who are not afraid of your pain and can contain it. Those people become your anchor and safeguard your wholeness while you explore the fragmented experiences and parts of yourself. Letting my closest friends see how much pain I was in was the most vulnerable I have ever felt. It was the first time I had shown them all of myself and it enabled me to see so much more of them. They were there, even when I had nothing to give. They created a space for me to exist exactly as I was and to explore my grief as it evolved and without judgement. They witnessed my pain, and they didn’t look away. They became my anchors. It is the truest expression of love I have ever experienced, and it created a depth of friendship that I am profoundly grateful for. The parts of you that are the most hidden, the most shameful, and the most vulnerable, are what connect you the most deeply to others. Heal yourself by choosing yourself: At some point, I realised that I had to let Will go if I wanted to live. That the best way to honour him would be to pursue a life that was big enough for us both. I worked on redirecting some of the love that I had for my brother back into myself. Choosing myself every day, in small decisions or acts of self-care as a powerful declaration: I am on my side and I deserve to be happy. I choose that life every time I put my phone down and really see and hear the people I love the most when they are in front of me. Each time I notice and prioritise what brings me pleasure, no matter how small - my first sip of coffee, the way the light fills my living room each morning, being around my family and feeling how much precious love there is between us. Each time I speak my truth, each time I am brave, each time I don’t play it safe or small and move towards a life that is authentic to me. In these many small decisions and moments, I am building a life that is big and beautiful, for me and for Will. Your brother will always be with you: While my brother is physically gone, I have come to believe that he is always there in the most powerful and profound way. In a person walking by that looks like, or sounds like, him. In a middle name of someone I’ve just met. In a sunset that takes over the sky. In a song we liked that comes on in a café. It reminds me that he is watching over me, wherever he is. I like to think of these moments as a sign from him that I’m going in the right direction. That I am where I should be. I see him everywhere if I keep my eyes open. And you will always be his sister: Where there is deep grief, there was great love. Loving Will and being his sister was, and continues to be, the greatest privilege of my life. I would have done anything to carry his pain, to have made his life easier to live. But I am forever grateful for the miracle that he existed. Our love for each other lives on in me and in the people that held me when he died. It lives on in these words, it lives on every time that I think of him, it’s there every time I say his name. He will be with me until my last breath. In the words of Helen Keller: ‘What we have once enjoyed we can never lose. All that we love deeply becomes a part of us.’