Hello dear one. My heart breaks with yours. You are not alone. Welcome to this safe space where you get to do whatever you need to do in order to survive this devastating loss. Here I will talk about the truth of loss and grief. The truth is that your most precious, beautiful, life-filled child has died. Whatever the cause, your love of all loves is gone. After suffering a loss like this, the only direction to go is down, down, down into the most overwhelming darkness. Hold my hand. Hold the hand of your beautiful child. Hold onto whatever you can.

In my traumatic grief journey, the most important resource I found were other bereaved parents who had also sat in this darkness. The moments that sustained me were when they sat with me and spoke about the darkness and also the possibility of light. The only reason I believed that light could one day return was because they were intimately familiar with the darkness. Being with the truth of the pain, anguish, rage, confusion, and despair of the death of my child by suicide has allowed what feels like a miracle to occur. I am now also in touch with the capacity for gratitude, compassion, joy, love, and pleasure in a way that I did not fully know before the death of my child. The grief and pain that lives and moves in my body carved out a space in me that can hold a wider range of feeling that includes the capacity to experience an exquisite joy, that exists not in spite of my grief but because of my grief.

Artist, musician and bereaved parent Nick Cave so beautifully puts it this way: “Wonders such as these are eternal reminders of the terrifying counter-intuitive truth that grief is not the end of things but rather the dark substrate from which great things can emerge.”

I hope you find solace in knowing I share your grief and have found some relief and meaning-making through my creative process and deep dive into the underworld. May my art, writing, offerings, and resources give you comfort and companionship on your journey.

With deep love and compassion,

Monique