Somehow, I had a deep “knowing” when my mother decided to end her life. I remember talking with my therapist about how I couldn’t reach my mother to tell her that her mother, my grandmother, had died. We discussed my fear that something was wrong, and my therapist asked what the worst thing could be.
I said, “That she took her life.”
My grief for my grandmother was instantly drowned out by panic about my mom. I couldn’t reach her and I lay awake imagining every possibility. Even with that deep “knowing,” I still pictured her alive and answering the door. That gap between what I sensed and what I hoped was where the grief began, long before the truth arrived.
In the months that followed, I felt like a boat left at sea, waves of anger, confusion, sorrow, guilt, and disbelief all tangled together. In one week I’d lost half of my family. I’d lost the matriarchs to whom I attributed all my resilience, fire, and strong disposition. I replayed every conversation with my mother… the last time I saw her, the last time we touched, the last phone call. I was searching for the moment I could have changed what happened.
Suicide carries both the ache of absence and the burden of “why.”
It forces us to live with a story that will never be complete, one I still know well 21 years later.
I no longer feel lost at sea. Over time, I became grounded through a winding road of healing. There are still moments when I feel the emptiness of not having my mother in my life, especially now that I am a mother myself. The turning point for me was my refusal to live in the shadows as a suicide loss survivor. This refusal gave me a voice in my grief, allowed me the opportunity to honor the life of my mother, empowered me to speak out against stigma, and allowed me to support fellow survivors through my work as a therapist. The moments I once feared would sink me eventually became the very moments that feel like wind in my sail.
Finding purpose after suicide loss was never about making sense of tragedy. It was about learning to live alongside it, to stay present, and to speak truth to my pain so others might feel less alone.
There is a saying, “healing doesn’t happen in a straight line” and if you’re on that messy, uneven stretch right now, I want you to know this: you don’t have to understand, forgive, or move on. Some days, getting out of bed is enough. Other days, you might feel a flicker of hope and wonder if that means you are forgetting. You are not. Healing has no timeline and does not mean leaving your loved one behind. It means finding new ways to carry their memory with tenderness instead of pain, allowing love and loss to evolve into something that sustains you instead of breaking you.
Grief will always be part of my story, but it does not define my whole life. I have learned to hold both sorrow and joy, loss and love. My mother’s story ended too soon, but mine continues, shaped by her life, not just her death. In that continuation, I find meaning. I see it in my son, whose smile is just like hers, a living reminder of what was and of what can still be.
To my fellow survivors, I offer this simple truth: your pain is real and deserves gentleness. Healing is not forgetting, it is remembering differently. And with time, the weight becomes more familiar. You learn to carry it and still move toward the light.
About the author
Michelle Parrella is a therapist, mom of twins, a worldwide traveler and suicide loss survivor. She works to dismantle stigma, normalize suicide grief and offer survivors a place to be seen and supported.
