21 and Emotionally Numb
A Reflection on Losing a Friend to Suicide
Writers Note: This wasn’t what I planned to write about today, but when I started typing, this is what came out. So, please be gentle. It’s been a long time since I’ve opened the box containing these feelings.
If i could write letters to my younger selves, the one I’d write today I’d postmark for Des Moines, IA and I’d mail it in April, 2008, just a few weeks shy of my 22nd birthday and college graduation.
I had just experienced a heartbreakingly real dose of trauma as one of my sorority sisters died by suicide in the house we lived in, while we were asleep. As a senior and one of the first people on scene, I garnered a huge responsibility for others that day. We as a collective were asked to do three things:
First, don’t leave the house. It has to be thoroughly searched first.
Second, do everything you can to get the younger girls here.
Even if they are in classes or meetings or internships or at work. Please don’t tell them why they need to come right now, please tell them they’ll be excused from whatever it is once this moment passes, and please, please ask them to come down the back alley and in through the kitchen door. We don’t want them to see the ambulance or the police cars.
Third, please wait. Please don’t ask questions.
We’ll relay all of the information we can once the investigation is complete.
Do you know how many phone calls I made that morning?
I’d have to guess it’d be in the range of 45-50. Do you know how many times I had to repeat in as minimal detail as possible what so many now know, and how hard it was to sit in speculation, trying to put the pieces together, knowing that upstairs the police had to rule out homicide before they could rule it a suicide, and then, then they couldn’t reach her parents. We were frozen in time until that phone call was completed.
I sat in the kitchen at our sorority house for something like 11 hours that day, and sometimes I think having had the skill of dissociation practiced like a well used muscle served me best that day.
That night, her parents drove up to school. It took them an hour and a half, and I kept thinking it was such a great gesture. They were so numb. There’d apparently been prior attempts, but they couldn’t hide their surprise that it had actually been successful. I felt more broken then they seemed.
That night, I fielded calls from alumnae and advisors, everyone looking to check in, some offering to send or bring anything we needed, and honestly, each one aching to hear the details. It wasn’t about gossip. Or at least it doesn’t feel like it was. It felt like a lot of girls, spanning ages of 18-30, who knew this girl, who knew us, who were part of our house, our sisterhood, and like us, they were desperately just trying to understand.
For days and even weeks after our hearts were broken, I learned three things about myself when my feelings don’t have enough words:
I do not sleep well, and at first, i could not sleep at all in that house. The first few nights afterwards, I shared a bunk bed in the dorms with a sophomore who was emotionally intelligent beyond her years.
I cannot eat. Not even ice cream. There is no desire, and no space inside of me for it to go.
My stomach goes rogue. Note, this was 8 full years before I was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease, so the only frame of reference I had was that stress and grief couldn’t keep me out of the bathroom.
5 days later, nearly 60 of us got on a bus that brought us from Des Moines to Cedar Rapids, where we hugged her parents, held hands as we cried so hard our bodies shook, and gently, in the rain, scooped dirt onto the top of her casket.
If I could time it right, the letter I’d send myself would arrive within days of that trip.
April 18, 2008
Dear Amanda,
I know you’re not okay. I know that you feel like you have to put on a brave face, but it’s okay to be authentically heartbroken too. You don’t have to censor your feelings. Not with these girls. The last ten days have hurt you in a brand new way, and it’s okay to not always have the words, to not have the energy, to be talked out. Anything you feel right now is okay.
Let me repeat that.
Anything you feel right now is okay.
I hope you believe me.
You’re going to spend these last few weeks of school relying on friends two years younger and several years less mature, and that’s okay. It’s only three weeks worth of time. It’s okay to ask for what you need. I know that’s never been your forte, I know you’ve never felt comfortable in that realm, but today I’m promising you that it’s okay. I’m promising you that you absolutely need every hug, every physical touch, every blanket, every tanning session, every trip to QT - you need it all. Make the memories before you graduate so this isn’t the first thing in your mind when you drive away in May.
The house feels off. Maybe even unsafe. But I will promise you that when you return to your bed for the last few weeks of school, this is the exact place you should be. The only people who can truly help are the ones who are living this beside you in real time. And that house, looking back, still holds my favorite memories. I promise you don’t lose that sense of home or sisterhood or love.
Every away message, every vague facebook post about Theta Love being enough to survive - it’s the truth and you know it. Please don’t feel the need to justify to anyone internal or external how you navigate this. Grieve out loud. Grieve vaguely. Grieve in specifics. Grieve however you need. And know that this is just one season. The first year will hurt the most, and then overtime the heartbreak turns to heartache which turns into something manageable as you experience more pain both in your heart and in your body.
Don’t think about that now.
Just know - this is amongst the variables that change you.
You couldn’t have done anything differently, anything more. I promise you. You don’t believe this today, and thats okay. But I promise you at 26 and again at 38 you’ll learn that depression tells lies. And those lies are far scarier than the truth. You couldn’t have saved her, because she didn’t consent to be saved. That’s why it was a secret. Why nobody saw her in the kitchen the whole week prior. That’s why she went to sleep for the last time in the guest room and not in the bunk beneath her roommate. It’s why there was no note. There was no ability for her to explain. I understand that now, in a way I wish I never could - but I can.
Please, try to remember even in your grief that it’s okay to feel other things. Fear and sadness, joy and celebration. Go to Senior Bartending night. Don’t cancel the RLD Booze Cruise. Bring extra tissues to Senior Sendoff and to Wills. Be yourself. Thats all anyone needs you to do right now.
I so admire your tenacity. Your perseverance. Your compassion. And your empathy. I know you hurt for yourself and for others, and I know that without a reference guide, you do a pretty damn good job of navigating it alone.
When you find To Write Love on Her Arms, lean in. Jamie’s blog has words in that will ironically carry you through all of the hard and all of the good that you find going forward. And more interestingly, this moment, this organization, this blog - it’s how you’ll meet your husband just six years down the road.
Sweet girl, my heart breaks for you right now, and I know you’ll hate hearing that. So let me try this one (as an adult I prefer it a hell of lot more) - I am heartbroken with and for you.
Yes, this moment has changed you.
Yes this season will be seared into your brain.
Yes, every year on April 10th for as long as your alive you will think of her smile. Of the best moments. Of the what could’ve beens.
I promise you that you’ll not just remember but want to reach out to her parents every year on her birthday and the anniversary of her death, and you’ll remind them that you haven’t and that you won’t forget their daughter. Next summer, they’ll meet you in Chicago as you walk 20 miles from Dusk to Dawn with the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention alongside two of your closest sisters. You’ll raise nearly $5,000 for research and training and prevention. You’ll make a difference in her memory.
And when it comes time to leave Des Moines, it’ll be okay that you’re not ready to come home. There will be a place to stay, people to take care of you, and space for your grief which inexplicably expands when you’re outside of the bubble.
Remember this -
“You are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.
But the most important thing is, even if {it feels like} we’re apart…I’ll always be with you.”
I’m writing to you from 17.5 years ahead, where I have to be honest. This isn’t the hardest thing you’ll ever survive. In fact, painfully noted, it’s not even in the top five. But that doesn’t mean right now that it doesn’t feel like the center of your universe imploded, because well, it did.
Burying Brett four years ago and Lauren the year prior taught you about love and loss. AND, in those different circumstances you gave yourself more permission to fall apart at the seams.
I hate to break it to you, sweet girl, but your seems aren’t sewn up so tight. Theres so much thats going to come spilling out once you process this all. And, I can also promise you this - you’re going to survive. You’re going to be okay, at least from where I stand today.
You still have the whole world in front of you.
Always,
A
December 19, 2024
Writers Note:
If you or anyone you know is struggling with depression or suicidal ideations, please utilize these incredible resources:
Crisis Textline or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a volunteer crisis counselor.
National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), call or text 988 (The National Suicide and Crisis Hotline.