This post has been in my head for weeks now. I've rewritten it a dozen or so times. There was even one time where I pushed the button to post it, then quickly took it back. Today I feel a bit braver.
It's been 208 days since my cousin Josh took his life. I count in my head--adding one more tally to each morning. I think to myself, "Will there be a day that I stop counting? Do I want to stop counting?" Josh seemed to be in my head 24/7. "Why didn't you reach out? Could I have done anything? What will life look like without you? Will my family ever recover? Will they ever be happy again? I miss you."
I feared that someone else in my family might hurt themselves. That I couldn't go too far away "just in case". And when my first long distance trip after his death approached, I was paralyzed. I couldn't move. For a moment I stopped living.
And this is not even a 1,000th of what his brothers, sisters, and parents are going through, I'm sure.
denial, anger, sadness, blaming... those shitty steps happen all the while normal life continues.
But something this summer stuck with me. I had a friend say this:
Often we hear that the opposite of light is dark. And we start to believe that light and dark are equal in power. Like if you mix white paint with black paint, you'd get gray. Both black and white paint being equal opposites to each other would create a new medium blend between the two--gray. But Dark is not the equal opposite to light. Darkness is just the absence of light. If you mix the two, light always wins.
Light always wins.
I forget that. And sometimes I think I come from a family that forgets that too. We have tunnel vision.
I needed to sit in darkness for a bit this past summer. To answer hard questions like, Is life really good? To grieve the loss of Josh. But sometimes when we sit there, we forget about light. We forget that it exists and think the dark is all there is.
Light always wins.
And today I take rest in this: a tiny candle sitting near my window in remembrance of Joshua Christian O'Reilly on World Suicide Prevention Day lighting my tunnel.
