I don’t think any words can really describe my grief.  In a ten year span I lost my Dad, my sister Erin, and my mother (my song, my light, my rock).  I lost me.  With each death a part of me died too.  Honestly, for the longest time I really felt dead.  I didn’t know how to recreate myself.  My sorrow, fear and anxiety have been overwhelming.  The nightmares lasted for years and they were always the same, Dad and Erin falling and me waking up completely drenched in sweat.  The endless turmoil that had become my fate was slowly taking over my life leaving me feeling like an empty shell.  This kind of misery takes no prisoner’s. It shuts you down and suffocates you.   I couldn’t bare running into people so I started to build up walls. My walls protected me and gave me some form of control from my otherwise uncontrollable and unquiet mind.  This kind of isolation weighed heavily on my friendships. I was convinced that my friends saw me as a pathetic and damaged person and on the very rare occasion that I actually did go out when they looked at me (I felt) they saw the letter D for death plastered across my forehead.  They weren’t seeing me, they were seeing my suffering.  Mix this with the stigma of suicide, well, I just couldn’t bare it.  I chose to be private in my bereavement and as a result I pushed many of my friends away. Calls went to voicemail and emails went unreturned.  Some of these friendships stood the test of time and some did not.   The stress of these traumatic events has caused me to have an overwhelming fear of more loss.  My marriage has suffered greatly but I’m thankful that Robert loves me deeply and unconditionally.  My children are my salvation. They are my life and they have filled my heart with a joy I wasn’t sure I was capable of feeling again.  It does however remain a struggle for me to not detach myself from the ones I love so much. I am fiercely protective of my family and that has been the one constant, unshakable thing in my life.  Being strong and having an unwavering faith in the face of personal tragedies is not the way of the fainthearted. Borrowed from the kind words of a close friend of my mother’s – I try hard to keep my faith in spite of, and not because of, what life has thrown my way.