I can’t think of a more important story to read than a real life example of why we should choose to stay. Why we should choose to help others, and help ourselves. No wife should have to bury her husband, and then her child soon after, both because of suicide. No brother should have to see his father, and soon after his older brother buried because of suicide. 💔 This shouldn’t happen. There is help available, please get help. There are ways to educate your children, your spouse, yourself, about mental illness, so you can help those you love and help yourself. Please don’t dismiss the reality of mental illness. It’s real, it’s painful, those who live with it need need our help, our love, our patience, our support. If you are one of those who lives with a mental illness, you are loved and wanted by more people than you know – – please read this [brave] grieving mother, and wife’s story and let yourself be reminded that it’s a better choice to stay. Please take it just one day at a time. Please choose to speak out and reach out for help 💚
This is the mother’s [Leanne Payne Tressler] story:
“I tried to post at six weeks. I couldn’t. I tried to post on his would be 17th birthday. I couldn’t. I tried to post at the 3 month mark. I couldn’t. My post simply would have read: “Pain” These two moments in time depicted here were intimate moments of grief. Loss of this magnitude and suicide have effects that etch into the souls of those who live to tell the tale. The first shows a 13 year old boy who became an old man overnight, at a balloon release at his father’s graveside service. A boy who would never be the same, who tried everything in his young boy heart to fix for his family what his dad’s death broke. A responsibility that wasn’t his but he felt it nonetheless. The more he felt he failed at that, the more into himself he withdrew. He masked the real, raw pain and put forth the best parts of him for everyone to see. That good stuff was absolutely real, he truly was that cool….But he hid the ugly painful stuff. He felt suffocating pressure that death of a father imposed on him to be a man before he was ready. Parents, please don’t leave by choice. Don’t push 20 years of aging onto your children in an instant. Let them be children. My kids are still kids, but their souls have aged rapidly since then.
The next photo is of a 9 year old boy looking at the casket that holds the body of my boy from the first picture, his older and only brother. The second time in his life he’s taken in this scene, the 1st time as a 5 year old when his dad died. The second time to sit in those chairs, the second time to witness the body of his hero be carried by somber men to a deep hole in the ground. The thoughts that must have been in his head at that moment. A boy that feels abandoned by the 2 males that mattered most in life. A boy that has to work out the puzzle of having 2 heroes that he wants nothing more than to grow up and be exactly like, but to somehow not choose suicide when life gets unbelievably hard like they’ve done. A boy who feels left behind by his dad and only brother.
I have much to say about the struggles my husband and son endured and what I feel attributed to their desperate decision to stop the pain. I have much to say about how those who hurt can be better helped by those who don’t hurt…as much. I have much to say on the topic of widowhood, legit single parenthood, singlehood, religion, children in grief, bereavement, support for those who grieve, loss, suicide, teens who struggle, love, and God. I have learned many things in the last 10 years, most of those lessons have come at astronomical prices. But today I say this:
The pain you feel will be passed on. It does not leave with you. As the pain Spencer was hoping to leave behind was passed to Kaden, the pain that Kaden succumbed to is now passed to Nate. It passed to all of us who love Spencer and Kaden, but that lineage of pain between father to oldest son to youngest son is the most acute. Please remember that when you contemplate your options on how to deal with the pain. You are only imprinting the pain on those who love you. Please, find another way. Know that those who love you will literally hurt until they join you in the next life. They will carry the torch of that pain that won’t stop. Please get help. Please stay. Please enlist the support of those who would rather work through a hard life with you (you are NOT a burden!) than bury you. To bury a husband was hell, multiple times over….but to bury a child, that was to bury a huge part of myself. It’s like nothing I have ever felt, heard, or witnessed. Now, when I can actually go to the cemetery again to stand over my two guys, I stand over a piece of myself that is inextricably linked with my boy that is buried on the the right…right alongside his dad on the left. I will turn away and pick up my torch that the kids and I now have to carry. That we have no choice but to carry. It’s the price we all pay to love someone, the price I must now pay to have been his wife and his mother. I will pay that price, it was worth it. But please….don’t hand off that torch to your loved ones…please stay. Find a way. Speak. Release it. Pull it from the dark and get it into the light. Do it today. Spare your family from the torch of pain. You are fiercely loved, you are desperately wanted, in all your brokenness. Truthfully, we are all broken in some way, no one is immune….it’s part of being human. Instead of handing that torch off, raise your voice that you can’t carry your torch alone…I promise someone will heed your call for help. Don’t set it down for your mother or son or daughter or father or wife or husband or grandparents to pick up. It’s yours to carry, but others can and will help you do it. Dig deep and STAY ♥️ 24hrs a day, suicide prevention hotline….1-800-273-8255″
