I want to follow this up and share a little more of what happened with me and my experiences.
I have struggled with mental health for years and have almost taken my life on several occasions, I was always the person who had difficulties, and my brother was this happy incredibly bright young man. He had even started his own business at the age of 15!
No one in my family had any idea he was struggling with mental health issues. Period full stop. He took his own life on an evening in October when we were all at home in the house, even that day there wasn't a single sign, he was totally normal, grabbed some ice cream sometime after dinner and that was the last we saw of him. My mom found him when she went to say goodnight.
I share this because our natural inclination was what did we do wrong? How did we not notice? Were we neglectful etc. It's hard but you cannot allow that to dominate your thinking, because none of those things were true. My brother was a kid who was loved more than anything in the world and had so much to look forward to. He was opening his flagship retail store in a few days and his birthday was a week away. He went Christmas shopping with my mom the morning of.
Now obviously some people knew Jason struggled but at the end of the day, knowing like people did, or not knowing like my family did. Nothing can change what happened as tragic as it is and it is a decision that the individual made, while being influenced by an absolutely horrible illness.
That choice is not something you can take on yourself, the pain and the grief is enough, finding a way to absolve yourself of guilt is incredibly important.
As someone who has nearly taken their own life, and in fact was in many ways saved by my brother, it breaks me to know i never had the chance to return the favour, but i know he didn't mean to hurt anyone and he wouldn't want to inflict pain, much less guilt and all these other emotions on us.
So I hope you can come to a place where you find some amount of peace with what's happened. Life will never be the same again and that's ok, it shouldn't ever be the same. But finding a place of peace where you are free from guilt, while still allowing room for a heavy heart filled with sadness is so so important.
(I've written and rewritten this several times, anything like this is so hard to discuss and talk about and I'm always afraid to say something wrong, but I think this is such an important topic and so I am just sending this message as is, because it doesn't need to be written perfectly to still be impactful