The path to get here.
Posted: Fri Jul 26, 2013 4:26 pm
Hello all. I started looking around the forum earlier in the week and decided it was time for me to put my own story up.
Until recently, I didn't have any sort of issues with depression. I worked as a professional with large amounts of responsibility, volunteered time and resources for others in need, had a pretty good family life, and was working on remodeling my house in my free time.
Then not quite 3 months ago, my little brother was found dead at work. He wasn't even a week past his 28th birthday. I got a phone call at work from my mother and just knew before I said hello something had happened. Most of the rest of the next two days, getting home from work, telling my husband, and getting across the country, is a blur.
It took us several days of fighting with people to have my brother sent home because he was in a different state at the time. The waiting was...something I can't even begin to describe. The service and funeral were beyond what I thought hell would be. He and I were the ones everyone relied on for strength in the past and this time, I was on my own. I heard so many times to be strong for my parents that I literally went outside and started screaming.
Since that door closed on the parlor for the last time, I feel empty inside. Not sad, not angry, simply empty. I went back to my regular life, pasted on the joking smile everyone expected, and felt not a thing. Even when things were going wrong at work, I couldn't make myself care that I didn't care. I would go home and grab a drink, thinking that at least feeling miserable was feeling something, right?
Logically, I know this was a destructive behavior and I'm fighting through that. Haven't touched it in a week.
Grief is a process, I know. But unlike other members of my family, I can't start moving through it. We are still waiting on a coroner's report to know what happened. That's all I find myself thinking about, what happened to my little brother?
So that's where I am, deep in a hole I've never experienced before and with no one I can confide in. Either they don't understand or they're in the grieving process themselves. Not to mention it's humiliating to not be the strong one all of a sudden.
I'm just hoping that this forum and chat rooms will be like a sounding board, just someplace to remind me that I've not been completely abandoned to my own devices.
Until recently, I didn't have any sort of issues with depression. I worked as a professional with large amounts of responsibility, volunteered time and resources for others in need, had a pretty good family life, and was working on remodeling my house in my free time.
Then not quite 3 months ago, my little brother was found dead at work. He wasn't even a week past his 28th birthday. I got a phone call at work from my mother and just knew before I said hello something had happened. Most of the rest of the next two days, getting home from work, telling my husband, and getting across the country, is a blur.
It took us several days of fighting with people to have my brother sent home because he was in a different state at the time. The waiting was...something I can't even begin to describe. The service and funeral were beyond what I thought hell would be. He and I were the ones everyone relied on for strength in the past and this time, I was on my own. I heard so many times to be strong for my parents that I literally went outside and started screaming.
Since that door closed on the parlor for the last time, I feel empty inside. Not sad, not angry, simply empty. I went back to my regular life, pasted on the joking smile everyone expected, and felt not a thing. Even when things were going wrong at work, I couldn't make myself care that I didn't care. I would go home and grab a drink, thinking that at least feeling miserable was feeling something, right?
Logically, I know this was a destructive behavior and I'm fighting through that. Haven't touched it in a week.
Grief is a process, I know. But unlike other members of my family, I can't start moving through it. We are still waiting on a coroner's report to know what happened. That's all I find myself thinking about, what happened to my little brother?
So that's where I am, deep in a hole I've never experienced before and with no one I can confide in. Either they don't understand or they're in the grieving process themselves. Not to mention it's humiliating to not be the strong one all of a sudden.
I'm just hoping that this forum and chat rooms will be like a sounding board, just someplace to remind me that I've not been completely abandoned to my own devices.