Grief does not follow a schedule. Most people who have lost someone know this in theory and then find themselves surprised, months or years later, that they are not further along than they are. That the loss still hits without warning.

I put this together because I know what it is to search for something, any research, any evidence that what you are experiencing has a name, in the aftermath of a suicide loss. The statistics here represent real people and the families they left behind.

You have had this argument before. The same shape, the same ending, the same feeling of having gotten nowhere despite both of you trying.

I first came across this concept in Brené Brown's book Rising Strong. She tells a story about the day her mother collapsed and was rushed to hospital.

I am an eldest daughter. I have been over-functioning since I was a kid. I did not have a name for it for most of my life. I just knew that I was the one who noticed things, managed things, held things together.

You have probably heard some version of the following: grief takes about a year. Or that it comes in five stages. Or that time heals all wounds, and that if you are still struggling after a certain point, something has gone wrong with you.

Most people who say the wrong thing after a suicide loss are not unkind. They are scared. They do not know what to do with a grief this particular and they are terrified of making it worse, so they reach for the nearest thing that sounds like comfort.

There is a particular kind of person who comes to therapy and apologizes on the way in.

I have lost people in a lot of different ways. I know what it is to sit at a bedside. I know what it is to get a phone call that rearranges everything. I know grief that comes with a long warning and grief that arrives without one.

And I know what it is to lose someone to suicide. Three times.

I help women who hold everyone else return to themselves.

This is the moment I learned to be held.

I was taught not to cry.

Motherhood broke me, but not all at once. It happened in the silence and the self-sacrifice, until grief finally asked to be named. When I let myself mourn what was lost, peace returned and joy cracked free. The journey is no longer self-sacrifice. It is self-honouring.

I lost 3 family members to suicide.

And so many loved ones.

I thought I knew grief.

But I didn’t.

Last week, I sat in the woods by myself for 7 days.

No kid

No husband

Ten years ago, on a mountain top in Ireland I saw the most incredible rainbow.

And for the last 10 years, I’ve been unknowingly chasing them.

I came down off that mountain top and learned the language of healing, of self awareness.

Do you see what I see?

I spy a family - people that love each other and got together to play and have fun. Yes – that’s a bouncy castle behind them and in a helicopter hanger of all places.