to love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it
and everything you’ve held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat
thickening the air, heavy as water
more fit for gills than lungs;
when grief weights you like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief,
you think, How can a body withstand this?
Then you hold life like a face
between your palms, a plain face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again.

~ ellen bass

 

I lost my sister Sarah to suicide on April 1, 2014, after watching her battle a drug addiction for years. Heroin was her ultimate downfall; she died 17 days before my wedding day. In the eulogy I wrote for her, I promised to share her story with the world in the hopes that "someone else's Sarah" would gain some strength from our loss; that someone, somewhere, would end up wearing my sister's story as their own medal of valor, and their loved ones wouldn't find themselves standing at their funeral trying to remember how to breathe.

The following December I started writing blogs for a treatment center down in Florida, and in the span of a year over 60,000 people read Sarah's story. Countless people reached out to me, thanking me for the honesty behind my words.

What they didn't know was that those messages kept me going, every single day. On those days when my grief threatened to swallow me whole, I held on to those words and they brought me back into the light.

I had to take a break from all of this when I was pregnant with our daughter - I was drowning in everyone else's grief and I needed to step away. I need to get back to writing, though. I know this much to be true.

So here I am, keeping my promise, trying to honor the spirit of a girl with a heart as big as the world and a smile to match and questioning if I'll ever be able to do her story any justice.

Here I am, four years later, still battling the "what ifs" and searching for silver linings since she's not here to find them for me.

Here I am, watching our little lionhearted daughter navigate the world carrying so much of Sarah's spirit in her tiny little body that it hurts to look at her sometimes.

Here I am, full of loss but still so full of hope for so many other Sarah's I've come to know and love.

Here I am.

This page is a work in progress. As of now, it will consist solely of the parts of our story I've already written. Down the road, though, I plan on inviting other Sarahs and their loved ones to share their words here, too. Stories of hope and recovery will be mixed in with stories of loss. I want this page to be a source of strength for those who need a reminder to keep swimming, a source of comfort for those who have found themselves in the face of a seemingly unsurmountable loss, a source of education for those who seek to learn about the disease of addiction, and most of all, a source of hope for everyone who takes the time to read what is written.

Above all, I hope I make her proud.

Dum Spiro Spero.

Where there is breath, there is hope.

~ Munchie Morgan Clement