Finding Closure

Five years of grieving and counting

Five years ago today, my son Lucas killed himself. Naturally, this has traditionally been a challenging time of the year for me. Maybe not specifically the anniversary, but the time around late February to Lucas’s birthday in mid-March. While last year was particularly bad, I have been unusually steady this year. Because I have the week off for Lunar New Year Break, it feels like any other day off. I’m wondering if this means I’m “cured,” and if so, how it came about.

Over the past five years, the act of writing has been the biggest contributing factor with helping to create a more positive mental state. It truly has been therapy for me. I wrote the first of what I’ve published here hours after his death and have been writing steadily since then.

Eventually, I realized that many of the passages weren’t finished. I hadn’t come to a conclusion so mentally and personally, I hadn’t found closure. I decided to commit myself to completing my thoughts. Committing to having whole essays forced me to examine my thoughts more closely and come to conclusions that I may not have without pushing into difficult territory. It’s easy to have a thought, but not always easy to come to terms with the contradictions or uncomfortable truths that arise when following it to its logical conclusion. In attempting to rectify these issues, I often had to self-examine my thinking closely.

I have been writing since the day Lucas died, but what turned things around for me over the past year? At some point, I had the realization that I couldn’t change the past and that the future was ahead of me to do as I pleased. I became better at recognizing negative thought patterns, rhythms in my daily life, and patterns in my actions then learned how to head them off. I got better at preventing bad moods through regulating my sleep and through changing procrastination habits. I’ve learned to set boundaries on what I’m willing to do, more with myself than with other people.

Last May was about the point when I was running out of things to say about Lucas’s death. When I first started writing, I had to limit myself to publishing only twice a week. By May, I was realizing that I wouldn’t be able to keep up that schedule for much longer. I was still inspired to put down ideas and philosophies such as thinking about what it means to be content or even to stop punishing myself with the same regrets over and over. All of this has led to examining my life through a healthier lens.

So many ideas came about with my riverside rides, whether it was fleshing them out through conversation with friends or on my own in my own head. While my writing and publishing has been an exercise for myself, I appreciate the positive feedback from others who have lost a loved one. People have told me how much my writing has meant to them, a side effect that I did not anticipate when I initially began sharing my thoughts publicly.

I don’t want to give the impression that I have everything in my life sorted out. I still have bouts of intense sadness and feel down at some point on a daily basis. I get disproportionately angry at small things. With that in mind, I am worlds more confident and happy than I was even a year ago.

One thing I can say for sure that I have gotten better at is in acceptance, mainly with the acceptance of Lucas’s death, but in other aspects of my life. Learning what I can control and I can’t has been a big deal for me. Ticking chores off my to-do list is a way to be less anxious about the things that I can control.

Prioritizing the things in my life that hold value to me has led to happier outcomes. I have been noticing people around me putting too much energy into things that they clearly do not value. At the same time, I have seen friends walk away from enviable situations when they recognise that they are straying from where they want to be.

I am far from done reflecting on Lucas’s death, yet I feel like the worst is over. I want to remain cautiously optimistic because I’ve thought that before. However, if I can get through this, the worst time of the year, and still feel good for as long as I have, I think that it is reasonable to expect this to continue.

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