I will survive today. Some days that is enough.
A murder-suicide occurs about twice a day in the United States. For every incident it has been calculated that 12 people are affected as survivors. For those of us closest to the loss, it feels very lonely.
One of the hardest parts of surviving two losses in my family was getting through the day. I quit my job. I could barely sleep for nightmares kept me awake, and if I did sleep waking up felt like a punch when reality hit me – they are dead.
The most helpful thing my friends did was to bring food and spend some time sitting with me and listening to whatever I needed to talk about. People called to check in on me, which was wonderful until the calls stopped because life goes on for everyone else.
A hard day for me was a day I called a friend needing to talk about some discoveries from the medical examiner. I wish I had known about this group before I made that call. I wish I hadn’t felt the need to burden my friend with details that she could not handle hearing. But I needed to say them out loud, and I needed someone else to know. I needed someone else to hold space for me so I wouldn’t ruminate about the findings all night.
Some days went by in a blur of sunrises to sunsets viewed from the top of a cliff on a nearby beach. Other days I had things to do, things to get through, the stuff that comes after a surprise death - the cleaning and organizing and making plans. Many days I knitted while watching old episodes of Survivor and let my mind focus on knit-purl-knit-purl.
I couldn’t keep working, my job was one of calm, compassion, and caring for others. I had to focus all of my caring attention inward. I ordered in and used meal services for months because I needed to be nourished but had trouble finding the desire to cook.
I lost a fetus about a month after my losses. At the six week scan she was there and growing, but by eight weeks she had stopped growing, her proto-heart cells were no longer active. I spent another week crying, my knitting lay in a pile under the coffee table.
There was little the community could do to help me. We had a community meeting with a social worker, but I was never offered help from the state as a victim of a crime. If it hadn’t been for friends who cleaned up after the police were done, I would have had to clean up a crime scene myself. I was lucky to have been seeing a therapist for several years before my losses, so I continued getting support from her.
I found my way to get through each day was to have something positive to think about. I had been in the midst of IVF; my miscarried baby had been a result of an embryo transfer. So I decided to let my body heal and try again. For months I did what I could to get through each day, to stay healthy so that I could transfer another embryo. Hope kept me going. And then it worked, and I was pregnant again, so I remained hopeful that something good would come. And then she arrived and I continued having a reason to be hopeful that every day would come, and then I would go to bed and get to do it all again the next day.
For some people a murder-suicide is the reason they lost a child. It is not lost on me that my reason for getting through the days is unique to me. Survivors do find their reasons. We find our things that help us get up, face the day, and sleep again – be they trivial or not. In the early days I also look forward to the support groups, to a place where I could talk about my days, and my feelings about my losses, in a way I couldn’t during the time between meetings.
What gets you through the day?
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