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.

They are not sure they have a good enough reason to be there. They are managing. They are getting things done. From the outside, nothing looks broken. They are the person other people lean on, the one who holds it together, the one who holds it together even in the middle of their own grief, still fielding everyone else's.

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.