After a suicide attempt last year, I was enrolled in a partial hospitalization/intensive outpatient program. A girl who was in my program that I had known for a few weeks committed suicide and it wrecked me. I've never personally known anyone that had committed suicide, so it really affected me, especially considering the condition I was in (mentally). I didn't know her for very long obviously and I didn't talk to her that often, but it was still so heartbreaking. It had affected me so strangely, and so differently than any other deaths or difficult experiences I've gone through. I had been suicidal many times and just to know someone who actually went through with it and succeeded (she had tried multiple times) completely shook me up. At the time I felt very sad but at the same time jealous. When you're depressed and you see someone else who is and who actually takes their life, it makes you jealous that they had the courage or the willpower to actually do it and be done with it all. I was jealous that she got out and I was still stuck.

The concept of death is very strange to me. The idea that you can see and talk to a person one day, and the next day they're no longer living just perplexes me. I couldn't handle the fact that I had JUST seen her the day before and less than 24 hours later she was dead. I felt a great sense of guilt that I could have done something to save her. I would have done anything had I known that she was seriously considering taking her life again. I know it was not my fault, I was not responsible for her death, and there was essentially no way I could have prevented it from happening, but I still felt guilty. I still feel hints of guilt now, but not as much as I used to.

As many times as I'd been suicidal, actually knowing someone who went through with it changed my perspective completely. Fantasizing and yearning for death seemed so ridiculous now.

It's been over a year (mid-october) and I still think about her every day. I still cry from time to time. I still feel the heartache and weight of her death on my shoulders. You'd think I'd be over it by now; it's not like we were best friends or anything or like I had known her for a long time. It has gotten more bearable to think about over the past year, but it's still there, you know? Does the grieving ever really end? Or is it something that you just accept and carry with you forever?