Chastity Werner > Recent Status Updates

Lines are drawn, but then they fade. For her I bend, for you I break.

It’s widely acknowledged among those who grieve that the second year is often worse than the first. The first year, you’re trying to adjust to the newness of the suffering, and to get through the days. It’s the second year that you realize you’ve lost sight of the shoreline. There’s nothing but emptiness ahead & behind, a vast loneliness stretching out as far as you can see. This, you realize, is permanent

Suicidal thought is a symptom of illness, of something else wrong. Most suicides are not impulsive, spur of the moment decisions at all. Instead, most of these deaths are the result of a person losing a long and painful battle against their own impaired thinking. A suicidal person is someone who is unable to tolerate their suffering any longer.

Every time I disinfected a surface or laundered a hamper of dirty clothes, I was destroying traces he had left behind. The idea of erasing him broke my heart, and I worried that with every emptied wastebasket I was loosing opportunities to understand the last hours of his life.

For the first time I truly understood how ‘heartbroken’ had come to describe a sensation is terrible, terrible grief. The pain was actual, physical, as if my heart had been smashed to jagged fragments in my chest. ‘Heartbroken’ was no longer a metaphor, but a description.

It seemed possible, looking back on it as an adult, that some part or her mother had slipped under the Earth with her father, never to resurface.