“The Lord is close to the broken hearted and to those whose spirits have been crushed.” Psalm 34:18

No scripture has ever landed so hard in my life than this one. I have known the bitter metallic taste on my tongue from the bloody bile of the sickness of a having a crushed soul. In reading this, even in a forsaken and isolated state, this was the only real comfort that I have truly known.

He is with me.

The God of the universe isn’t afraid of my broken state, He is present, He comforts me and He is fully aware that my soul was crushed.

I wanted to talk about survivors guilt because it is something that I didn’t know how to process, that I felt the inclination to hide in shame, to internalize it and live with like I had sent myself to death row. I had never experienced it before. I had never been shown what to do but automatically negatively coped. I had never met anyone else who dealt with it. I didn’t have automatic emotional insight. I didn’t know how to cope let alone live with it.

If you know someone or are that someone that struggles with this, this one’s for you.

Survivor’s guilt to the grieving soul is like trying to perform a resurrection to the dead.

Once we lose someone to suicide, the response is often guilt. Not only that but it resounds the loudest for some. The punitive nature of guilt works like a weaponized emotional trap that isolates.

It strips away self worth like a victim being ravaged, like a casualty of war.

It’s a complicated mind game as it activates the memory of every single instance that we were ignorant of before and then turns it into severe regret.

“I should have known.”

“Why didn’t I see the signs?”

“Why didn’t I say something?”

“Why couldn’t I save them?”

We replay interactions, conversations and constantly feel that frustrated impossibility that we somehow can go back in time and change it. Even though we can’t.

The lie is. that if you ruminate on this enough it will punish you for your “failure” but also somehow help with the guilt and at the same time will tell you that you did not save the person you love; it is a torture tactic to tear down the love of God. The truth is that the love that He already has for us and always will and can never be removed, no matter what, nothing will change that.

“³⁸ For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons,^[a] neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, ³⁹ neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Romans 8:38-39

I know I wrestled with the belief that I was not loved by God after what happened. The thoughts I had were laced with harsh questions like: “How could God possibly love you, when you failed your nephew so badly?”

The blame of his death came in the dark, in the middle of my most vulnerable state, my swollen eyes that couldn’t cry anymore, to my soul that felt drained. No person came to me and said that, my family didn’t think that. It just arrived like an unwelcome visitor that refused to leave.

In reference to my existential crisis and suddenly believing that I had fallen out of favor with God, that He no longer loved me-He never said it nor does His word that He would ever stop loving me.

It was just a concept that materialized out of the black.

Honestly, if one of my own kids didn’t believe that I loved them, it would be devastating. But the emotional disconnect is there. It is the grief saturated irrational lie and belief “it should have been me, not him.” because my self worth was shot at that point and that my life felt that it had been reduced down to nothing.

Talk about being kicked when your down.

Where the hell did all of this guilt and shame come from?

Exactly.

Hell.

The truth is nothing will ever bring back my nephew I know that he is safe and doing better than I am, I know he is in heaven. I know nothing will change what happened.

Survivors guilt is real. This is war.

There is an enemy trying to take out as many people as he can. What else is it? That comes to kill, steal and destroy?

I have debated some of the good ones and not for one second did they ever have an answer for the evil that manifests among us. Even when they were subscribed to the atheist channel or just straight up said they were a pagan, they couldn’t explain it. To be honest, to admit something spiritual on that level is to open a door for people who don’t want to believe in God and instead want to be their own god, they don’t want to say there is a devil. Why? Because then they bloody well have to admit there is a God. In order to talk good and evil, archetypes and such, you have to look at all of it.

In all honesty, Christianity is not for the faint of heart. I have heard the arguments for why people choose Atheism, agnosticism and other religions but for me, Christianity is one the harder routes to go. It’s not a crutch and it’s not easy.

It’s not just a bunch of rules and religious bull crap, real Christianity is like brain and heart surgery.

You’re opening yourself up to the God of the universe, the very same one that created it and saying you want to be known.

It’s making a commitment that you are all in and that you answer to Him.

It’s not a religion.

It’s truly being known and embarking on a voyage that’s going to dash your ego and pride on the rocks. It’s going to take all the ugly parts of you and drown them at sea. It’s going to teach you that the Captain of the ship isn’t you, you’re the first mate. And no matter the rough waters, you will not sink this ship;

He won’t let you.

In all actuality, if anything, it’s unnerving to live with nothing but your own mind making all the decisions, answering to no one. Because in this world “follow your heart” is a tossed around like its some kind of great piece of knowledge.

But the truth be told, how can we trust ourselves?

Our world right now is even saying that we can make our truth, to speak our truth. But to what are we measuring it to? I personally would never want to follow my own heart, when trauma enters the picture, how do you trust what may or may not be true? The brain on trauma can’t make informed and healthy decisions. No more than a broken hearted human being with a crushed soul can heal themselves alone.

The harsh reality that I have experienced is survivors guilt. It’s an intruder that forced it’s way into my mind and destroyed what I thought to be true. It took my faith and tore it to shreds. Not that I ever denied God it was that I didn’t understand anymore when that question of “why?” came about. Why couldn’t we save him? Why didn’t we know? Why did this happen?

My nephew, dearly beloved, committed suicide.

Even writing that down, in black and white ink feels so devastatingly final-so hard to accept. It was a shocking tragedy that everyone involved is still mourning and grieving.

I believe on some level we always will be.

“Grief is love with no place to go.”

Death is hard enough, but to see a my teenage nephew get taken out like that turned the volume up on the tragedy to the absolute max. It opened my eyes that there is an invisible spiritual war going on behind the scenes and it’s taking out people left and right.

Why else is abortion the leading cause of death? in 2022 alone 44 million babies were murdered in the womb and that’s just the known amount for that time. Here we are in 2026, what will the death toll be? What kind of evil forces are at work that we aren’t willing to acknowledge this as people?

Even a new statistic is floating about saying1/3 of all GEN-Z’S are already dead because of murder/abortion.

And that suicide seems to be unstoppable, the one thing that makes no sense. That we are designed for survival, to be alive, but there is something so diabolical about the idea of it all.

My nephew, he was amazing. He was charismatic. He never showed anything but love, humor, happiness, kindness, compassion. He never did the typical things, never ran with the wrong crowd, never got into drugs or alcohol. He was a one of the kindest people I have ever met. And even though I saw that he seemed sad or bummed sometimes, he never said a thing. This was no cliched case study. I had never seen anything like it. This never fit the bill or the norm. There was no why.

And it’s in the lack of why that I found a special kind of hell erupted into the aftermath of his life.

None of us ever saw it coming. His parents are amazing, they dearly loved him and would have done anything for him. His family was very close. He never had a mental illness diagnosis, he was vibrant and alive. He had a season where he admitted he was depressed but never that it would end like this. In the day to day he was smiling, cracking jokes and really was the one that we all loved and enjoyed. The one that helped me walk across a parking lot when I was too sick to do it alone.

I went to visit their family for a few months, I was very sick and ended up getting surgery for a malfunctioning gall bladder after nearly starving to death for over two months. I had never known chronic illness so severe. I could hardly walk without help and spent some days unable to do anything but cry from the pain. I had spent so much time there, I spent time with him. There were a thousand moments where we had to talk and not once did he ever say that he was thinking of committing suicide. Not for one second did any of us, as close as we were, none of us ever saw it coming.

I flew home and recovered from my surgery only to get that phone call.

My nephew was dead. He had committed suicide.

I remember the absolute shock. My mind simply could not believe it or accept it. I couldn’t even cry. I had just seen him a few weeks ago. I had just hugged him.

The panic was there, what about my sister, my brother in law, my nieces and my other nephew? What about them? What was to become of their family? How would they survive and live with this? The amount of pain they were in made me so physically sick I couldn’t keep anything down. My central nervous system and my brain felt like it was short circuiting. That this couldn’t be true. It couldn’t. How could he be gone?

I remember the sinking feeling of guilt, when it arrived, it felt like humidity. I couldn’t see it but it was thick and tangible. It seemed to saturate into me. It seemed to absorb into my skin. Into my being. I remember the way that the grief crashed over me like icy frigid waves that crashed hard over my head, the way that I felt submerged, shocked and at the mercy of it. I remember the way that I felt that there was no ground beneath my feet, no shore in sight, I was in some kind of an awful riptide and I had forgotten how to swim.

Blame arrived too. It crawled up and down my skin in shivers. I remember hearing a narrative from a voice that didn’t sound like my own start speaking into my thoughts, I didn’t recognize it.

“This is your fault.”

“You should have saved him.”

“If you hadn’t been so weak, so sick, so selfish, so pathetic, your sister would have had more time with her son.”

“If you had just died then no one would be mourning their son. You should have never gone there to get help. you should have just died. Maybe if you did, he would still be alive.”

“You knew he was sad, you should have done more.”

“You failed him. You failed their family.”

“How many hours did you spend with him and you didn’t know he was thinking about ending his life?”

“You really didn’t love him, you could have helped him but you didn’t.”

“It should have been you.”

Living in guilt is bondage. Nothing seems to matter anymore. It’s like being imprisoned with no way out. The thought of living your life now sounds like you’re betraying them and that you aren’t allowed to enjoy anything anymore, because they’re gone.

You hear all the cliched and honestly stupid things like:

“I guess heaven needed another angel.” Well we don’t turn into angels when we die. Angels are angels. Humans are humans, we don’t turn into one and get “wings.”

“They’re in a better place.” Well yes, they’re in heaven but the tragedy of how they died and the crime scene they left behind was traumatizing and broke me in two, so telling me that really isn’t helpful. With all due respect, to anyone who is well meaning but doesn’t know what to say, please don’t say things that aren’t helpful. Just be present. Just offer comfort. You can’t make it better. Release yourself from that awkward stance of trying to come up with some cliched line.

You even get people that expect you to “get over it”. That think that the bomb that went off in your life is a “suck it up and deal with it” situation. I gave myself permission to cut ties with those people and I don’t miss that garbage.

The reality for me was that I somehow listened to all that noise in my head and it landed because I really would have saved him. I would have stayed up with him all night if he had said something. I would have paid any price to keep him here. I would have done anything. I would have.

But I can’t change anything.

So there was the ugly part.

Here’s the messy healing part.

There were days of so much grief I felt like it would consume me. He was like a son to me. I had days where I couldn’t stop crying and I had to pull over on the side of the road. Wracked in sobs and apologies, talking to him “I’m sorry, Buddy. I’m so sorry.” I wept knowing my sister was experiencing a loss that would never be rivaled by anyone or anything. That I couldn’t take it from her, that I couldn’t change anything.

When you’re a fixer, a problem solver, helplessness feels like a punishment. You can’t do anything. So you feel useless, unworthy. It doesn’t mean it’s true. It’s just how you feel.

I had days where bursting into tears was a thing until there were no tears. The ugly cry, the red eyes. It’s interesting how your normal sense of needs will shut down with severe depression. There was no appetite, to eat. I didn’t even think to drink water. I just….existed. The shell shock, bomb went off, state of being that I had never before known.

We were all so close and happy, we always made do. We were always there for each other. We weren’t perfect but we loved each other. And then losing him it was like someone dropped an atom bomb on our lives and we were all blown apart. When we all crawled across the battle ground, broken and bloody, when the smoke cleared, we were still there, but he was gone, permanently.

Suicide is the unkindest cut of all. Because it is preventable. It is one of those instances that we all look at with guilt, regret, shame, wishful thinking.

Healing is messy because it isn’t instant. There is nothing sudden about it. The incident, the trauma was sudden. But the pain carries on, concurrent with their legacy.

Suicide isn’t just their death, it takes all of us with it on some level.

And if anyone could ever know what aftermath they would leave behind in their wake, they would never succumb to the pain that got them to that point in the first place.

The lie is that “everyone would be better off if I wasn’t here.”

That is a lie from the devil himself.

None of us are better off. We got worse and had to desperately seek the Lord to survive the worst thing that we could have ever imagined.

Suicide is traumatic. It’s devastating. It’s daily chronic pain on every level.

The years have passed since he died.

But it feels recent, fresh, devastating.

To anyone reading this, being told any of those lies, being pulled toward ending your life, it’s not true. It’s not a solution, even if it seems like it is. It’s not a happy ending. It is the pain we want to end, not our lives. Suicide is a plan to snuff people out in this life.

The truth is that thinking of my nephew, yes I remembered all the good things. I remembered HIM.

But the messy part was the way nothing felt right anymore. The way my own two teenage sons sunk into a deep depression. They felt the weight of the loss of their cousin and it permanently changed them. One of my sons had to get counseling and take medication for over two years. He even told me “Mom I don’t want this pain, I don’t want to be here anymore.” My oldest said, “After losing him, I have never wanted to get attached to anyone again because I might lose them too. Mom, this hurts.”

I thank God that right now, both my boys are healthy and thriving. They were able, we were able, to overcome the deep depression of tragically losing someone we loved, that we will always love.

Death is part of life. But tragedy was never meant to be and it is a trainwreck that changes everyone involved permanently.

The messy part of healing was all the phone calls and visits with my sister that I saw what losing her son looked like. That no sayings or quotes helped. There was no easy answer. There was no one thing.

Time does not heal all wounds. God does.

But He doesn’t do it overnight. The healing is hard. The healing is excruciating. He was present in all of it. He was good throughout it. It was a constant presence, a constant steadiness of being there with peace in the chaos. But day after day, the heavy weight of the loss was there and it wouldn’t be ignored. I can’t count the days that I broke down and cried in the car. The days that I went to bed sobbing with grief. The days that I wasn’t sure my own two sons would pull through. There was not one moment that I told myself “something good will come of this.” I am not one to sugarcoat and I am not one to pretend things are good when they aren’t.

It’s hard to find the silver lining in the clouds beneath the dark shadow of death.

He never left a note.

There were so many moments of ruminating on that fact. Why didn’t he leave us an explanation? Why didn’t he say why? I don’t want to fill in the blanks and honestly the answer wouldn’t undo it or help us understand it any better.

He’s gone. Period.

And that loss was once that in the dark, at night, when I wasn’t as busy, the guilt would come, the shame.

And to this day as I look back on any type of response that I could have had, why that?

No one ever blamed me. I was never one prone to that way of thinking. It honestly feels like, concerning suicide, that there is a shockwave that takes place spiritually. That there is the initial volcanic eruption, then the earthquake with the shock waves that never quite seem to calm down.

And then there is the stuff that can just feel downright resentful if you let bitterness take hold.

The first holiday and holidays without them. The next birthday when they’re dead. There is this forced feeling in an obligatory way of feeling like you have to make good come from nothing. That you have to somehow pick up the pieces of all the shattered things. It is the worst feeling, to be broken, grieving and vulnerable but trying to make everything better.

SIDE NOTE:

If you are grieving, I would love to encourage you to not force yourself to do anything. That you would have the grace and mercy to love yourself in the aftermath. That you wouldn’t feel any pressure to rush through this part. The truth is, if you see someone physically suffering a deep wound, you would get them medical care. You would do anything to help them. Don’t forget internal wounds of the heart, the mind and the soul are in this same nature. They need healing too. You have the permission to heal.

The messy part of grief is the way that we can try to make everything better, to move on, to trudge through. But the truth is, it’s okay not to be okay. This means that you can accept exactly where you are at and not pressure yourself to grieve any type of way. Contrary to popular belief there is no right way to do this thing.

I spent days, hours, minutes, all of it suffering in silence. I had been taught over the course of my lifetime, two things by everyone around me. Either “suck it up and deal with it” or “heal pretty.” And what does that mean? Weakness is not allowed, stay positive, don’t cry in public, be stoic, be strong, move on, don’t for any moment think it’s okay to feel the feelings, get over it.

There were days of anger. There were moments of resentment.

My family always sought to serve God and worked in ministry, sacrificed for others, prayed, read their bibles, gave so much in the name of helping people to know Jesus, to share the Bible. And in the midst of all that serving came the most horrific of tragedies. A bright, wonderful, young man that loved so greatly, fallen. So to be quite frank, why?

There is no pretty lesson that comes from this. No, not even real Christians that you would love to know are spared trials and tribulations. But we are also told ahead of time in the Bible.

Isaiah 43:2 (NIV): “When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; when you pass through the rivers, they will not overwhelm you. When you walk through fire, you will not be burned; the flames will not set you ablaze.”

He never said we wouldn’t suffer, but He did promise to be with us through it. No it’s not some kind of consolation prize and no it doesn’t make everything better, but it’s truth. We are not alone.

I will admit, at my lowest nothing anyone was going to say was going to make one bit of difference.

It reminded me of having a big open gaping wound and when well-meaning people came by trying to say something they thought was helpful, like dumping peroxide onto it which we all know burns but feels like it kind of helps but all you feel is the pain.

Healing isn’t overnight. There is no instant gratification.

Losing someone you loved deeply is the ultimate disruption to everything. It changes you.

You will never be the same.

And to this day, the pain is there. It’s not as pronounced. It’s not open or festering. It’s not bleeding out. It has been stitched up but it’s still healing.

I remember thinking that nothing would help. That by me believing in all of those lies, it would somehow bring him back. But the acceptance of it all and the truth I already knew was, that’s trauma.

Trauma happened the day he died. And when trauma isn’t healed, it continues on and on. It lives with you. That version of him that I loved, that I knew, he was gone.

Trauma demands that you look at it, that you live with it, that you keep thinking about it, until it is healed.

It is that loud because it’s screaming for help.

The fact is unless we deal with trauma, it will never leave. It remains as an open wound.

Guilt and shame make it worse and it causes the wound to keep bleeding.

Survivors guilt is real. But we don’t have to stay there. It’s not a permanent address. We do not have to punish ourselves for anything that happened, it’s not a solution. It’s not an answer, even if it seems like one.

When someone dies, they are never coming back in this lifetime. We cannot take responsibility for this loss. We have to accept it. It isn’t easy.

The guilt is not part of the healing process.

When did I start to find healing?

Here is the second messy on going part.

I will always love my nephew. But I accepted that he left. I do not blame him at all. Something happened, to convince him that death was the way to go. Often what happens is the lie that it is the only way out. I know that he was a wonderful and amazing soul that would have changed the world. I accept that I had the time with him that I did, what a gift it was. I love that my children remember him and talk about the good memories. I love that I ever knew him at all. And yes it would have been a miracle to know him always.

I know that blaming myself is irrational. That if I had known I would have done anything.

I also know that regret is absolute garbage.

I know that it cost me a great deal and offered me nothing. I know that guilt was there but it was vicious, merciless and harmful.

I hate guilt.

It doesn’t serve while it destroys, it only destroys. No matter what, guilt has no place in the lives of people who have done nothing wrong.

It is a parasite that attaches itself to the soul and feeds off of you, draining the life out of you.

I learned a great deal about life in the aftermath of death.

I know that there is nothing good that comes from dwelling on the past. That resentment doesn’t help. I know that feeling the weight of the darkness and that it’s depressing, but those aren’t the places that I want to reside.

I know that I questioned God, but that I also started questioning what I believed. As in; thinking we were indestructible and that we were some how exempt from tragedy. I also questioned why I thought life would always be perfect and good. Even though I had faced several tragedies before I had somehow developed a false unrealistic thought that it wouldn’t happen again. I had seen other people suffer atrocities too and thought; “Not us.” Why did I think I lived in some weird sense of false security when we live in a fallen world?

Healing will put everything you believe under a microscope and teach you some hard truths. Not that we needed any more pain to begin with.

The grieving still continues. The life without him, continues. The pain we live with is still there.

God is continuously working moment by moment, He never sleeps.

I sometimes picture healing like one that has fallen into a pit of needles and somehow crawled out. God gently and carefully removes each one, needle by needle. He never pushed us into that pit, but He is the one that pulled us out. And like the careful, gentle surgeon that He is, He removes them, one by one. He leaves no fragments left behind, treats each an every wound so no infection will spread. It takes time to remove them. He doesn’t rush. Not out of coldness or apathy but because He is thorough. Careful when others, even us, were careless. He is aware and He knows. And the extraction is difficult. It hurts. But He is at work.

There is no pretty way to heal.

There is no suck it up and deal with it.

There is no need to fill in the blank.

Blame, shame and guilt will never resurrect the loved one that we lost.

I want to encourage you now that there is no timeline of grief, grieve how you need to.

But that you have to know, surely you must know, that God is all in. He is close to broken hearted and to those whom spirits have been crushed. He never leaves. But without realizing He is there, asking for help, the road is harder. It’s longer, it’s even more painful.

Remember that guilt and shame were never meant to be part of your life, your healing.

No matter what I endured, I still found healing with God. I still worked through it with Him. There is no pretending to be perfect. We are humans and we face very human problems but we also have a God that came down to earth in human form and became Jesus.

To understand but to overcome.

The only reason why I can ever say that I know healing at all, is because I sought the Lord and He heard and He answered and He keeps showing up and He keeps answering. He is close to me, He keeps healing me. He keeps working with me. There was never a moment where I woke up and forgot the pain. He was with me. He was there for me. He is there for me and He is with me.

Without Him, there is nothing. There was no method I found in medication or psychology alone. It was through process with Him that I ever saw the healing, the changing. It wasn’t instant. It was a commitment and even though I faced a storm of negativity, I saw lies, I experienced darkness. Even though there was despair, there was tragedy, I still found there was nothing in those things to ever made me feel better. There was no turning to distractions to make it okay. It was honesty, processing, feeling the feelings.

I had to realize that the tsunami had already hit and had already caused all that damage, but now was just the riding the after waves to shore, staying there and finding a new way home.

It was prayer, constant prayer. It was confession of my pain of being broken-hearted that I found a small epiphany.

A broken heart and crushed spirit do not have a get-fixed quick way of healing. Something profoundly dramatic happened in order to cause that pain, to break that heart. No sudden remedy will undo it. There is no way to make it go away. There is no pill or substance that will ease it, or heal it. It takes a supernatural intervention to make it better.

In His careful love and His profound healing is the one that knows in His great wisdom, exactly how He needs to heal us.

God’s ways are higher than our ways. We can’t understand Him fully, but He understands and knows us.

I recall the days before my nephew passed. I went to the hospital for that emergency surgery, depleted, starving to death, not able to keep any food down; that I couldn’t think straight or function and the only conclusion was to get this surgery done. I still felt the fear of trusting this surgeon with my life, that anything could have happened. That I may never wake up or see my kids again.

But I went through with it. It took awhile, to extract the problem, to cut and fuse, to stitch things up, for the surgery to be done. And I woke up. I was in pain.

I tried to power through it, to leave as soon as possible. I said and did the right thing to leave the hospital, to tough it out. And convinced everyone I was fine, then got discharged to go to a pharmacy to pick pain medication all the while, saying I’m fine.

I made it into the store twenty minutes after the hospital and fell in the aisle, nearly passing out. Customers asking if I was okay?

The reality is I tried to power through that pain, my abdomen looked black and blue and I could hardly walk. I was in a rush to be better. But there was no rush. There was no hurry.

I had a deep incensed belief that I had to be tough, to push hard, never to be weak, to keep going, to keep pushing, to keep thriving. Heck, I had four babies, no medication, I prided myself on being so self-sufficient and determined.

But there was no rushing healing, there was not trying to power through it. There was no way I would magically overcome the incisions, the blood loss, the pain, the way that it would take time and effort to heal. This was a perfect providential answer to what I was about go through, having to live with the loss of my nephew.

I will always miss him.

But I do not live in regret. He would never have wanted that anyway.

I know that it changed my life. But I know that I will see him on the other side.

“The Lord is close to broken hearted and to those whose spirits have been crushed.” Psalm 34:18

If I choose to accept that God is near, the change is real.

I have never been one to care when someone threw scripture at me and hoped that it would land. But that one is what helped me get through one of the hardest grieving processes I have ever known.

There is nothing that can be said or done to undo the past. But we can still live a life worth living everyday. We are still here. We may be wounded, but we can be healed.

Don’t give up.

I hope that you have or will have peace, that you know rest, that you will let God meet you where you’re at. You don’t have to suck it up and deal with it and you don’t have to heal pretty.

This life will never be easy.

But the Lord is close. He is real. He is available.

Healing is real.