Now we can cross the shifting sands.

My best friend killed himself in 2012. I loved him for 15 years before that, and for most of that time that love was apparently the obstacle that stopped him. He told me so once before, but I forgot. I forget a lot of things I shouldn't. But that last year, I was angry because I knew he was alone and he wouldn't let me help, and because he wouldn't be there for me when I was going through horrific post-coma stuff. He abandoned me, so I let him think I'd given up on him, and in doing so I removed myself as an obstacle. His choice was his choice, it wasn't my fault. But I can't forgive myself for even for one moment giving him the idea that I'd stop loving him, and I try over and over to forgive him for taking the easy out. In those first days after the call, it was everything I could do not to will myself to death. Even now, there are days where the combined weight of my commitments and the knowledge of how much it would hurt everyone and of what I've had to go through to survive this long is all that stops me... and though I've been suicidal off and on all my life, and already died once so really ought to want to live, this is the first time I've lived having already drafted an escape plan. And that's never going away, now that it exists it will always whisper to me from the darkness.

A lot of people struggle with the question of why, when someone they love commits suicide. Why couldn't they ask for help, why didn't they trust, why did they want to hurt everyone like that? It's never really been a question that I wondered about, because like you, I recognized that this was a choice arrived at by the narrowing of vision to exclude other options. I even knew the mechanism by which he excluded them, or at least I can guess at it with a reasonable degree of confidence. Instead, what I wonder about whenever the grief is eating me from the inside out is what would I do differently if I had it to do over again. If I had a time machine and could go back knowing what I know now, what would I do? History is set, I can't change it, but there's a little wiggle room in there... how would I use it? And you know what's weird? I think I might actually use it to help him do it. I couldn't stop it, but if I could be there and make sure that right up until that last, dying breath he knew with absolute clarity that he was loved, I would do that no matter how much it hurt. Because the very worst part of this loss is the idea that maybe he didn't know that. And if he didn't, well... that part really is my fault.

Grief as a poly individual is a strange thing. It's been hard on my husband, witnessing my grief and knowing exactly what caused it, and being completely unable to fill in that empty spot. It's been hard on me, because when I'm grieving so hard for one person I love, I still need to take care not to minimize or exclude the others that I love. That can have the effect of sometimes making me feel less entitled to my grief, and combined with the very complicated and ill-defined nature of the relationship I lost, make me feel that my grief is somehow less real. That's the part that it's hard to get help for... nobody is left who can validate my feelings or my relationship except me, and I've spent a lifetime learning to distrust my emotions, because when you suffer from bipolar disorder that's something you have to be able to do. You can develop coping mechanisms for depression or mania, you can learn how to think around them and keep your life running... but you can't out-think grief, the only choice is to experience it. At the end of the day, therapy can teach you that depression is a chemical response and that you can to some extent learn to separate the filter of those chemicals from your experience of your life, and meds can help you change the chemicals themselves, and behavioral changes can help you drag yourself through it. You can with dedicated effort gain some small power over depression, and I have spent many long years learning that... but then along comes grief, and it isn't just chemicals, it isn't something you can separate from your experiences, and it isn't something you can medicate. All the coping mechanisms are different coping mechanisms, and it's so hard to know which way to cope first.