By Sali — Still Here. Still Sharp.
I was exhausted the morning it happened.
I had been up most of the night and had finally allowed myself two hours of sleep. I woke up to my mother knocking on the bathroom door. My brother had been in the shower too long. She knocked again. No answer.
I knocked the door down.
The window was open.
I looked out. Seventeen floors down, I found him.
I was the first one there.
I am telling you this not for shock. Not for sympathy. I am telling you this because if you have lost someone — especially someone whose mind had been at war with them for years — you deserve to read the truth of what that loss looks like. Not the cleaned-up version. Not the version where grief arrives in orderly stages and resolves itself in a year.
The real version. The one nobody warned me about.
Before the Diagnosis, There Were Signs I Didn’t Understand
My brother was 25 when he was diagnosed with schizophrenia and manic depression.
After the diagnosis, things he had told me over the years began to make a different kind of sense. Stories about people following him. People trying to get rid of him. People trying to catch him.
At the time, I didn’t know what to do with those stories. I listened. I loved him. I didn’t have the framework to understand what he was describing — that almost all of it was happening inside his mind, and that his mind had built it as real and vivid and terrifying as anything in the waking world.
That retroactive clarity — understanding the past through the lens of a diagnosis that came later — is one of the quiet griefs nobody prepares you for. You grieve not just the person. You grieve every moment you didn’t know. Every time you might have responded differently if you had understood.
What I Miss Is Not What People Expect
People expect you to say you miss him before the illness. Before things got hard.
But I miss him. The whole person. All of it together.
I miss his presence in the room. I miss playing PlayStation with him — FIFA, always FIFA — the way brothers do when words aren’t necessary and just being in the same space is enough.
We were only a year apart. That kind of closeness becomes its own language.
When we went to different countries to study — him to become a dentist, me to become a pharmacist — we would Skype each other every day. This was before WhatsApp. Before iPhones. We found a way to stay connected across distance because that’s what we did. We talked. We showed up for each other.
That’s what I miss. Not a version of him. Him.
The Shock of Absence
Nobody warns you about the shock of absence.
Not sadness, exactly. Not the crying — though there is crying. Something more disorienting than that. The sudden awareness, again and again, that he is simply no longer here. That there will be no more calls. No more FIFA. No more ordinary Tuesday afternoons in the same room.
I have not deleted a single WhatsApp conversation since the day I lost him. Not one. Because somewhere in those messages there might be a voice note. A few seconds of his voice. And I was not prepared for how much I would want that.
Since losing him, I have also made a quiet decision — one I have never fully explained to the people around me. I take more pictures now. With everyone. My friends, my family, the people I love. Not obsessively. Just intentionally. Because I know now what it feels like to reach for something and find only silence.
If you have done something like this after your own loss — you are not strange. You are someone who has learned, the hard way, how to hold on.
What It Did to My Parents
My father could not sleep in his bed anymore. He moved to the living room. The bed held too much.
My mother cried every night before sleep. Every night, for a long time.
And then there was Alex — our cat — who seemed to understand something the rest of us could barely put into words. Alex did not leave my mother’s side. Not in those early weeks. Not when the grief was at its heaviest. He stayed.
Three or four years later, something shifted. Slowly, without announcement, the sadness began to leave my parents’ eyes. They simply became — ordinary again. Present. Able to sit in a room and laugh at something.
I want you to hear that if you are at the beginning of this. They got there. Not over it. Through enough of it to breathe.
Faith Was Not Something I Turned to Later
On the day my brother died — that same day — I made a decision.
My parents were shattered. They needed something to hold. And I needed to be the one holding it out to them.
So I leaned into what I believed, and I said it out loud, and I kept saying it: this life is a journey. A trip we pass through on the way to something more. The hereafter is our destination. And we will see him again.
Faith did not take the grief away. It gave me somewhere to put it. If you have your own version of this — hold it. Let it hold you back. You don’t have to explain it to anyone.
What Nobody Tells You About This Kind of Grief
Grief after suicide loss is not like other grief. It carries things ordinary grief does not.
It carries the question of whether you could have done something different. It carries the weight of having watched someone you loved fight a battle that happened mostly in their own mind — and having loved them through it imperfectly, the way all humans love each other imperfectly.
Nobody tells you that grief will ambush you in ordinary moments. A song. A football match. The particular angle of afternoon light in a room he used to sit in.
Nobody tells you any of this. So I am telling you.
To Whoever Is Reading This at 2am
I don’t know what you’re carrying tonight.
Maybe you lost someone. Maybe you’re watching someone you love disappear into an illness you don’t fully understand. Maybe it’s something you haven’t said out loud to anyone yet.
There is hope for a better day. You won’t see it coming. That’s the nature of it — it arrives quietly, without announcement, when you are least expecting it.
You will not feel normal again. I will not promise you that. But you will learn to live alongside this. Not around it. Not over it. Alongside it. And one day you will notice that the sadness has quietly left someone’s eyes. Maybe your own.
Hold on until then.
This life is a journey. We are all just passing through it. And the people we love — the ones we’ve lost, the ones still here — they are part of what makes the trip worth taking.
Still here. Still sharp. Still going.
If you are in crisis right now, please reach out. You don’t have to carry this alone tonight.
International crisis centres directory: iasp.info/resources/Crisis_Centres
Crisis Text Line: Text HOME to 741741
If you are in immediate danger, please call your local emergency services.
This is the first post on the new Still Here. Still Sharp. — a space for anyone who is still standing after something hard. If this reached you, I’d love to hear from you in the comments below.