I actually just signed up after seeing this post because I feel much the same way - like there aren't a lot of 20-something children who have lost a parent to suicide.
I am 26, turning 27 on April 2nd and just lost my mother. She had just turned 55 on New Year's Eve. She shot herself at 10:42 p.m. on this past January 19, about an hour after she and my husband and I had a tiff with her on Facebook (yeah, no guilt here!
). She had suffered from clinical depression all her life, but was medicated for it. She also felt she was probably borderline personality disorder, which was never actually diagnosed because she never saw any mental health doctors, but the description does seem to fit.There were a lot of factors leading up. She always had low self-esteem... she was picked on a lot in school and never seemed to work past that like most folks do. She had baggage she carried around her whole life and just kept adding to it, never coping with life's little struggles. She was caregiving for her parents for the past two years... lost her own mother (my grandmother) last June. Between Grandpa's declining health, losing her Mom, and Dad still being unemployed (he lost his job October 2010 and has had no good prospects since then)... she just seemed unable to cope. Said the generic medication for her depression wasn't working (couldn't take name-brand because with Dad being unemployed, they had no medical insurance). Dad had a second interview that went really well in January, then got the call on that Tuesday that they hired the 20-something with a college degree instead of him.
Two days of Mom going to her "dark place", as I called it, she started lashing out at everybody... Dad, my husband, me, others. I guess that's what the Facebook fight was, really, her lashing out and we fell for it. She had rages like this where she'd go off, but then call and apologize the next day. This had been happening very badly since grandma died. I had just gotten emotionally and mentally exhausted from it. Had always been my Mom's best friend, but I just was tired of the rages and the suicide talk. I always begged her not to do it... she promised me she wouldn't... her older brother committed suicide back when I was 13 and I remember what she went through. She promised me she wouldn't make me go through that with her. And then she broke that promise.
And I couldn't save her. I had talked her down from "the ledge" so many times, I never thought she'd actually do it. Very, very tough thing, this is. And the guilt. And being angry at her, being angry at myself for not doing more to help her. Just awful.
Sorry, ended up turning this more into my story than yours. But just know there are other people your age going through this. If you want to talk, you can message me or email me. I assume this board has a messaging system... like I said, totally new here and signed up when I saw your post.
Take care, froggy. We just have to tackle this thing one day at a time, I guess.
