My girlfriend died by suicide in 2023, looking for people who understand.

[omenalready]

Hi everyone, sorry if I'm posting in the wrong area or if this is unclear. It's only my second post here and I'm still figuring out the rules. I just need to talk and hear other people's thoughts and experiences. I promise this is all true, I'm not trying to get attention. I genuinely need to share this.

In 2023, I lost my girlfriend to suicide. I was 28 and she was 41 when she took the bus. She was the first person who ever truly understood me, and I loved her completely and her too.

But she couldn't fight her own demons. After a year together, she started seeking euthanasia. In Belgium it's legal under specific conditions. Her case was accepted because she had survived the 1994 genocide and carried deep trauma. She cut contact with me, and a year later I found out a doctor had taken her life forever. I never got to say goodbye. All i have is a letter she wrote from back in the days where she promise me she will fight to stay and that it wasn't my fault if she cut contact with me and that she loved me. That letter is what I've been surviving on for three years. I have nothing else.

I never properly grieved her, and I never filled the space she left.

Since then, I've tried relationships again, but I always end up feeling like "too much." Either i get attached too fast, or i struggle to set boundaries, and at some point they always say the same thing : "I need to leave you to protect you." I'm exhausted by this pattern and I don't know how to break it.

Two questions for anyone who's been through something similar :

How do you navigate new relationships when you carry this much grief ? How do you stop being made to feel like a monster for being so intense ?

And for those who have lost a partner to suicide specifically : do the people you date actually acknowledge this loss and factor it into the way they treat you ?

I genuinely feel like people don't give a single f*ck. Like i'm really being treated like either a monster or a worthless piece of shit. I'm being used, abused, played, cheated on, left out, replaced. I thought that by telling this story and how it triggers / affect me, people would have mercy on me, but it's completely the opposite. Should i even stop talking about it ? Should i stop mentioning that i've lost my former lover to suicide when i feel safe to say it to someone i'm dating ?

Thank you for reading this far.

 

[daruino]

Hi, welcome to the forum. I am so sorry to hear you have gone through this and still suffering. I think it is important to reaffirm that it wasn't your fault for not stopping her. In a way I think her cutting contact and not telling you was her trying to protect you, because she loved and cared about you. I'm sure you were a lightpoint in her life. Legal euthanasia is difficult to attain so it is clear her suffering was just too great

You still deserve a meaningful, good relationship but it seems you might want to work through this first. I can only really suggest seeking therapy or some sort of support group- online or irl. But it is important to talk about this(with someone capable) and hopefully- over time- make it less painful. Fully 'healing' is difficult and should not be something to focus on as it is abstract- but learning to cope and live with it is definitely possible

I wish you the best of luck, Sorry I could not answer your questions- I have not gone through something similar. However I do recognize new relationships being difficult with grief and trauma, and I am trying to work on that first before seeking out relationships again. Best wishes, hugs. If you ever want to talk you can PM me.

 

[persistentheartache]

I think the way you feel makes sense. I find that trying to find sympathy usually has the opposite effect that you wanted. although I would say SaSu is perfectly appropriate place for this. I've experienced that sort of reaction to my own grief as well. been called pathetic or a martyr etc...

I think the way to navigate relationships is to process and heal from your grief. As much as you deserve support and you deserve to be heard, no one is obligated to shoulder that with you. which is where I think that reaction comes from in other people.

it's not really fair to go through so much and be met with mistreatment an I can empathize with feeling jaded about that.

that said, it's no ones obligation to shoulder your pain with you. as much as you also deserve that and deserve to be able to heal and move on. Maybe separating your grief and healing from your relationships for a while until you've recovered more would be a good idea.

it's a lot for anyone to have all that emotional intensity dropped on them. that doesn't mean you sre too much but most people aren't ready for that.

I know that can be hard to hear. what you're going through is difficult. you can't force people to understand unfortunately.

Time heals, they tell me. and people suck a lot. grief's not easy

 

[omenalready]

Hi everyone, thank you for you answers. I have seek help, i was two years going in and out from psychiatric hospital, recently after my girlfriend cheated on me, i have spent two days there. What is very difficult for me is to make people understand how i feel without making them upset or feel like they have to carry me, or nurse me, or say things like " i don't want to be responsible for your mental health"

especially in the relationship i was in lately, the person in front of me just don't want to cope with anything mental health related, she saids it triggers her since she has been dealing with her own father being suicidal. Now she lives at my place, because we are also roomates, and she fucks with another guy who lives upstairs, and i'm on xanax as soon as they are together, or i need Ativan as soon as they sleep together.

It's really hard, because i feel like it's very impossible for her to understand how much it hurts.

My friends get upset at me as soon as my mental health start being too messy / when i mention suicide. They are not frontally upset, but they really make me feel like a burden.

So i don't know what to do about that. I am feeling like some kind of paria, crazy, disabled person that no one wants to deal with.

I have one doctor following me and also a psycho-analyst, but it feels like we are just going in circles. I do this more to convince my surroundings that i'm "solution-oriented".

I can talk about it as much as i want : death is unsolvable, and as you said, people don't have to be kind to me / be helping me / be giving me a shoulder to cry on. They are mostly living their own life, what makes me feel like if i ctb they won't bother that much. And also, i'm not crying much, actually i am just asking people to be kind and not treat me as if i'm worthless, because deep inside i know i'm not. I have so much to give, i can't imagine that just because it comes from me, it's worthless.

How do you guys live with grief and constant suicidal thoughts without being a burden ? I am thinking i should just stop mentioning all of these things. I should just take my xanax until i find the strength to ctb - but right now none of the methods seems realistic to me, it's almost impossible to find the thing that will make you sleep forever without going through a hell lot of pain.

 

[SoLowHollow48]

Hi everyone, sorry if I'm posting in the wrong area or if this is unclear. It's only my second post here and I'm still figuring out the rules. I just need to talk and hear other people's thoughts and experiences. I promise this is all true, I'm not trying to get attention. I genuinely need to share this.

In 2023, I lost my girlfriend to suicide. I was 28 and she was 41 when she took the bus. She was the first person who ever truly understood me, and I loved her completely and her too.

But she couldn't fight her own demons. After a year together, she started seeking euthanasia. In Belgium it's legal under specific conditions. Her case was accepted because she had survived the 1994 genocide and carried deep trauma. She cut contact with me, and a year later I found out a doctor had taken her life forever. I never got to say goodbye. All i have is a letter she wrote from back in the days where she promise me she will fight to stay and that it wasn't my fault if she cut contact with me and that she loved me. That letter is what I've been surviving on for three years. I have nothing else.

I never properly grieved her, and I never filled the space she left.

Since then, I've tried relationships again, but I always end up feeling like "too much." Either i get attached too fast, or i struggle to set boundaries, and at some point they always say the same thing : "I need to leave you to protect you." I'm exhausted by this pattern and I don't know how to break it.

Two questions for anyone who's been through something similar :

How do you navigate new relationships when you carry this much grief ? How do you stop being made to feel like a monster for being so intense ?

And for those who have lost a partner to suicide specifically : do you feel like people understand and take this in accountability in your relationship ?

I genuinely feel like people don't give a single f*ck. Like i'm really being treated like either a monster or a worthless piece of shit. I'm being used, abused, played, cheated on, left out, replaced. I thought that by telling this story and how it triggers / affect me, people would have mercy on me, but it's completely the opposite. Should i even stop talking about it ? Should i stop mentioning that i've lost my former lover to suicide when i feel safe to say it to someone i'm dating ?

Thank you for reading this far.

Hi! Welcome. Don't stray too far into the void, yeah? I know that grief never ends and it always comes back to haunt you when it feels like it shouldn't.

I lost my bestfriend and ex girlfriend here, actually. Almost a year ago on June 23rd. She took SN. I still mourn her to this day and I still cry over things that remind me of her. I quit my last job because I was mourning her to the point where I couldn't concentrate much on anything about my job. Still jobless now and I thought: "God, why did I let a dead woman ruin my career?" but she's not just any dead woman, isn't she? She's my lover and my best friend for years. This is just what grief does. It makes you stupid, a bit like love. I mean, if you think about it, that grief stems from love.

To all of your questions, one by one.

1. How do you navigate new relationships when you carry this much grief ? How do you stop being made to feel like a monster for being so intense ?

I haven't got any. I thought that I should give myself a lot more time to work thorugh her death first, what went wrong before between us, and try to accept her suicide as it is--that it's not just my fault but other people's too.

I gave her to my friends and I trusted that her family would take care of her when we broke up before she died but it turns out that no one gave a shit about her depression and believed that she was fine. I think the best way to embrace that you are not a monster is to eventually accept that their life is not just about you. They have other people and other things going on in it that you ABSOLUTELY cannot interfere with--not even if it means to help her.

I think you have to really convince yourself that you've tried. Even if her death means that you failed, you've tried to the best of your capabilities to take care of her. The rest is really up to the lady to decide. Yes, they are depressed. Yes, they cannot make clear judgments but at the end of the day, you must know that if they still want to fight on, they would. Girl, I've seen depressed people on this forum who still want to push forward. Our girlfriends lost. And that's okay. This is the best choice they can make for themselves. This is not up for us to decide anymore.

2. And for those who have lost a partner to suicide specifically : do you feel like people understand and take this in accountability in your relationship ?

What do you mean by this? Like, do the people around her take as much accountability as I do? Or is this about how people perceive my accountability in terms of her death? I'd like to think that the people who were around her at the time do take accountability but that they refuse to mourn for this long. I saw her asshole boyfriend going with another girl already. Her friends are back to their lives like nothing ever happened. I hope that deep down, they all still have her within their hearts but I'm not so sure.

I think people who knew about the mess that was our relationship before she died have shifted the blame on me. Her family refused to have any contact with me anymore. But I don't really care about being blamed because before this, I have blamed myself for her death anyway. She literally started planning her death right after we broke up which was months before she eventually ctb. I'd like to think that if I hadn't ruined us so much, maybe she would still be alive. Then again, she's done the irreversible. There's not use for what-ifs anymore.

Do the people in her life blame you for her death?

3. How do you guys live with grief and constant suicidal thoughts without being a burden ?

I'm not actively suicidal. Not since 2021 when my dad died I guess. Her death sort of made me want to commit but like the job that I lost, I remember that if I keep letting her death weigh me down, I'll keep making shitty decisions that hurt not only me but others too (I have to support my family monetarily and now without a job, I'm basically freeloading). I mostly center my care around the people who are still alive right now. People who ACTUALLY matter to me. Not a dead girl.

Also, if you feel like you're burdening the people around you with your suicidal thoughts, you have us. We'll help you recover. Well, I would. Others here just stoke the flame, usually. I don't like them very much. This site is supposed to be a support system for suicidal people to get better, not get worse and commit suicide. I think the mods and users have lost direction now overtime.

Anyway, your worth is not tied to whether you're suicidal or not--whether you're depressed or not. Just know that. A lot of people are not accustomed to taking mentally ill people under their wings. To be exact, they don't know what is the right support to give. I was there too. I had caretaker fatigue with my dead ex. It's damn hard to just listen without giving unsolicited advice. It's damn hard to not judge. It's damn hard to not want to give solutions and recommendations which, instead of making her feel better, make her feel worse and weighed down with expectations.

All I'm asking from you is that you keep bothering these shitheads. They'll learn how to care for you eventually. If they really are people who are good for you, they will learn how to help you too. This sort of thing is not meant to be fought alone. Trust. You need a big ass support circle. She didn't have any because she chose to hide it all instead of just being honest of her condition and "burden" other people with that knowledge.

especially in the relationship i was in lately, the person in front of me just don't want to cope with anything mental health related, she saids it triggers her since she has been dealing with her own father being suicidal. Now she lives at my place, because we are also roomates, and she fucks with another guy who lives upstairs, and i'm on xanax as soon as they are together, or i need Ativan as soon as they sleep together.

I'm not saying that you should cut people whom you feel like you can hold on to because at times, it doesn't well but if you still have others who care--girl, dump that bitch (unless this is a poly/open relationship in which case, I won't argue with you even if I don't support it)

 

[omenalready]

Thank you so much for this. Genuinely. The way you wrote about her, about grief making you stupid "a bit like love" ; that hit me hard. I'm sorry about your friend, your ex, your person. Also, a year is nothing. And losing a job over it makes complete sense to me, even if it doesn't make sense to the world. She's not just any dead woman. You said it perfectly.

Me since this happen, i could only work on a night-club and drink all trough the week-end and take drugs and have one night-stands, it was very destructive, but i'm out of that tunnel now, and since then i've been receiving help from the government

Also, I want to clarify what I meant in my second question ; English isn't my first language and I realize it didn't come out right. What I actually meant was : do the people you date acknowledge this loss and factor it into the way they treat you ?

Do you feel like anyone actually takes it into account when they're with you ?

That's what i genuinely ask myself.

Because to me it feels like a shame to carry such heavy emotions.

I believe that when you know someone has carried something that heavy, there should be some delicacy, some awareness of the fragility underneath.

For what it's worth, I'm a happy person ; I try to be. I'm diagnosed bipolar, so during my manic phases I'm am truly a sunshine. But the moment I'm alone, or when a low hits, I fall back into that same void and I don't know what to do with it. Before her death, i spent two years in psychiatric hospital, then i lost her, then i lost two close friends in that same period at the end of 2023, also from suicide... so I told myself : okay, this is the bottom. The dramatic potential of my life can't get any lower. It can only get better from here. Every person who comes into my life from now on will bring something good. But the opposite happened.

I struggle deeply with being single. There's always someone in my life, more or less ; I think I developed a strong emotional dependency after she left, and I can't seem to fight it. I've tried. I traveled alone for three months. Recently I spent two months with a friend who also lost her mother around the same time ; someone I can actually talk to openly about all this. But people like that are rare, and they're not part of my daily life, they live abroad.

In my daily life, the people around me look like they're wearing devil masks with pieces of human flesh between their teeth. That's exactly why she left ; she couldn't take this humanity anymore. And the longer time passes, the more I understand her.

The people who came into my life after her haven't only hurt me ; but they have hurt me. One girl told me she was tired of me talking about her, that it was the past, that she couldn't understand how I could be emotionally unavailable. And since then it's just been one thing after another. I can't deal with loneliness at all. I don't even want to escape into alcohol or drugs — it doesn't appeal to me. When things are bad, I just sit with myself and hear these voices repeating things people have said to me : "I'm not responsible for your feelings." "I'm leaving you to protect you."

In my relationships, everything is fine until I show how much the fear of abandonment, the fear of losing someone again, makes me completely fall apart. After a loss like this, I find that normal. But I'm increasingly shocked by how incapable people are of reading someone, of reading me, of understanding where the wounds come from. I'm not asking anyone to heal me. I just want to be understood. And I'm starting to wonder if I'm going about it the wrong way ; or if I should just stop talking about it altogether.

As for her family ; her sister, who was also my best friend, still holds it against me. We stayed close for a long time, but whenever we fight, she says horrible things that make it clear she thinks I killed her. Which is not true. After she cut contact with me, more than a year before the euthanasia, things kept falling apart in her life ; her sister had a miscarriage, supposedly ( that's what my beloved one used to convince herself of ) from the stress she caused, and she decided she brought only suffering to this world. She told all her friends she was at peace with leaving. She didn't tell me. She just vanished into ash.

I don't even know why I'm telling you all this. It doesn't answer your questions. But what I keep coming back to is : what is the right posture to have in future relationships ? Is it normal that this is still such a problem ?