Rambling Reflections on Realisations

Amanda made a post to the BP group about a realisation she'd come to about never getting to know her birth mother and all the unanswered questions that remain.  It got me to thinking about suicide in general and a couple of people in specific. I don't know whether I believe we ever come to terms with suicide or any death really. There are always "what ifs" and thoughts about "could have beens" and regrets. My great-grandmother died and I still have questions. I want to know more about her life. I miss her and wish I had more time or could have done things differently in the time we did have. My grandfather died and I miss him terribly. Have I come to terms with those "natural" deaths? Are they less traumatic or frustrating for me than those that've been lost to suicide or accidents? I don't think so. There are always questions and there are really no answers for those left behind. All we can do is go forward, learn to live with our grief and our confusion and our anger without letting those emotions become crippling. I think I tend to swing from idealising the lost to demonising them. For a long time after my friend's suicide--the first I'd ever experienced, there've been more since then. I didn't want to think about her at all. It was like I walled up my feelings and memories and put them away. And then a while passed and I could think of her again but I was so angry that I focussed on all her faults. It gave me a justification for my negative feelings. And after much guilt at that I switched my thinking and made her into more than she'd been in life, more understanding, more connected to me and other people, because in some way I guess I needed her to be more. I didn't have any answers for why, so she became this symbol, I guess, of the ultimate friend. Now, I just remember, good and bad, and miss her, and know that no matter what I'm feeling it's not going to be enough--there are just no answers.  During undergrad I had a good friend whose mother committed suicide when she was nine. My friend did the same--swung from being flaming angry to setting her mother up as this ideal of doting motherhood. Her mother was bipolar. I admit that sometimes after my dx I thought about how A-- talked about her mother's death and her father's grief, and her own resentment and confusion and wondered what kind of plague is this illness that we sometimes think we'd be doing our families a favour if we were gone.  There are no answers there either. My own mother, for all her numerous faults, predilictions and piccadillos, occasionally has something meaningful to say that sticks with me in a positive way (as opposed to all that nasty crud she's loaded into my seriously dysfunctional emotional baggage). There was a period of a few years when we were attending funerals nearly every week and someone would comment about the turnout, then the flowers. My mother would kiss her teeth and tell us she didn't want any such displays when she died. What good are beautiful flowers to me when I can't smell them or touch them. Bring me flowers now while I can enjoy them.  Since we can have no answers from the dead, maybe we should just content ourselves with our memories, our imaginings, and make sure we give flowers to the people we know should have them in the time they're available to us.