My father was a kind man. I don't remember him ever raising his voice to me. He always spoke with kindness and empathy.  As a child I had no clue of the pain he hid. Behind the life we had built of stability and what my sister and I had assumed was a fairly normal suburban upbringing, there were things that were not discussed in our home.

For most of us, we go about our lives dealing fairly well with stress from jobs, being parents, relationships and other things that fill our days. For the rest of us that don't deal well with it comes a black cloud and a storm that never ends.

I don't remember when his came but I know it all began to unravel at once. His job, he and my mother's marriage and shortly thereafter, the life he had known and lived in for so long. I think often of when he made the choice to take his own life. Was it made in a matter of minutes, months, years? Knowing my father it had been planned strategically like a well crafted document. I didn't know which decision would be worse, something that snapped in an instant or one that was mulled over for months.

My father chose one of the least messy methods of suicide, carbon monoxide poisoning. He woke up one day and put his car in the garage and sucked the poison into his lungs. I was fourteen at the time and my sister was nineteen. Just children who couldn't wrap our heads around this thing that had just shattered our lives. Words will never be able to describe that feeling.

It will be eighteen years on December 2nd and for some reason the pain is fresh this year. Perhaps it's because though our lives have progressed, they have done so without him. Weddings, births, deaths have all been absent of his presence. You see, as a child, you assume the one constant in your life is the love of your parents and when one of them chooses to take it away for what seems like forever, it's a wound that never completely heals. It's like a cut that has scabbed over, but if it's irritated enough by something, it will reopen and is once again exposed to the elements.

As much as my sister and mother and I have found closure as much as one can find such a thing under these circumstances, we will all have a piece of heart that is missing. It is hard enough to lose someone period, but when they choose it themselves, you have so many unanswered questions that you live the rest of your life knowing you will never get the anwers to. This is what makes closure so difficult.

I thank God for my life every day and the people in it. I cherish the gifts I am given, one of them being my father's death. Without his dying the way he did I don't know if I would look at the world the same way I do now. I try to see the things in it that he couldn't. I wish he could have found a way but I think we have been left here to find a better way to see things than he ever could. Lord knows we will teach our children every day that life is worth living even when it's hard as hell to go on.

Wherever he is now, I hope his soul is at peace. That's all I want for him. That's what I want for all of us, and to live our life knowing that we, as suicide survivors are not the sum total of the horrible things that happen to us, but are better for having gone through it.  I think suicide survivors are more than just survivors, we're warriors!

I decided to put a picture of myself with my family because I wanted to represent hope and the outcome you can have after a loved one commits suicide. You can thrive, you can be healthy and you can be happy again....it's just takes time.