She Didn’t Leave a Note; So I Write One Every Day

Some people think that when someone dies by suicide, they leave a note. A final message. Some kind of explanation to make sense of what doesn’t make sense.

Kahlia didn’t.

I searched and searched. But no note. No text. No whispered words left behind. Just silence. A silence that’s so loud, it echoes in my bones.

And so, I started writing back.

Not to fix it. Not to figure it out. But to survive it. Every day since she left, I’ve written something: a letter, a line, a list, a memory. Sometimes it’s two words: Help me. Sometimes it’s ten pages of fury and love and heartbreak tangled together.

Because grief like this doesn’t come with instructions.

There’s this myth that closure happens after someone dies. That time passes, you grieve, and you heal. But I’ve learned that real grief; this kind of grief, is open-ended. It loops and backtracks, it screams and goes quiet. It doesn’t resolve, it evolves. And to be honest I don’t want it to end. I want to feel the pain, the hurt and the emptiness for the rest of my life.

Writing has become my lifeline. Not because I’m trying to make sense of it, but because I need somewhere to put all this pain. Somewhere to scream into without scaring anyone. Somewhere to love her without being told to "move on." Somewhere to make sense of the chaos inside my head.

I write because I still have things to say to her.
I write because the silence left behind is too big to live in.
I write because when your daughter dies, your entire vocabulary changes, and sometimes you have to invent a new language just to keep breathing and I write to her because I just plain miss her.

Some days, the words don’t come easily.
Some days, I hate the page, it reminds me that she’s really dead and never coming back.
And some days, I cling to it like a life raft.

But I show up anyway. I show up for me and for her. I show up to remind the world that she was here and she was so important. I write to leave a message in the world.

Because she didn’t leave a note,
and I’m not done writing hers.