How Grief Nearly Destroyed Me (But Here's What Saved My Life)

Grief is a storm that no one can fully prepare for. When I lost my best friend, Desiree—a newly single mom—to suicide, my world changed forever. Navigating that heartbreak was one of the hardest journeys of my life, and at times, I wondered if I’d ever find my way out. The weight of that loss nearly led me down a dark path, but through self-care, support, and rediscovering hope, I managed to reclaim my life.

In this post, I’ll share my story of surviving grief, what helped me heal, and how I learned to prioritize myself in the process. If you’re a single mom navigating loss, struggling to take care of yourself, or just feeling alone, know this: there’s hope, even in the darkest moments. 

The Day Everything Changed

This post is part 2 of a five-part series about the loss of my friend. Can you tell that the grief (and the process of overcoming it) was so great that I had to divide the story into five parts? If you're encountering this story for the first time here at part two, and you want to read part one, you can read it here, or you can listen to it here.

Part one tells the story of how Desiree and I came to be friends, what our friendship was like, what she was like as a friend and a mother, and the series of events leading up to her passing. Now I resume the story here, talking about what happened internally for me after I lost her. The things that still, 5 years later, I am healing from. 

The Weight of Grief as a Single Mom

To give you a time frame to reference, Desiree passed in late July of 2019. I was in my last semester of graduate school getting my Masters in Mental Health Counseling, and I was also working full time completing my internship at a mental health clinic. My son was just 7 months old, and my daughter was a couple months away from turning 5. They were both in daycare that cost about $2400 a month total, and their dad was paying nada, but doing the silly dance of "I'm gonna get a job and as soon as I make money, I'm gonna send it to you." And then never sending it, and then if I said anything about it he would say things like "you CHOSE to be a single mom" and would imply that he'd pay for daycare if we got back together. 

These details are important because there was a whole lot of stress piling up on top of me around the time of her passing. At the beginning of 2019 I had two best friends. My kids' dad, and Desiree. And then I also had some childhood friends, but we'd been steadily growing apart since I had my kids. Not in a negative or toxic way, but we were just going through very different things in life at the time. So when I broke up with my kids' dad at the beginning of 2019, and I was down to one bestie, for her to just up and die left me with what felt like no one who could see me. 

I was able to lean on my cousin for support, but our friendship was kind of new, so I didn't necessarily feel seen or super close to her at the time. I'd also been friendly/flirty with someone I met around May, and he was super supportive from a distance, but again, it had been a short period of time so the depth of friendship wasn't there. It wasn't like I could lean on these newer, fresher friendships in the same way I could lean on the two deeper ones I'd just lost. (And let's be real, I could never really lean on my kids' dad anyway, but I definitely could and did lean on Desiree.)

Things were kind of tense between my family and I since I broke up with my kids' dad back in February. We'd had to move back home to my parents' house less than a year prior, I was pregnant with my son, and then my kids' dad totaled one car, got the replacement one repo'd, and it's a whole long story, feel free to listen to it here, but let's just say they weren't necessarily mad at me, I think they were just worried/irritated about the whole situation. And then I went and made it worse by going out on dates and asking them to watch the kids for 4 hours or so and then consistently losing track of time and staying out for waaaay longer than 4 hours. Bad stuff. So, I was already losing myself a bit from the breakup and recovery from being in a relationship with a very covertly narcissistic individual for 7 years.

Now that I've set the stage for what I was dealing with support-wise, I can talk about the story of my collapse. 

Have you ever seen someone fall in slow motion, but in real time? Where somehow they're able to fight gravity enough to not just hit the ground in one quick fell swoop falling at the usual 9.8m/s/s? First you see that they're about to fall, and then maybe their knees hit the ground, and you're like are they done? Can they recover? And then their momentum carries them forward and you're like "ope, it's not over" and then their arm hits the ground, then their other arm goes to do the same, but it slips from under them, so the left side of their body falls to the ground, but the momentum from losing their "footing" (handing?) causes them to also roll a bit? And then they get up a little bit too early and fall AGAIN?!

Yeah, that's how the grief hit me. Let me explain:

When Desiree died, as I described in the first part, I was hit with a single wave of grief. Anyone watching would have seen this as the part of falling where someone hasn't fallen yet, but you know they're gonna fall. I cried about it that day, and then I had to go to work the next day, so I did. Because I was feeling okay enough. I kind of coasted like that all the way through August. I was fine. I mostly felt numb, but then I cried sometimes. So I thought I was going through the grief just fine! 

TW: And then, in late September after a particularly sleepless set of days, I started to want to not be alive anymore. I started thinking "this is so hard, I can't do this anymore, I see why Desiree would want to escape this" etc. etc. I eventually started to imagine what I would do to end it. I'll spare you the details of what the beginnings of my plan were. But here's what saved my life. Or rather, I should say who:

I was talking to my cousin and telling her how I feel and kind of asking if she'd ever felt the same. And she certainly did empathize with how I felt. But she also reached out to our grandmother, who then reached out to my mom and told her to take me to the hospital, or she would. So I went. Voluntarily. And they admitted me. And I got a good night's sleep there without my phone, without having to wake up in the middle of the night multiple times to feed or soothe my children. So when I woke up, I felt so much better. The suicidal thoughts and ideation had vanished. I just wanted to get back home and see my kids. 

However, the doctor refused to let me go, and I was transferred to a psychiatric hospital that night. I was very upset at first and reluctant to go, to hand in my phone, and to sleep in a room with strangers whose mental states I knew nothing about. But I also saw it as a time to get even more uninterrupted sleep and fill that up. So I went. I missed work, I missed class, I didn't tell anyone I was going except for that guy I was in a flirtationship with (maybe I will share more about him another time because that story is pretty wild too), and my daughter's best friend's mom as I requested that she pray for me. Anyone else I didn't tell probably for about a year! Maybe it was shame, maybe it was just being very self-protective of that level of vulnerability. 

I spent about three days in the hospital before busting myself out nearly against medical advice because a new person came into the shared room I was in, and I left for art therapy or something and came back and the room smelled like someone had smeared dookie all over the walls. I was up in arms like "Y'all can either find me another room to sleep in or let me out of here. I'm no longer a threat to myself, and technically wasn't when I was admitted here. Go in that room and tell me if you'd sleep there tonight!" And when no one even wanted to walk in there I was like "Exactly. So lets get this paperwork going." That worked and they let me go! 

Wow. In the spirit of transparency, I want to pause here and share with you what's going on with me as I write this. I just had to take a moment and tend to the part of me that survived all of that, because she's started crying. I'm writing about it in a candid way, but it was a very serious, very scary experience. I was very broken. And I am so motherfucking grateful I survived it. But I also hate that I had to experience any of it at all. One of the hardest parts of my grief for me to process was my anger. How dare Desiree fucking leave me? I can't tell you how many times I've written that, whispered it, yelled it, screamed it. Dreamt about her and sobbed in her arms about it. Even though I went through my own stint of feeling the same feelings that she did, knowing she had it way worse support wise. 

That's not to invalidate how I feel, but to hold space for both. I've had to learn to hold space for both instead of minimizing one (empathy and understanding) in favor of the other (rage and betrayal). I feel both (and many other things). My grief is massive. That's okay, that's normal, even. Okay. Back to the story, thank you for holding space for me with me. 

I finally left the hospital and who did I text first (besides my mom to come pick me up and take me to my babies lol)? The flirtationship guy. What can I say, he was special to me. He's always been special to me. I also texted my daughter's best friend's mom. And then I didn't really tell anyone else what happened. I didn't speak to my cousin for a little while after because while I know she saved my life, I was kinda pissed she snitched and felt betrayed. Even though I'd have done the same, and it was the right thing to do and I am also eternally grateful to her for it (we don't speak anymore because she properly stabbed me in the back a year or so later, but that's a story for another time). 

From there I thought I was all good. My daughter's birthday was at the end of September, I can't remember how we celebrated off the top of my head (another clue that I really was not out of the depths of my grief just yet), I went back to class as normal. I brought the paperwork to my professor/advisor to not get dinged for missing class and assignments, and he was like "oh, that's what was wrong. Let me know if you need anything," because apparently his infinite elder therapist wisdom saw I was falling well before I perceived it. I ultimately left my internship because I'd gotten enough hours and I needed to take things off my plate. Although it left room for me to not have any money for the next few months until I could get licensed after graduating. So I coasted (like a zombie) through October and November, graduated in December, and began job hunting and got a job as a therapist (with no clients) a couple weeks before I got my license in January. I also snagged myself a guy who was the exact opposite of my kids' dad, down to his physical appearance. Definitely NOT a rebound, definitely didn't also have the opposite kind of narcissism. Things were looking up. 

Then, in February 2020, that anger I hadn't let myself feel, the grief I kept unconsciously stuffing away for another time because I had shit to do, the feelings I was afraid of looking at because of how depressed I was in September, they morphed into something new: SHEER PANIC. 

I started having at least three panic attacks a day. Once upon waking up, at least once during the day, and once an hour and a half after falling asleep. I also developed emetophobia, and so I was terrified of taking meds for anxiety lest my tummy not like it. And speaking of my tummy, it started to not like a lot of things. I'd become so traumatized and held in so many feelings that my body started to express my grief in this new way. It was sounding the alarm for me to feel. I know this now. But when it was happening? I was terrified! I thought I was dying, I thought I got cancer, or HIV, or something else deadly. I was tethered to the things that distracted me from the anxiety. This went on for a year. At some point along the way, though, I decided that if the anxiety was here to stay then I needed to learn how to befriend it. This was the beginning of my self-care journey. 

From that point, the anxiety pushed me to find ways to befriend and hopefully minimize it. I was in therapy, I sought the counsel of my aunt who was studying Traditional Chinese Medicine, I even did take hydroxyzine for it which helped a bit. I saw a functional NP, a functional medicine doctor, I got acupuncture, I switched therapists to try a different modality, I did yoga, I changed my diet again and again and again. Different teas, aromatherapy, weighted blankets. I even shaved my head bruh. There are probably other things I tried that I am forgetting about. And while some things didn't work, some things made it worse, others stuck! I still see my acupuncturist and I'm still with the second therapist. In times where I've been so overwhelmed at night that I need to sleep somewhere other than my bed, I always bring my weighted blanket. I'd used lavender essential oil to calm myself so often that it began to work instantaneously to bring my anxiety down a notch. 

The beauty in all of this, the gift that the grief anxiety brought me that I am still grateful for--I had to learn through trial and error all the places I wasn't taking good care of myself and fix it. It's one thing when you're avoiding a feeling that actually quiets down when you avoid it. It's another thing entirely when you're avoiding a feeling that only becomes stronger the more you avoid it and will completely derail your life and put you out of commission until you address it. Anxiety beat my ass y'all. You know that scene in every action movie where the hero gets their ass beat into dust before having to take a break and then they do the whole training montage to get stronger so that they win the battle? Yeah, my grief anxiety was like that, except every single day. Go to bed 10 minutes past my bedtime? Panic attack. Eat a meal an hour too late? Panic attack. Didn't do yoga before 6pm? PANIC! IN THE BEDROOM. There was no room for slacking on myself. If there were, I would not have changed. My body new that, God knew that. I got collected okay? Edges snatched. 

I've gotten to a point now where I have much more wiggle room because I've spent the time to repair the absolute brokenness I was dealing with before.