Losing a Loved One to Suicide | The Legacy of Joy
Trigger warning:
This post deals with topics of suicide, death, and trauma associated with this type of tragedy.
Suicide is a real issue in this world… sadly, it is often vilified and many times swept under a rock. Death is such an unwanted and yet guaranteed part of our experience on earth and I think the difficult nature of death from suicide needs to be demystified and talked about more.
This is incredibly difficult and painful to write and enter back into, but I’m writing on this topic for five main reasons:
First, as a way to get these painful memories inside of me expressed and set to words. As I’ve learned, suicide is like a bomb that explodes shrapnel on all those who were close to the one who passed and there is a lot of pain and trauma associated with it.
Second, I’ve realized that losing a close loved one to suicide means that you join a club that you never wanted to join - I want to post my thoughts here to offer encouragement for anyone else who has also lost someone and might be searching for solidarity and comfort.
Third, I don’t ever want to forget her, and I want this to also serve as a tribute to her and her memory and impact on me. I want whoever reads this to know that this person existed and this person mattered.
Fourth, to assist in the acceptance of mental disease. The brain can get sick and injured just like any internal organ, muscle, or joint. It is a very real and very serious illness and should be recognized as being as legitimate as any other recognized disease.
Fifth, and incredibly important - if you as the reader are dealing with thoughts of self-harm, I would encourage you to read through this writing and remind yourself of how important you are to someone, even if you don’t feel it and are suffering from depression and anxiety.
This is me and my younger sister.
On the left, as childhood friends and siblings, just enjoying the simple pleasures of life.
On the right, the last picture we have of each other, roughly 60 days before she died.
On February 24, 2022, she lost her decades-long fight against mental illness and we are all still finding our way through this trauma as I’m sure this journey will continue for a long time.
In this writing, I want to explore my relationship with her and what she meant to me, directly.
I’ve left out pictures and details of her later years with her husband and children; they meant the world to her and miss her greatly but that is their story to tell, should they choose to.
THIS is a brother’s perspective.
This is my sister, Joy - Joy Melissa (McLellan) Bourassa.
The fact that anxiety and depression took the life of someone named “Joy” is harshly poetic.
This photo above is the one we used for her funeral program as it showed her at the epitome of her life, full of happiness and peace - this was her wedding day, at age 19. I love this picture of her.
The year was 1981, and my older sister Marisha and I welcomed baby Joy into our family.
2 siblings became 3.
This is our family of 5 at Christmas, in 1981.
We grew up in a suburb of Minneapolis in the 1980s.
Our childhood was filled with all of the typical adventures of a middle-class mid-west family that you’d expect.
The 1980s were kind to us.
Life was fun, simple and carefree.
In the mid-1980s, we moved to a new home that we later learned had a serious black mold issue.
Joy’s bedroom was in the basement and had some of the worst mold exposure. Since she was the youngest in the family, the mold exposure seemed to take hold of her much more than anyone else in our family. This seemed to present itself in physical ways during our first few years in this home, but there was no significant consequence.
Despite the grainy resolution, this is one of my favorite pictures of myself and Joy, taken around 1987.
I remember she and I had concocted a plan to get rich, so we had our mother make some popcorn and we made a small popcorn stand and would sell bags for .10 each. You know, I don’t think we ever sold a single bag but I remember the glee and euphoria of our little business plan and how much fun we had setting it all up.
This memory is sweeter now than it has ever been, given the circumstances of losing her.
Things that were seemingly simple with no inherent meaning have become unexplainably beautiful.
As the 1990s took hold, our family enjoyed traveling vacations and the three of us siblings went to school together and enjoyed similar hobbies and interests.
Joy, however, started dealing with nagging mental issues, with rotating and sometimes simultaneous anxiety and depression.
As she entered her teen years, these became more prominent and my parents tried combinations of medication and therapy to assist her.
Her health would ebb and flow but for the most part, she remained somewhat stable and lived an active life.
Throughout the 90s, Joy’s condition slowly worsened, as she experienced trial and error with both medication and natural treatments. She was admitted to mental health facilities at times to help stabilize things and results were mixed.
You should know that mental health struggles are not the only thing that defined Joy… it impacted her life for sure, but she was much more than this.
She was a daughter, sister, niece, friend, cousin, wife, mother, and much more to so many people.
I remember when we were kids, Joy and I would experience the typical “older brother” / “younger sister” relationship, filled with teasing, whining, scrapping, playing, imagining, goofing, and laughing. We grew up without a TV in our home and I recall fondly how when our family would visit relatives with a TV, how much Joy and I would just LOVE indulging ourselves in TV shows and pop culture.
Joy was an athlete - she was super fast, often beating boys in her class at private school in foot races… we also both enjoyed playing basketball, playing for the same private school, playing in the driveway, or at the local health club we’d often go to.
We both LOVED music and often shared the same musical tastes - we enjoyed going to concerts and sharing the latest in our musical collection.
We went to summer camps and youth group retreats and enjoyed hanging out in the same social circles for many years.
Joy loved people - she had many friends and had no fear of striking up conversations with strangers, making them feel valuable and noticed.
In the early 90s, there was a local roller rink called the Roller Garden and every Saturday night, it would be packed with teens and young adults.
I started going there in 1994 and Joy started coming with me about a year later; it would be our most bonding experience (seen above in 1995), stepping outside of the struggles and frustrations of life and enjoying this social experience of skating with other young adults and listening to our favorite music. We went each week religiously for 5 years and it was the greatest of times.
Back then, I hadn’t ever experienced any significant health issues in my own life so I was somewhat clueless as to what Joy was dealing with underneath it all… I had no idea.
Near the end of the 1990s, our family enjoyed vacationing in southwest Florida, seen here together on the left — on the right, Joy and I with our commonly used “sibling finger hug”. ;) As we grew older, we joked about how it was too awkward to hug each other every time we saw each other, so instead we’d do a little finger hug.
We must have greeted and said farewell that way hundreds of times over the years.
We carried this tradition until the very end. We even did it one final time the last time I saw her just weeks before she died, although I had no idea it would be the last time…
Joy married her high school sweetheart, Jason, in 2001. Shortly thereafter, she gave birth to her two children and started building her family.
Joy’s first townhouse had severe mold issues as well, which only exacerbated her issues and struggles. She had to rapidly exit this home in 2008 after a full remediation proved unfruitful.
What followed were several years of both rental homes and purchased homes that seemed to always reveal some sort of mold contamination that would trigger her symptoms - many times creating physical manifestation but nearly always worsening her anxiety.
In 2015 and 2018, she had some incredibly difficult phases where she’d be in a 3-4 month freefall into the absolute depths of despair.
She did a very good job of hiding this from the outside world with many friends being kept at arm’s length. The tough thing about mental struggles is that until you’ve suffered or known someone to suffer from it, it is generally difficult to understand and accept.
So, on the outside, she might look healthy and normal but inside, the war was raging.
During these two time periods, she’d retreat from the public eye for many months and then slowly emerge as she was able to find medication that helped stabilize her neurotransmitters.
As a family, it was very difficult for us to observe and we felt powerless to help, many times just sitting with her, holding her, watching over her.
But she always rebounded, so we just all thought that this disease would never claim her.
This picture was captured in late 2015, roughly 6 months after Joy’s first big tumble into mental hell.
She had bounced back from this crisis but had lost a lot of weight in the process. She was feeling much better here and I love this picture of her.
This photo was taken in late 2017, about 6 months before she once again fell into despair in 2018.
Even as I write this and go through many photos of Joy, it pains me to see the growing hurt in her eyes - as someone who has struggled with chronic pain and even bouts of mental struggles over the past 20 years, I can see the pain she fought so well to control.
Joy and I shared this bond of suffering and many times we’d see each other in public and sometimes we’d just slowly nod and mouth, “I know…” since we could pick up on the visual cues when one or both of us was feeling defeated in health issues.
Joy enjoyed several years of mental peace from 2019-2021.
2021 was one of the best years she had ever had as she found a medication that worked for her, and she had stable mental health for nearly that entire year.
She did so well in fact that she had a deep desire to be off of medication. After all, the medication had seemingly worked as her mind was at peace; she was a purist and wanted to experience life without side effects of medication.
I completely understand her motive and desire for clean health, but this decision would have such dire circumstances.
This is the last photo I have of Joy, taken just weeks before she passed - she is holding my youngest daughter here. Within days of taking this photo, in December of 2021, she made the ill-fated decision to stop her medication cold turkey and she never rebounded from the effects of withdrawal.
She hadn’t told anybody she stopped the medication because she didn’t want to worry them or create conflict and she felt so good, that she was confident she could push through whatever unpleasant withdrawal symptoms would arise.
However, after being on SSRI medication for the larger part of two decades, this is wishful thinking and although it took about three weeks to hit, the withdrawal agony came on like a raging hurricane.
In mid-January of 2022, she started showing signs of significant mental weakness, missing out on events and even admitting herself to the ER. As days turned to weeks, our family noticed that this was going to be another white-knuckled crisis and that we’d have to once again do our best to support her in this fight.
But on February 24, 2022, our world changed forever.
Joy had been admitted to a hospital a few days earlier but was discharged due to being “too stable to remain in the hospital”. My mother, who had been staying with her for weeks had just returned to her home in Wisconsin, along with Joy’s eldest daughter. Joy’s eldest son was at a missions training facility in Hawaii.
Joy was alone at home and her world closed in.
At around 10:00 am on February 24, she called her husband, Jason, whom I’ve worked with since 2000. He came to my office with Joy on speaker phone and I will NEVER forget her voice on that phone call and the mental anguish I could hear in her voice.
Her brain had betrayed her and it was on fire with tormented thoughts. She was so desperate for relief. She had to put the fire out.
Her husband raced home to be with her and for the most part, she had calmed her mind down and was resting in her bed as Jason was downstairs; this was around 5 pm.
AND THEN I GOT THE PHONE CALL.
I remember exactly where I was, what I was doing, and what everything looked like around me.
I was just leaving work to go home, feeling quite heavy with Joy’s situation.
I was outside and getting into my car as a Minnesota blizzard was raging. I saw the phone call coming from Jason and answered, hoping for a positive update about Joy.
The sound of anguish and terror in that man’s voice will forever haunt me… “PAULLLLLL!!!!! NOOOOOO……. SHE DID IT!!! SHE’S GONE!!!!! SHE’S DEADDDDD!!!!!”
God, this is so hard to recall and type…. I often don’t allow myself to go back to that night as it was just so traumatic.
I remember sitting in my car and screaming, “NOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” at the top of my lungs. I kept asking, “Are you sure?!?! Are you sure?!?!?”
The phone was finally passed to an officer who was at their house and as my voice trembled, I asked him, “Can you double-check? Are you sure? Is there any hope???” I desperately wanted to to hang onto any semblance of hope but he confirmed my deepest darkest fears. I told the officer that I would drive over right away to be with Jason.
After I hung up, I just stared.
Nothing seemed real.
My arms felt dead, my hands were numb and tingling… my stomach was filled with adrenaline and despair.
I called my wife right away and stumbled through words, informing her of the news and that I had to drive over there.
And then came the hardest call I’ve ever had to make, to inform my parents and sister.
I tried calling my parents and there was no answer. I then called my older sister… oh, that was so painful to tell her. How do you find the words to tell one sister that the other one has passed in such a tragic and violent way!?!? I don’t even remember the words I formed but she was at my parent’s house and I could hear as she relayed this horrible news to both my parents.
The sound of my parents weeping from shock, and grief as I was still reeling from the news myself. It was wretched and surreal.
I kept hoping that I’d wake from the nightmare; like when you have the worst possible dream and wake up and then how the relief washes over you. It was like that kind of feeling but deep inside you know that this is now reality and that there is no turning back.
Because of the inclement weather outside, it took about 90 minutes to drive 20 miles to their house and it was the most haunting drive of my life, as my brain tried to process how my little sister was gone and how our family would never be the same.
When I pulled up to their home, there were police cars all over with lights on. It was terrifying to look at. This was real. There was no misunderstanding. This was tragedy incarnate.
I spoke to an officer outside and he said I needed to wait in my car due to a firearm being used.
“OH NOOOO!!!!!!”, I thought...
Up to that point, I had assumed it was something like pills or - I don’t know - some more “peaceful” method… I don’t know what I expected, but I just did NOT expect that… it just made the entire situation that much more painful.
I sat in my car for about 45 minutes and just cried… I cried over the loss of my sister, over the violent way in which her life ended, over the pain she must have been feeling to end her suffering in this way, over my brother-in-law losing his wife, over my parents losing their daughter, over everything… I called some close friends and family as I sat in the dark as I needed desperately to talk to someone.
After what seemed like forever, the officer let me in and I timidly stepped into their home and ran to Jason, who was in the throes of anguish and despair and I just held him.
I didn’t know what else to do, so I held him…
I tried to be strong for him while my heart was breaking. After about 90 minutes of questioning from officers, he was free to go. We were sitting in my car outside and an officer said I may want to get out and stand in front of the car’s window as they were bringing Joy out of the home.
I hated this so much! I tried blocking the window so Jason couldn’t see it, but I will NEVER forget seeing my sister’s form in this black body bag… this absolutely HORIFYING and BEAUTIFUL shape.
I did not look away, and stared at what was the outline of my sister for the last time… this was my sister’s lifeless form, being carted off into the ambulance. Nearly three years later this image is seared into my brain and continues to haunt me.
Because he had nowhere to go, Jason came to our home that night and the drive to my house with him was deathly quiet and then very loud and then quiet again. “Did this really happen? Is this a dream? Is this a nightmare?” He and I didn’t even know what to say and we just spewed out emotions… I drove with my left hand on the steering wheel and my right arm around his shoulder.
As we arrived at my home, my children were all confused as to why Uncle Jason was with me and what was wrong with him. The anguish on their faces and their painful tears, as I told them that their “Aunt Joy” had died tonight, was like ripping open this fresh wound and the pain began the cycle again.
The next morning, all of our family descended upon our home, and the painful, trembling, weeping embrace of my older sister and parents was so needed and yet so difficult. To be a grown man and to hold your parents from falling over as they sob on your shoulders was such a horrible thing to experience.
As family converged upon our house for the next 24 hours, these walls were filled with sobbing, silence, tearful laughter recalling good memories, and every other emotion you don’t plan on experiencing with this type of loss.
But when everyone left later that second night, THAT is when despair hit.
I went in to take a shower and I recall sobbing at a level I’ve never done before… reality set in, people had left, and quiet in my home gave way to every horrible emotion with the volume turned on high.
I wept and would say out loud, “I’m so sorry, Joy!!! I’m SORRY!!!!”… I desperately wanted to speak to her to let her know how I felt about her and I was unable to communicate it to her. I loved her so much at that moment and just wanted her to hear that from my soul to hers.
Losing someone in this manner creates grief that is so unpredictable – over the next several days and weeks there were random unexpected waves of grief, apathy, desolation, optimism, anger, and then… back to grief for another cycle.
Weeks after she passed, my mother, older sister and I were going to help clean up and prepare Joy’s home for a quick sale. As difficult as this would be, how do you enter back into a place of hell?
I knew that we’d have to see and enter “the room”…. where this unspeakable act happened.
I am not one to run from difficulty, so I thought I would enter into the room and just try to exist in that space - in that space where life met death.
I wanted to bring something good into this space where something so horrible had happened.
I recalled Joy’s favorite song, “Falling Down”, by music artist David Meece. When Joy and I would go roller skating together, she would ALWAYS request this song to skate to. It was a source of life to her during her struggles and it brought her happiness and peace.
So I sat in that room, which had just been gutted, cleaned, and ripped down to the bare walls; just a sterile white room now, as a witness to Joy’s last moments on earth.
I sat on the ground, put my palms on the floor, and played the song on my phone’s speaker… tears streamed as my older sister, Marisha and my mom stepped in the doorway.
This is the song we played in that room - in that space where Joy entered eternal rest, her mind no longer tortured by this horrible disease.
Sitting in that space with this song playing… it was holy.
It was a moment with the supernatural.
We accepted what had happened here and we did our best to bring life and light to this room of darkness.
We would survive. We would endure. We could remember Joy and honor her.
This death from suicide would not define her.
She was more than this. She was so much more than this.
She was my sister and I loved her.
How do you deal with immense grief like this?
The word "gratitude" comes to mind.
It helps to intentionally be thankful that Joy was my sister for 40 years.
It helps to focus on the good that Joy brought into my life - the memories, the gifts along the way, the laughter, the inside jokes, all of it... yes, there is sadness but there is also so much good to cling to!
Those are the memories that must be embraced.
There are good days and bad days. Weeks go by and life seems normal and then the grief and memories come back to remind me of what happened. We suffer but we move forward.
We take the mantle of pain from those who have suffered and passed suddenly... their suffering has ended, and we increase our suffering as we carry on. This is undesired but it is an innate part of the deep connection of the human experience.
If you are struggling with mental health and have thoughts of self-harm, please don't fight this battle alone! Call 988 or reach out to someone who can help you through this difficult period. Life can be very, very difficult at times but it is worth fighting for.
