Tomorrow will be the seven month anniversary of my brother's suicide.
If there is one thing I have learned since then, it's that however much I miss him, even if I wallow in sadness forever, life just has to go on.
I got engaged just before the new year. It was a wonderful, exciting, happy end to a pretty shitty year. My engagement to a wonderful man has brought back some happiness into our lives, a feeling I thought we'd never find again. It's a different kind of happiness, tinged with the knowledge that my brother won't be at my wedding, but it's still happiness.
A few days after he proposed, AK asked me if I was sad that I couldn't tell my brother about our engagement. I told him the truth--I'm not. I'm sad he won't be at my wedding, my first child's birth, and every other happy event to come. But I'm not sad I can't tell him about my engagement. Because he knows. And life has to go on without him.
