Grieving Longer Than They Lived: A Suicide Loss Milestone

There are many ways to measure time after a suicide loss. Anniversaries. Birthdays. Seasons. The slow accumulation of years. Each marker carries its own weight, its own particular ache.

I’m approaching one I’ve never seen written about before. I’m calling it the Balance Point.

John lived an extraordinary 6,244 days. He died by suicide on April 10, 2009, at seventeen years old. As a former scientist, I tend to look at things analytically. The Balance Point arrives 12,489 days after his birth, the mathematical moment when the days since his death finally outnumber the days he lived. But mathematics can’t truly measure what really matters.

The spreadsheet may tell one story, but the heart tells another story.

What the Balance Point does is give grief something concrete to hold onto. Time often feels like it stopped in the early days after a suicide death. We need markers to prove that time is actually moving forward, even when grief makes every moment feel frozen in place.

They aren’t equal units on a timeline. They’re dense with meaning, packed with presence, heavy with love. Many of the days since feel hollow by comparison, spaces where he should be but isn’t. That hollowness doesn’t diminish with time. You just learn to carry it differently.

How We Count the Days After Suicide Loss

In the early days after John’s death, I counted everything.

Hours

Days

Weeks

Months

Each milestone felt both unbearable and necessary to mark. Three days without him. One week. Two weeks. A month. Every single day seemed like an impossible distance to cross, another 24 hours survived without my only son.

Eventually, the counting shifts. The days give way to months, then years. We brace ourselves for the anniversary of the death, the calendar event that brings everything rushing back.

The years become our new measure, our new way of marking how long we’ve been walking this path. Seventeen years for me now. Seventeen trips around the sun without John.

It’s a marker most of us never imagined we’d reach, and one I’ve never seen written about. I hope talking about it helps someone who is quietly doing the same math.

It’s also worth discussing something the math makes plain, the Balance Point arrives only when the person who died was young. If you lost a parent late in their life, the numbers may never tip this way. But when a child, a teenager, or a young adult dies by suicide, someone whose days were cut short long before they should have been, the Balance Point becomes one of those particular stings that belongs specifically to young loss. The numbers are a reminder of how much life was taken.

A seventeen-year-old doesn’t get a Balance Point. His survivors do. No one warns you that one day you’ll be counting in this direction.

I’ve written before about other significant markers on this path. On Day 2,922 (eight years after John’s death), I wrote about the gift that emerged from my grief, the compassion and empathy that grew from the support others gave us in those early days, and how I learned to pay it forward.

On the 10-year anniversary, I reflected on how few people were still thinking about John, how very few mentioned his name unprompted anymore. It had fallen to my wife Teri, our daughter, and me to keep John’s name and memories alive.

Then came Day 5,000, when I reflected on how impossible it seemed that so much time had passed, yet how those 5,000 days of loss would never outweigh the 6,244 days John was with us. Each of these markers represents a different stage of understanding, a different way of learning to carry love and loss together.

The Weight of Presence and Absence

The Portuguese have a word for what many of us experience, saudade. It describes a deep emotional state of longing for something or someone who is absent, a presence of absence. It’s melancholic yet beautiful, acknowledging that love persists even when the person we love is gone. Saudade captures something that English language can’t quite reach.

At his sister’s wedding, his picture sat on the altar at the church so he could be with all of us, so we could see him even if only in spirit. I mentioned him in my father-of-the-bride speech because he belonged with our family in that moment.

The births of his niece and nephew, children he’ll never hold but who will grow up knowing their uncle’s story. His niece carries his memory in her middle name, an homage to the uncle she will hear many stories about.

Birthdays and holidays where we visit his resting place, tell his stories, feel the particular ache of his missing piece in our family.

This saudade, this presence in absence, isn’t a comforting fiction. It’s real in the way John shapes our decisions. It’s real in how we show up for other families walking this same devastating path, in the way his death changed us into people who understand suffering and survival in ways we never wanted to learn.

We look forward to more days where John will be with us in spirit. More milestones he’ll miss in body but not in impact. More moments where we’ll feel that particular combination of grief and gratitude, the bittersweet awareness that loving him means carrying both his life and his death forward. More days of saudade, of feeling his absence as a kind of presence that shapes who we are.

This kind of bond has a name in grief research. Continuing bonds describes the ongoing relationship survivors maintain with the person who died, not as a failure to let go, but as a healthy and natural part of long-term grief.

John didn’t leave our lives when he died. He changed how he exists in them. That distinction matters.

What the Longer Arc of Grief Actually Looks Like

When people talk about grief, they often reach for the Kübler-Ross stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. These were never meant to be a linear path, and they certainly weren’t designed to describe the long-term reality of living after a suicide loss. They may describe some aspects of the early chaos, the initial survival. But they miss what comes after.

They miss the longer arc that really matters, the years of learning to integrate loss into life, the slow transformation from a person who cannot imagine surviving to a person who is actually living. Integrated grief (where you carry your loss alongside your life, where both can be true at once) becomes the critical threshold to work toward. Research on suicide bereavement, including the work of Dr. John Jordan, one of the leading clinical voices on this topic, consistently shows that integration, not recovery, is the more honest and more useful frame for where survivors are trying to go.

In the early days after John’s death, integrated grief seemed impossible. How could I ever live a full life again? How could joy and sorrow coexist? How could I honor John’s memory while also honoring my own continued existence?

The concept of a Balance Point would have seemed like a cruel countdown, a finish line I never wanted to cross.

But here I am, approaching it. Not because time heals all wounds, because it doesn’t. Time just marches forward, indifferent to our pain, relentless in its motion. The question isn’t whether time passes. The question is how we choose to mark it, and how we choose to do the hard work of healing on our way through it.

Choosing What the Markers Mean

I’ve chosen to mark time by facilitating a support group, by writing this blog, by showing up for other families in those devastating early days when survival seems impossible. I’ve been honored that hundreds of families have allowed me to learn their stories, to sit with them in their darkest hours, and to begin healing alongside them.

I’ve marked time by learning that I can laugh without forgetting, love without betraying, live without leaving John behind. I’m working on another blog post about the memory bands we made in his honor that say “Live, Love, Laugh”, themes that he taught us about that we need in our lives,

My professional career was fulfilling work. But that’s not how I measure my time after losing John. Losing him taught me there are more important things than professional accomplishments. The people who held our safety lines in those early days showed me what mattered. I’ve spent these years trying to offer that same lifeline to others.

As I wrote on Day 2,922, I came to understand the gift hidden in my grief. Not the loss itself, but the compassion and empathy that grew from how others showed up for us when we needed it most. That gift transformed how I measure my days. Not by professional achievements, but by the support groups facilitated, the families helped, the stories shared, the hope offered to those who can’t yet see it for themselves. I’ve seen some of the darkest corners of the human experience. I hope to shine some light for those wandering in that darkness after a suicide loss.

Grief researchers call what can happen over the long arc of this work post-traumatic growth, the way that devastating loss can, over time, lead to a deeper sense of purpose, stronger relationships, and a changed understanding of what actually matters. It doesn’t diminish the pain. It doesn’t mean the loss was worth it or that the person had to die for you to grow. But it is real, and many survivors who’ve been at this for years will recognize it in themselves even if they’ve never had a name for it.

Those 6,244 days John lived still outweigh everything that’s come after. They always will. A book is not defined by its last page, but by all the pages of stories and memories it contains.

But the days since his death aren’t worthless or wasted. They’re days where his impact continues to ripple outward, where his story helps other families survive their own losses, where his life, not just his death, continues to matter.

The View from Here

Standing here, approaching the Balance Point, I can look back at seventeen years of grief and forward to however many years remain. John is present in all of them. Not present the way I wish he could be, not present in body and conversation. But present in the way that love persists beyond death, in the way that losing someone changes the shape of your life forever, in the way that carrying him forward becomes your life’s work.

I’ll be honest about something else this milestone has stirred. There’s a quiet, uncomfortable guilt in recognizing that I’ve been living, building, laughing, finding meaning, for longer now than John had the chance to live. That’s not easy to sit with.

Many survivors carry some version of this at milestones, a sense that continuing on is somehow a betrayal of the person who didn’t get to continue. It isn’t. Moving beyond that guilt is some of the hardest work this grief asks of us. But the life you’re living, the meaning you’re making, the ways you carry the person you lost forward, none of that dishonors them. It’s the opposite.

The scale will never balance. And maybe that’s exactly right. Because John’s 6,244 days were never meant to be matched or equaled or balanced out. They were meant to be honored, remembered, and carried forward into all the days that follow. In my heart, his life will always be bigger than his death.

You Are Not Alone in This

Time marches on. And I march with it, carrying my son in my heart, learning day by day what it means to live with integrated grief, to survive a suicide loss, to find meaning even when the destination isn’t one I would have chosen.

That’s the view from the Balance Point. And from here, I can see that survival is possible. Even when it seems impossible. Even on the days when the weight on the scale feels crushing. Even after the suicide loss of my son.

If you’re reading this because you’re approaching your own Balance Point, or because you’re wondering if you’ll ever survive this grief, please know that you’re not alone. Many of us have walked this path, and we’re still walking it.

And if you’re in the early days, if seventeen years sounds like an impossible distance and the Balance Point seems like a concept from a different lifetime, I want to share something with you. The fact that someone can reach seventeen years and still love fiercely, still carry the person they lost, still find meaning in the carrying, that isn’t luck. It’s the result of one day at a time, one week at a time, one year at a time.

You don’t have to get to seventeen years today.

You just have to get through today.

Posts You May Also Like

• Understanding Grief: Making Sense of Your Experience. Explores the phases of grief and what integrated grief looks like, offering a more honest framework than the stages model for long-term survivors.
• Time After Loss: Finding Your Way Forward. Looks at how our relationship with time shifts after suicide loss and how to move forward without the pressure to “be over it.”
• What Does Healing Look Like?. Reframes healing as a non-linear process and helps readers recognize the progress they’re making even when it doesn’t feel like progress.
• Finding Your People: The Healing Power of Suicide Loss Support Groups. Explains why connecting with others who truly understand suicide loss can change everything, especially in the long stretches of grief that come after the first year.
• Ritual and Remembrance. Offers ways to honor and carry the person you lost through intentional rituals, especially on milestones and anniversaries.