Two weeks ago, I was in Sydney visiting an old friend. We went to Coasters Retreat and drank champagne, ate a ridiculous amount of delicious food, swam in the ocean, basked in the sun, and generally made the most of every moment. It had been a long time since I’d felt so present in the ‘now’ that I didn’t start my five-and-a-half-hour journey home until 6pm on the Sunday night.

I arrived at my parent’s house at 11:30pm, and it was empty. Odd, I thought. Every odd. It was only until after I had unpacked the car that I saw the note on the kitchen table. “We’ve gone to Marnie’s. She’s OK. We’ll explain when we get home.”

My heart started to race. If they’re still at Marnie’s (my grandma), then they’re not at the hospital. So, it can’t be that bad, I reasoned. I called my dad, and he said they’d be home in half an hour and would talk then. Something was off; his voice was thick with it.

I watched the clock. I couldn’t sit still. I unpacked, I tidied the kitchen, and I was halfway through folding the laundry that had been left in the loungeroom when my parents arrived. My mum entered the room first. She couldn’t even get out the words “Sit down,” before she lost composure and her face crumpled.

I sat on the couch, she took my hand, and she told me that my 15-year-old cousin had taken her own life that night.

My mum held me close to her side, and it was moments that felt like years before the shock released its grip on my chest and allowed the tears to flow. She stepped back from me to explain how my cousin had ended her life, and I felt it like a punch to the gut. You always read that expression in books, and I’ve never thought it realistic to have such a physical reaction to words, but I remember nearly doubling over at hearing my cousin’s choice of method. It felt cold, brutal, and ancient. And it gave me such a vivid picture that the raw reality left me winded.

It was mere moments after this that I began to realise how complicated grief is, and how everyone deals with it differently.

I’ve been fortunate enough in my nearly 30 years to not have attended too many funerals. The ones I have attended were of people who had long eulogies and the photo on the front of the service booklet had them sporting grey hair. They had long lives. Their deaths, while terribly sad and heart-wrenching, were not what you would call tragic. I have never experienced a grief such as this.

I sat on the couch crying, processing, thinking, face in hands, my parents on either side, questions streaming through my mind like bullets. Many were questions I had answers to, if I had thought logically. Why!? She had a mental illness. Her mind was her worst enemy, and she lived in a dark cloud most of the time. She had struggled for years. How were my aunt and uncle, and their boys? Devastated. Shattered. Heart-broken.

And many were questions we would never have answers to. What was she thinking of, in the end? Was she at peace with her decision, or was it an experiment gone terribly wrong?

While my mind raced, my mum started to speak. She asked me if I’d noticed the trees my dad had trimmed today. She told me about the garden beds they had built at my sister’s place the day before. She told me she had left an iced coffee in the fridge for me – had I seen it? And was I still going to drive three hours to my job the next day?

I don’t know! Why are you talking about trees and iced coffee when a 15-year-old girl just took her life!?!? I wanted to yell at her. But in the next moment, I realised that my mum couldn’t cope with the silence. She needed to fill the space we were sitting in with words, with noise. My dad, on the other hand, just wanted to hold me. I imagined he was thinking about if he was in my uncle’s shoes. The grief he would feel from losing a daughter.

But all I wanted to do was give my cousin a hug. Not to tell her that “It would be OK someday”. I had no right to say that. She had a mental illness, and there is no proof to say that there was ever going to be a psychologist or pill right enough to help her manage her illness. No assurances that she would ever naturally overcome her illness with time.

Not to tell her “I’m sorry I didn’t reach out to you,” because not only would that be making it more about my guilt than her passing, but also because no matter how close we were or weren’t, it is unlikely to have made any difference to her decision. She had many people around her who loved her, supported her, and were close to her.

No, what I really wanted to do, was hug my cousin, and say “I’m here”. Because I just couldn’t bear the thought of her being alone.

After a little while, I told my parents I wanted to go to bed. I’m an internaliser. I need space and quiet to process. I tossed and turned for hours trying my best to fall asleep, but I couldn’t stop thinking about my cousin. I laid there looking at the ceiling; the darkness had never felt so massive and oppressive. I held my hand in front of my face and couldn’t see it at all. This is probably what it was like for her, I speculated. She couldn’t even see herself in the darkness of her mind, let alone a way out.

The next 10 days felt years long and unpredictably turbulent.

I spoke to my sister. We cried as we talked about how alone our cousin must have felt in her mental illness, and how she had been alone in the end. We cried as we talked about her family, and how we just could not fathom their grief. And we cried about the last moments we had remembered spending with her, weeks and months prior.

I sat in a tractor spraying weeds for several days which gave me distance from the whole situation. In some ways it probably wasn’t the best decision to be away from family, but it did give me the opportunity to be alone and process my thoughts and feelings. I watched the sunrise and cried. I listened to slow music and cried. I called my best friend and cried.

I began thinking about why I was crying. What was I actually upset about? I came to realise that grief for most people – myself included – can be broken down into just a few things.

• The past – in my instance, I grieved because I regretted not making more of an effort to really know my cousin closer; I hadn’t made an effort to be a real support for her. I grieved because I thought of the pain and loneliness she would have felt. But she was at peace now – she no longer felt these things, so why was I still so upset about them?
• The future – I grieved all of the family reunions, Christmases, holidays, her 18^th birthday and all the things she would not be here for.
• The unknown – Why? What was the last straw for her? Could we have prevented it? What was she thinking in the last moments?
• And then there is the grief we place on ourselves. Like my dad, putting himself in my uncle’s shoes, thinking about how he would feel if it had been one of his daughters, grieving a false reality. Like my sister and I, trying to comprehend the grief our aunt and uncle would have felt, inadvertently taking on their grief as our own.

I’d recently finished listening to the audiobook of Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now – in fact, I had finished listening to it on my drive home that fateful Sunday night. Tolle talks about how accepting the ‘isness’ of the ‘now’ brings inner peace, and it hadn’t made sense to me until one morning as I sat in that tractor watching the sun inch over the horizon. If I could accept that my cousin was gone, I would be able to relinquish the grief associated with the past, the future, the unknowns and everything we couldn’t control. That’s the theory, at least. I’m still working on it.

I would give anything for this to not be our reality, but I’ve also slowly come to accept what is. I would not say I’m at peace with it. Or relieved of all the grief. I’m no Tolle, and I don’t really strive to be, if I’m honest. I think it should hurt when you lose someone. I want to feel the grief. Maybe that will help me be a better support to the cousins I still have. Maybe it will help me identify signs in other young people, and do more for them than what I did with her. Maybe grieving is a way of honouring someone’s life. Just as learning to do better, be better and make every moment count is a way of honouring a life.

Who knows. I certainly don’t have all the answers. But I’m going to make every moment count, none-the-less.