Hello Penelope,
I am so sorry to hear of all your losses and all the pain they have caused you. It is heart-breaking and I am not at all surprised to hear how much you are struggling with all the pain.
I know I am coming to this conversation late, but I just wanted to respond to some of the things I notice from your posts.
I do have some experience of losing people to suicide as well as to illness and old age.
What I would say is that whatever the way you lose someone, you can always find something to blame yourself for. We all go through the ‘what ifs’ and ‘if onlys’ – if only I had done this, that would not have happened; if only I had done that, that would not have happened. The truth is that we all do the best we can with the information we have at the time, but things happen the way they do and despite anything we did or didn’t do, it would probably have happened as it did anyway in the end. No one lives forever and the past is the past. We cannot change it, so we have to accept it, learn from it if we can and move forward and find a way to live with it. Self blame is a natural part of grief, but that doesn't mean we should accept it. In fact, I think you actively have to fight against it.
Grief, in my experience, is largely about self help. Those who haven't been through it will never understand until they have. Others just don't know what to say, so hope we will just get over it and everything can 'go back to normal', but it can't because you are living in your own personal new normal and grief has made a different person of you and has made your world different, so there is no return to the old normal. You have to build a new life around the new normal and a new you. Not an easy thing to do when you are at your lowest ebb either. It will take time and determination and strength and all those seem in short supply when you are suffering so.
With suicide, what I have learned is that people are responsible for their own decisions and actions and although some suicide attempts can be a cry for help, others are determined actions that the individual has made up their mind to do and to succeed in and often, in these cases, lots of people have tried to help them, but they have decided to do what they did anyway. In the end, that was their choice and you cannot blame yourself. It is not your fault and to punish yourself, as you have been doing, just makes it worse, because it is likely nothing you could have done would have made any difference. You did the best with the information you had at the time. It was NOT YOUR FAULT.
The other thing I notice from your posts is how strong a person you are. It is clear that you don’t see that in yourself, but you are. Despite all the pain and the grief and the exhaustion, you still want to be there for your son and to make your future with him as happy and positive as possible. You clearly have an enormous amount of strength and a huge capacity to love. Love is a super-power, especially in your circumstances, with all you have had to contend with. Unfortunately, it also means you feel pain to a great degree and you have fallen into the trap of denying love to yourself. You cannot go on being so punishing towards yourself and must cut yourself some slack.
So often we direct all our love towards those around us and forget to direct any of it towards ourselves. So learn to love yourself a little, Penelope. Stop blaming yourself for things. Let go of the past. Start being kind to yourself and forgiving of any failings. No one is perfect and no one does the right thing all the time. We all make mistakes. The important thing is not to keep ‘beating yourself up’ about things. Just learn from your mistakes and from those of others and use those to make the future better. It was not your fault.
You have written a lot in your posts here about what happened, but what I found helped me was to write down privately what happened and how I felt about it all and any thoughts I have about it, acknowledging any failings I felt I had at that time. That helped me understand all those feelings, get them out of my system and understand it all better and accept it all. Once you have done that, I think you can begin to heal.
You can’t change the past, so you have to accept it. What you can do is put it behind you and accept that your questions will never be answered, but learn from it all and use it to make your future and those of the people you still have with you better.
Let go of the guilt, Penelope. What happened happened and you can’t change it. You can’t explain it either. All you can do is respect the decisions of those you have lost and put it behind you and use it to make your future better. Reurrect the good memories you have of those you have lost; the good times they had. Don't just think about the end of their lives. That was only a small part of it. It wan't all bad. To end it for whatever reason, was their choice. You have to accept that. You can't change it and probably could not have done when they were still here. Someone determined to end their life can be very secretive about it and will do their best to hide how they feel from others because they don't want to upset them and don't feel telling anyone will help. It is not your fault you did not see what was coming or could not prevent it.
It is not true that you have deserved this either. Who knows if anyone has ever had a former life or will ever be reincarnated? You are just adding to your own pile of blame unnecessarily. Please don't succumb to such thoughts. The acts of others are about them, not about you. They were not thinking of you in deciding to do what they did or they would not have done it.
Stop blaming yourself. Start loving yourself. Concentrate on the things that make you feel better. Write down the good things that happen to you each day. Allow yourself to heal. You can’t change the past, but you can make the future what ever you want it to be. Be positive and let go of the negative view you have of yourself. Start being kind to yourself. Acknowledge your strengths and your good qualities. You are actually an optimistic person and someone who looks for the good in life. Encourage that side of yourself, Penelope. Please stop beating yourself up.
Wishing you well.