The year was 2006. I was 25 years old, newly engaged, and life felt like it was finally starting to line up. I had just bought the engagement ring—one my mom had actually lent me the money for, a detail that still makes me smile when I think about it. She believed in me, believed in love, and believed that I’d make something of myself. I paid her back quickly, proud that I could. She thought the ring was perfect.

My mom was a fighter. She had dropped out of school as a young single mom, clawed her way back through night school, courses, and certifications, and earned her spot at the City of Saint John. She’d worked for everything she had. But in 2006, her world started to crumble. Trouble with her boss. Battles up the chain. Union reps who turned out to be useless. She eventually took a leave, unable to sleep, relying on pills to get through the nights. For someone who had fought for everything, it was like watching the floor get ripped out from beneath her.

Then, one October day, she was gone.

Her Dodge Caravan vanished with her. GAP-938—I still remember the license plate like it was tattooed on my brain. My father called to ask if I’d seen her. I hadn’t. I was his son, not by blood but by choice. He’d been there since I was five. He was a hard man, old school, commanding respect with his voice alone. He didn’t show emotion. And I wanted to be just like him. I tried. Thank God I failed.

The search stretched on. I remember hearing her van’s description over the radio. I remember a reporter interviewing my dad, and reading the article later—my sisters’ names printed, other relatives mentioned. But not mine. Her firstborn. In the beginning, it had been just her and me. No stepdad, no sisters, no one else. Just us. And in the moment I most needed to feel like her son, I was invisible.

I tried to take matters into my own hands. One day, I drove to Moncton without a plan—just hoping her van would be at the airport, that maybe she’d boarded a flight. I cried the entire way back. When my wife called to ask where I was, I snapped. “Do you have any better ideas? Is your fucking mom missing?” The world was collapsing and I had no control over any of it.

A week later, the phone rang in the early morning. My wife answered. Her voice was already broken when she handed it to me. It was my father.
“They found Mom.”
“Where is she?” I asked.
“It’s not good. She’s gone.”

And just like that, everything I believed in, everything I thought I understood about life, cracked in half.

Promises at the Casket

For three days, my mom lay in a casket. Cold. Pale. Stiff.

The first time I saw her, I couldn’t do it with anyone else. I had to walk in alone. Her hands were folded neatly, her eyes closed. It didn’t even look like her anymore. I had to leave. But I came back later, just the two of us—because that’s how it had started. Just me and her.

I stood there and made promises. Promises that still haunt me and guide me:

• I’d take care of my sisters.
• I’d make sure they knew how much she loved them.
• I’d support my father.
• I’d be a better person, like maybe this was somehow on me for not being good enough.

And then I said goodbye.

The funeral home overflowed with people. Some loved her. Some just wanted to be part of the story. I sat on my parents’ couch surrounded by faces I didn’t recognize, people bringing food, hugs, words that felt empty. I felt invisible again.

And then Dave—my father’s cousin—walked in. He had driven seven hours from Boston. He didn’t say a word to anyone. He walked straight up to me, hugged me, and that hug saved me.

The day before the funeral, I kissed my mother on the forehead and placed a book in her casket: Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff. She’d given it to me years earlier, when I was an angry teenager. It felt right to return it. Maybe it was the message. Maybe it was just a gesture. But it was the last time I saw her.

The Ones Left Behind

The hardest part wasn’t the funeral, or the shock, or even the quiet after the phone call. It was telling my sisters.

Jessica was 10. Emily was 8. They were kids, and suddenly I wasn’t just their brother anymore—I was something else. The three of us, with my dad and my girlfriend (who would later become my wife), went to my Mémé’s house where the girls were staying. The air was heavy, impossible to disguise.

Jessica’s eyes lit up when she saw us. “Did you find Mom?” she asked, hopeful. When my dad said, “Yes, we did,” she smiled. Relief flooded her face. For two seconds, she believed. Then came the words: “Mom died.”

I will never forget the way that smile shattered. Something broke in Jessica that day, something that never fully healed. Emily, on the other hand, sat still. Stone-faced. Absorbing the impossible. She didn’t cry right away. She was quiet, holding it all in, reaching for a comfort that only silence could provide.

That moment shifted my entire role in their lives. From day one, they were more than sisters. I’d changed their diapers as a teenager, learned how to hold a baby with them in my arms. I wasn’t prepared to be their parent, but suddenly, I had no choice. I owed it to my mother.

I wasn’t enough as just a brother anymore. I had to be more.

What Followed

What came after wasn’t clean or noble. It was anger. Years of it. Anger at her boss. At the union. At the pills. At the silence. At myself.

But anger only burns for so long before it hollows you out. Somewhere along the way, I started running. At first, just to move. Then, to breathe. Eventually, to survive. Running became the only place I could process the chaos, the guilt, the promises I’d made. It became Mental Miles—a lifeline disguised as a hobby.

It’s strange how life reshapes itself. My mother’s death fractured everything I knew, but it also forced me to build something new. I became a husband, a father, a contractor, a runner, a man still trying to keep promises made in a funeral home 17 years ago.

And I’m still figuring it out.

This Isn’t About Answers

This blog, this book, this story—it isn’t about answers. Suicide doesn’t leave them behind. It leaves silence, and questions that echo for decades.

This is for the ones left behind. For the kids who had to grow up too soon, for the spouses who were blindsided, for the siblings who never got to say the right goodbye. It’s about what happens after. When there’s no map. When you’re standing in the wreckage trying to breathe.

I lost my mother to suicide. Those words still feel impossible to write, but they’re true. And if you’ve read this far, maybe they’re true for you too—in your own way.

If that’s the case, know this: you’re not invisible.