Today, I took a break at a nearby coffee shop with a colleague who I’ve been working with for over two years. I knew a while back that mental illness affected her family, but recently I found out via a message she sent to me attached to the donation she gave to my AFSP drive that her brother was recently hospitalized for a relapse in alcoholism and seriously expressed a desire to harm himself. We spoke a lot about her family’s struggle to grasp her brother’s problem and her own desire to help him despite distance. Her family, like mine, doesn’t openly talk about mental illness or depression, but her parents have already started attending a support group for families who are touched by at a local hospital. I was pleasantly surprised to hear this, and sadly wished that my parents could have even considered for a second.

It was really hard for me at times to listen to what she was saying, not because I didn’t want to listen, but because it hit so close to home for me in terms of her fears, her frustrations, and her anger about the way her parents were handling the situation, and the way society handles or refuses to address mental illness. Her fear of losing her big brother is the same fear I had of losing Ed in the months leading up to his suicide. Her feeling of helplessness is the same as how I felt. “I’m scared that next year, I’m going to be joining you in your fight, that I will lose my brother the same way you lost yours three years ago,” she said to me. I had to keep my tears back as she looked me in the eye while saying that.

She told me she wished more people would be open about talking about mental illness in the way I was, and she was really happy to have the opportunity to speak with me. “You’re just so brave to share your story and all the details of your brother’s life through your fundraiser,” she said to me. The truth is that I don’t really think what I’m doing is brave. I just think it would be very selfish if I never tried to help anyone else who may be suffering from mental illness after what my brother went through. I wasn’t able to do enough to help him. But if I could do something small to help someone in the future, I think that is the very least I could do in his memory. I can’t fail my brother and what he meant to me.