Dia found the photograph when she was nine.
She was looking for sellotape in her mother's drawer, the one in the bedside table that was always slightly difficult to open. There it was underneath some papers. Two girls, maybe seventeen, arms around each other, laughing at something outside the frame. One of them was her mother, younger than Dia had ever seen her. The other girl she did not recognise.
She asked about it that evening. Her mother took the photograph, looked at it for a moment, and put it back in the drawer. Said it was an old friend. Said it in a way that meant Do not ask again. Dia did not ask again.
She is thirty-one now. That means that she has been thinking about that photograph for twenty-two years.
What September Always Was

There is a date every September when her mother goes somewhere. Dia cannot follow.
Not physically. Kavita is at the kitchen table, drinking her tea and asking about Dia's week. Something behind her eyes closes in a way that Dia learned not to push against. It lasts a few days. Then it lifts. Nobody in the family talks about it. It is just something that happens in September. Why do some houses have a particular smell or a particular silence? This one has September.
Dia is thirty-one, and she has only just started to understand what September is.

How She Found Out 

She found out the way adults do. Not through a conversation but through accumulation. 
A comment from a mausi at a wedding three years ago, half a sentence, quickly swallowed. Something her mother said once when she had had more wine than usual. Something about how you think you know someone, only to realise you didn't know them at all. She’d catch herself and change the subject.  Dia let her because she has always let her.
The photograph was of her mother's closest friend from school. Her name was Rohini. She died when they were both eighteen. Dia's mother has carried this for thirty-two years. She has carried it mostly alone, the way her generation carried things. They didn’t have the language that might have made it lighter.
Suicide loss does not belong only to the person who experiences it first. It moves through families. It sits in drawers. It becomes the thing nobody explains, and yet, everyone feels.

What World Suicide Prevention Day Actually Is

Dia did not know any of this on September 10 last year. She knew the date was significant. She knew her mother went somewhere unreachable. She did not know why. She had spent twenty-two years deciding it was not her place to ask.
What she knows now is that not asking was its own kind of failure. A quiet one. The kind that happens when you love someone, and you decide their grief is too fragile to touch. 
World Suicide Prevention Day exists, in part, for this. Not just for the people who are struggling now. For the Kavitas who have been holding something since they were nineteen. For the Kavitas who have never had anyone sit down and say, ‘Tell me about Rohini. What was she like? What do you miss? What is it like to have loved someone for thirty-two years after they are gone?’
Nobody had said that to Kavita. Not once. Not in thirty-two years.

What Dia Finally Did

Dia said it in October. A month after she finally understood what September was.
She did not plan it. They were washing up after dinner, and she just said it. ‘Amma. Tell me about Rohini.’
Her mother went very still.
Then she told her. Not everything, not that first night, but some of it. The laugh. The way she used to save the last bite of anything good and offer it to whoever was nearest. The morning Kavita found out, and she did not know what to do with her hands. The phone number she used to call for years after, not expecting anyone to answer, just to hear her voice. Until one day, the number was reassigned. A stranger picked up, and that was the end of that.
Dia stood at the sink and listened. She did not say it was okay. She did not say she was in a better place. She did not say anything much at all. She just stayed there and let her mother talk about Rohini for the first time in thirty-two years.
Later, her mother said, ‘I did not know I was still so sad about it.’

What Grief After Suicide Actually Does To A Family

Grief after suicide does not have an expiry date. That is something Dia understands now and wishes someone had told her earlier. The person going blank in September is not stuck or unable to move on. They are carrying something that was never given the space to be properly held. It will keep asking for that space every September until someone finally offers it.
The thing about suicide bereavement is that it is almost never just the person who lost someone. It is the people who love that person. The children who grow up sensing something without understanding it. The partners who learn not to ask. The families who develop entire architectures of silence around a grief that nobody named.
Suicide prevention includes this. The breaking of those silences. Asking questions that feel too large. The sitting with someone while they talk about a person they loved thirty-two years ago and letting that be enough.

What It Actually Takes

What Dia did is not complicated. It did not require training, the right words, or any particular skill. It just required her to stop deciding that her mother's grief was too fragile to touch. To ask the question she had not been asking for twenty-two years. To stay at the sink and listen.
That is what this day is asking of all of us, in different ways. Not to have the answers. Not to fix anything. Just to ask. Just to stay.

The Photograph 

The photograph is still in the drawer. Kavita showed it to Dia properly for the first time in November. Told her Rohini's name. Told her what she was like. Told her she had the best laugh of anyone she had ever known.
Dia looked at the photograph. Two seventeen-year-old girls are laughing at something outside the frame.
She understands now what was on her mother's face when she looked at it all those years ago. Not just grief. The grief of suicide loss, which is grief with questions attached that never fully resolve. Which is grief that carries the weight of the unanswerable alongside the weight of the missing.

Which is, still, after thirty-two years, love.
Dia did not know where to start either. She just knew she could not keep watching September happen to her mother without doing something.
iDare's support team is available via chat or call; no appointment needed, no waiting. Certified mental health professionals are available and ready to listen. If you are carrying something like this, or sitting next to someone who is, that is enough reason to reach out. Talk to us on the Support Vertical on the iDare app!

Image Credits: UnSplash