How Iife knocked me down

I was on my way to work. I was studying economics at this time. But more for the student status then actually studying. I was already dreaming and working to become a poker player.

My stepmother has passed away 3 month ago. To this day it is not 100% certain what happened. Some think it was suicide, some think it was an accident. I am not sure and I stopped worring about it. My father found here in their bed and never recovered from it.

While I am waiting for my bus I see I got a lot of missed calls and I call back my aunt. She tells me that my father comitted suicide last night. I hang up and walk back home, feeling kind of numb and not sure what to do now. The first thing which comes to my mind is, I dont feel like working today and need to cancel, as I am talking to my boss and need to explain what happend it got real all of the suden and I started to tear up. I need to hang up and trying to catch myself.
After some minutes the numbness returns and I want to make a plan what I need to do but I have no idea.

My phone is ringing again and my fathers lawyer is on the linie, he says he is very sorry about the situation but I need to do some things now. My father was a dentist and I need to take care of his doctors office, also I need to call the local police to get some paperwork and pick up his personal things and the suicide note. Also I am not allowed to enter the house yet till they are 100% sure nobody else was involved in his death and there is nothing I can do today but there will be a lot of work soon.
I have thoughts what will happen with me now? How will I able to pay rent etc? Then I felt guilty because I am thinking about money now.

So I just got drunk.

In the following weeks and months brother and me organize the funeral and the inheritage. I took care of selling the doctors office and we are planning to sell the house.
In this time I moved into the house of my father to be close to the office and gave up my appartment in the town I have studied.

I get drunk more and more often and my drinking sessions get longer and longer. I am able to deal with all the inheritage shit but emotianly I dont want to deal with the fact that he left us.

In the months between the death of my stepmother and my father. I got way closer to him. I felt I have to look after him since he is obviously not doing so well but I am also getting exhausted and I dont have time to grief for myself. But looking back I think I did the best I could.
But for a long time I thought it was my fault, I didnt took enough care, I wasnt there enough.
And I felt kind of rejected by him, that he is rather in a place nobody knows exist then here.

As I see suicide now, it is just a passing of pain from yourself to the people who are close to you.

This happened about 5 years ago.

2 years I ve tried to medicate myself with alcohol, I stopped doing any sport, I am eating badly , I am depressed and hardly have any interests at all.

Very unhappy with life and blaming everyone and everything except myself for my situation I discovered meditation.

And I dove deep into it : reading a lot, trying all kinds of meditations especially for gratitude and forgivness and slowly things started to change.

I could get out of bed and I started to take care of myself again. I ve started to read a lot, especially about habits, since I ve developed so many bad ones in those years. Self improvment became very important to me.
I developed goals again and plans on how to pursuit them. I cared about the people around me again and I ve started to write a diary to get rid of returnig thoughts and think things really through.

Joy is returning into my life and it started with just sitting down for 10 minutes a day.

I am still on my journey and there are also bad days were I still get sad (actually this is one of those days but writting helps and this is why I want to share this with you), but I developed tools to help me back on my feet and the knowlege that this sadness is just passing through and is not my life, just a small part of it.

I try to see the positive in everything now and even with this shitty experience it brought out something good. I had the courage to follow my dream, learnt a valuable lesson, that blaming others or your circumstances gets you nowhere, you just give up power and your happiness.

If you made it till here thank you a lot for reading.