There’s a chapter in my book that I almost didn’t write.

Not because it wasn’t important.

Not because it didn’t belong.

But because even now, years later, the pain of it still feels alive.

Writing a memoir about chronic illness has forced me to revisit some of the hardest moments of my life: surgeries, fear, trauma, loss, uncertainty, and all the ways illness can slowly change a person. Those chapters are difficult, but in a strange way, they feel easier for me to talk about because I lived them publicly. People knew I was sick. They saw the surgeries. They saw the hospital stays.

But grief is different.

Some grief lives quietly inside you where nobody else can see it.

One of the hardest chapters I will write in Pieces of Me is about losing my sister.

Not to sickness.
Not to an accident.

I lost my sister to suicide.

Even typing those words still feels heavy.

I think part of what makes this grief so difficult is that suicide leaves behind questions that never fully go away. Questions you replay over and over in your mind. Questions your heart desperately wants answers to, even knowing those answers may never come.

Why?

That one word can haunt an entire family.

Why didn’t we see it?
Why didn’t she stay?
Why couldn’t we help?
Why did this happen?

The hardest part is knowing there may never be an answer that truly settles the ache left behind.

For a long time, I questioned whether I should include this part of my story at all. Not because my sister wasn’t important to me, but because she was. Deeply important. The kind of loss that changes the shape of a family forever.

There’s also a part of me that wants to protect the people I love. When someone dies this way, the grief doesn’t belong to only one person. It ripples through parents, siblings, children, spouses, and everyone left behind, trying to understand something that feels impossible to understand.

And the truth is… some parts of it still haunt us.

That’s difficult to admit publicly.

As I’ve been writing this book, I’ve realized something important: grief has become part of my story, whether I wanted it to or not.

It changed me.

It affected how I viewed life, love, fear, family, and even survival itself. It shaped parts of me that people may never fully see from the outside. Leaving that chapter out would almost feel like leaving out part of who I became afterward.

But that doesn’t make writing it easier.

Some days I sit down at my laptop and stare at the screen wondering how I’m supposed to put this kind of pain into words. How do you summarize someone you loved? How do you write about loss without reopening wounds? How do you honor someone’s memory while also being honest about the devastation their absence left behind?

I still don’t fully know.

What I do know is this: memoir writing is far more emotional than people realize.

You don’t just write sentences.
You revisit moments.
You relive conversations.
You remember sounds, feelings, phone calls, tears, silence, and all the things your mind tried so hard to tuck away just so you could keep functioning.

Sometimes writing feels healing.

Other times it feels like grief all over again.

I think that’s why I almost left this chapter out.

Not because it doesn’t matter…
but because it matters so much.

And maybe that’s exactly why it belongs in the book after all.

Because Pieces of Me was never meant to tell only the polished parts of my story. It was meant to tell the truth about the moments that shaped me, even the ones that still hurt to carry.

If you’ve ever lost someone you love, especially in a way that left behind unanswered questions, then you understand something many people don’t: grief is not something you simply “get over.”

You learn how to live around it.
You learn how to carry it.
But you never stop missing them.