Most mornings, Sean, a Marine Corps and Air Force veteran who served three times in Iraq and twice in Afghanistan, would wake up with an overwhelming feeling of dread. After losing his son to suicide in 2017, he knew he had to process his grief. But all of those feelings had been mounting for so long, he wasn’t sure how. And the longer time went on, the more impossible it seemed to climb that emotional mountain and find peace on the other side.
“The way we handled things in the military was, you put things in your pack, you deal with them, and you keep pressing forward,” Sean, who is only using his first name for privacy reasons, told Salon. “That’s kind of what I did when my son passed away, and it kept building up and building up. … I was trying to figure out how I would process it, but I just got lost.”
