The week I signed my book contract on religious trauma, she died. For months afterward, the manuscript and the grief were indistinguishable. I could not tell where theory ended and memory began. I have finished the book now. It is under review. This is the first time I can write about her without being inside it.
She was there in my formative years, before I had language for identity, before I understood religion as a system, before I knew that shame could settle into a body so deeply it begins to feel like personality. We were young. We talked for hours, sat in cars listening to music as if it carried something sacred. There was an ease between us that, at that age, felt expansive, like being recognized before I fully understood who I was becoming. Life moved. We moved. Different paths, different commitments, the kind of adulthood that looks stable from the outside. But formative love does not disappear. It imprints. It becomes part of your relational architecture, how you understand intimacy, risk, courage, and what it costs to live honestly.
For several years, we barely spoke. Then contact resumed, and over the next two years I watched her disappear. She went in and out of hospitals. Tests were run. Nothing definitive was found. But I knew what it was. There was no scan for what was happening. It was the strain of living inside a structure that did not fit her, the years of self-suppression, the religious shame braided into identity, the rigid expectations about gender, obedience, and loyalty, the narrowing of options until every path felt catastrophic. You can scan a body and find nothing wrong. You cannot scan the damage done by decades of conditional belonging.
And then she died by an overdose.
When someone dies this way, people look for a single cause, a crisis, a chemical imbalance, a final breaking point. What I have come to understand is that sometimes the breaking point begins decades earlier, in childhood systems that teach a person who they are allowed to be and who they must suppress in order to belong, in families where deviation threatens connection, in religious frameworks that sanctify self-denial. Shame, when introduced early enough, becomes embodied. It wires the nervous system. It links authenticity with danger and makes exile feel worse than erasure. What I felt after she died was the same tension, finally stripped of denial. The split had always been there between who she was and who she believed she had to be. Her death did not create that split. It sealed it.
What makes this grief sharper is not only that she died, but that she did not live long enough to confront the life that was diminishing her. I didn’t save her. I couldn’t save her. I know that in every rational way available to me. And still, guilt lives in the body. There is still a part of me waiting to see if she would do it, if she could dismantle the life that was diminishing her, if she could stand up inside herself. There is also a part of me that wonders whether one more conversation, one more push, one more refusal to step back might have altered something. I know that is not how real life works. I know that systems, long conditioning, and chronic despair are not undone by a single person’s love and support. But grief is not rational. The body replays possibility even when the mind knows better. That frozen hope, and those moments of guilt, are part of what make this loss complicated. Feeling responsible is human being responsible is something else entirely. There are losses no one person can prevent. This one lives in my chest, not just my mind.
Religious and cultural shame rarely announces itself as violence. It operates quietly, in doctrine, in dinner tables, in marriages, in the daily narrowing of what feels permissible. Some overdoses are preceded by years of being told that authenticity is dangerous and belonging must be earned through self-containment. Her life was shaped by that. I am a therapist. I am writing a book on religious trauma, a model designed to help people disentangle faith from fear and identity from inherited shame. And still, I am human.
Understanding systems does not exempt you from loving someone shaped by them. Insight does not prevent attachment. Frameworks do not quiet the body. I cannot save her. I cannot rewrite her ending. What I can do is refuse the conditions that made it possible. I can integrate the grief instead of being ruled by it. I can live in a way that does not require me to disappear. The model I am building, the life I am choosing, the honesty I am practicing these are not departures from love. They are its continuation.