Been I think a month now. I'm 22. My Uncle has been my only familial support since I was 13. I left home across the country at about age 15 after a hospitalization from an attempt, and his support is what got me where I am today.

Every day I try to be more like him. I try to make the friends he had, to impact the people around me the way he did, to have the fun times he experienced. He was truly a magical motherfucker, I really can't even TL;DR it without writing 6 more paragraphs.

We shared an uncomfortable amount of childhood experiences, and thus shared an uncomfortable amount of brain issues. I'd known he was reaching the end of the road for a while now, so I made sure he knew how much I loved him. He knew he was my hero, so I don't feel any regrets. But it still hasn't really hit me yet.

I keep wanting to text him questions. Just shoot the shit.

He died via purposeful OD- the asphyxiation part. He knew I'd gotten into "social drugs" and he made sure I was educated to be as safe as possible. I'd always ask him questions about what I'm offered and if it's okay, what it does, how it's different from X and Y, etc. So that of course meant he knew exactly how to be as dangerous as he needed to be. I guess I get some comfort knowing his last conscious feelings were being in true 7th heaven high out of his fucking mind.

He was my rock in suicidal ideation, of course. He told me if I ever felt I needed to go, that he'd make a deal with me: he gets as long as he wants with me doing whatever it is he wants to do or where he wants to go, and if by the end of it I still had no will to live, he'd give me the resources I requested to go peacefully. (My ideal was hyper specific, I can't get into it without another 3 paragraphs but it wasn't just "yeah he'd give me a gun lmao.") That was incredibly reassuring to me; knowing that he was there was weirdly grounding when I dissociated or panicked.

Now that he's gone, I'm sort of just waiting for the next hardcore dissociation trip or panic attack to come so I can figure out what they're gonna be like without him. It's a really drab way to live and it's sort of pushing me towards being a little less social with my illegal tic tacs.

C'est la vie.