Seth Kimbro Saved My Life
How Seth’s legacy in “Giving Light to Darkness” by Laura Kimbro Saved My Life
I’ve written before about the darkness that traumatic brain injury can bring — the memory loss, the isolation, the crushing weight that makes suicide feel like the only way out. In my lowest moments, when the “Who Is This?” type of phone calls and encounters with others and the disappearing friendships piled on top of constant uncertainty, I came dangerously close to believing the lie that my family would be better off without me.
And it quite literally helped save my life.
Suicide After Concussion
When TBI Makes Suicide Feel Like the Only Option – And Why You Still Matter
I’ve met too many survivors of TBI that I met too late to still know them while they were alive. I met others that then didn’t show up the next meeting because they had lost their battle. They had encountered this living change surviving their injury and battling each day and found themselves part of an unfortunate statistic. I’ll share some of those statistics below. But they aren’t a statistic. Each one of them is a person. A person who loved and was and is loved. A person with a story. An incredible story. Even after their deaths, I learn from their stories, from their loved ones, from the legacies, and yes from their pain. The pain of living with a traumatic brain injury (TBI) can feel like fighting a war inside your own head — one that no one else can fully see and even the patient can’t fully see or understand themselves at times. Some days the battle gets so heavy that ending it all starts to feel like the only way to find peace. I know this darkness. Many of us in the brain injury community do. In fact, almost every survivor I have met shares the exact sentiment in their early months of wishing they could just reach in their head and pull their own brain out. But I also know there is light, even though it is not always visible each day. It is there, even when not seen in the moment.
This post is not about glamorizing pain or pretending everything gets magically better. It’s about naming the real reasons suicide can feel rational after TBI — for both survivors and their caregivers — and then honestly laying out why staying here is still worth it. Because it is. There is hope, and you are not alone - many of us have felt those exact feelings, the exact darkness, the exact pain - even though your story is incredibly unique and deserving of being heard.
Who Is This?
A few days ago, our phone lit up with a call from a number I didn’t recognize. I answered, as I often do now in recovery—trying to stay connected to a world that sometimes feels half-erased.
“Hi, this is your neighbor Jen,” the voice said warmly. “I’m wondering if you’ve seen Rose lately?”
I froze. Jen? Rose? The names echoed in the empty spaces where memories should be. Was Rose a person? A dog? A neighbor’s kid? My own relative? I had no idea. I also had no clear picture of who this “neighbor” Jen was. Did they move in down the road in the last three years? I don’t have many neighbors change in the country life here but I don’t know a lot now. The street, the faces, the shared history—large chunks of it are simply gone.
My 3 Year Anniversary
Today marks exactly three years since a wood splitter fell on my head and knocked me unconscious. Three years since the moment everything changed. Three years since I was, in a very real sense, reborn into a life I never asked for.
In the beginning, they told me I would be fine. “Just a concussion,” the ER doctor said. “You’ll bounce back quickly.” I believed them. My family believed them. I rested, followed instructions, and waited for my old self to return. In the days that followed I deteriorated, lost the ability to hold a memory longer than 15 minutes, became a lump on the couch sleeping 20 hours a day, headaches pounding, unable to think, process, watch a screen, forming words one syllable at a time, not able to think of what word was coming next or what word I had just said. After a day or two of almost appearing normal, I had quickly become unrecognizable, like a zombie.
I’m Angry, But Why?
I’m Angry… But I Don’t Even Know What I’m Angry At
Some days after my TBI, I wake up with this heavy, restless anger simmering inside me.
There’s no clear target. No single person or event I can point to and say, “This. This is why I’m mad.” It’s just… there. A vague, foggy frustration that makes me irritable, short-tempered, and sometimes even angry at myself for feeling angry.
This is one of the strangest and most exhausting parts of brain injury recovery.
Sister’s Silent Engagement
When Your Sister Can’t Handle a Conversation With You – What That Really Says About Her Readiness for Marriage
Today I’m sitting with a truth that hurts more than most of my TBI symptoms combined.
My sister just announced she is engaged and planning her wedding.
And I won’t be there.
Not because I don’t love her. Not because I don’t wish her every happiness. But because she has cut me out of her life completely. No calls. No texts. Years of her not wanting to share in anything real together. She has decided that any real conversation with me is too overwhelming for her mental health, and that I am the problem.
Repair Over Exile
Why Cutting Out a Sibling Is Almost Always the Wrong Choice
There’s a quiet epidemic happening in many families today: siblings cutting off siblings, family cutting off family. What often starts as “I just need some space” can slowly harden into permanent estrangement. While the person asking for distance may believe they’re protecting their peace, the reality is far more painful — for both sides.
Beauty in the Broken Days
Some people come into your life (even after they’ve left it) and quietly rearrange how you see everything. For me, one of those people is Claire Wineland.
Claire lived with cystic fibrosis—a serious, progressive lung and digestive disease—from birth. She spent huge chunks of her short life in hospitals, hooked up to machines, fighting infections, and facing the very real possibility that each day might be one of her last. She died at 21 in 2018, just days after a double lung transplant. Yet she left behind a voice that still echoes powerfully: sick people are not broken. They are not to be pitied. And their lives can be incredibly full, meaningful, and even beautiful—because of the pain, not in spite of it.
Estrangement Meets Mercy
Divine Mercy Sunday: Finding Forgiveness and Healing in Family Estrangement – Lessons from St. Faustina’s Diary
Every year, the Sunday after Easter brings us Divine Mercy Sunday—a feast day given to the Church through the visions and writings of St. Maria Faustina Kowalska. It’s not just another holy day on the calendar. It’s a profound invitation from Jesus Himself to plunge into the depths of God’s Mercy, especially when life feels shattered by pain, rejection, or loss. For me, this feast hits especially close to home because of a wound that still aches: my sisters cutting me out of their lives after my brain injury, right in the middle of their teenage rebellion.
Where’s Tommy?
I just finished reading Where's Tommy?: A mother’s journey through her son’s traumatic brain injury by Debbie Lennon – It was a heart-wrenching look at the invisible hell of undiagnosed TBI.
If you've ever wondered why someone’s life can spiral so dramatically after what seems like a “minor” accident, Debbie Lennon’s new memoir Where’s Tommy?: A Mother’s Journey Through Her Son’s Traumatic Brain Injury is required reading.
At 16, Tommy Lennon suffered a surfing accident — a surfboard to the forehead that left him with stitches and what everyone assumed was just a bump on the head. No dramatic coma. No obvious red flags at the ER. Life went on. But there was nothing “minor” about it.