Fear and Loathing in the Key of Matt: Coping with Suicide Loss

July 6, 2026

Damon R. Postle, Ph.D., Author

Tom O'Connor, Editor and Publisher

WARNING: THIS POST DISCUSSES A FAMILY MEMBER'S SUICIDE. 

IT INCLUDES SENSITIVE DETAILS THAT MAY BE TRIGGERING TO SOME READERS.

It has been a little over seven months since my brother Matt put down his trumpet for the last time. I am still not sure what universe I am living in or whether I want to keep living in it at all, which is the kind of thing you are not supposed to say out loud, but which is also just the truth, and I am done with the kind of writing that flinches from the truth. 

The doctors have a word for this. They have words for everything. Grief, they say, is like a weather system you can track on radar, moving in from the west and dissipating by Tuesday.

GRIEF. As if that word contains any of this. As if that word comes anywhere close to what it actually is, which is a bomb that went off in the middle of my life and left me standing in the crater trying to remember what the landscape used to look like before my brother decided he was done with it. 

READ: The Worst Day of Your Life, And Every Day After

Seven months. Two hundred and thirteen days, give or take, of waking up and remembering. On the days I can get out of bed. 

Here is what I know now that I did not know before: there was nothing I could have done to save him. I have turned that over ten thousand times in the dark. I have examined it from every angle, prosecuted myself for it, defended myself against it, and arrived, battered and exhausted, at the only verdict the evidence supports. 

There was nothing I could have done. Matt was going to go. The music was going to stop. And all the love in the world, all the phone calls, all the showing up, all of it, was not going to change what he had already decided. I did not save him. I could not have saved him.

Those are two different sentences, and learning to tell them apart is the shittiest homework I have ever been assigned. 

July 13, 2025. The last thing Matt ever said to me was "Fuck you". Two words. I have turned them over every day since, like a stone you find in your pocket that you cannot throw away, cannot explain, cannot stop touching. Two words that were not the whole of him, I KNOW that, I know that, I know that, and yet there they are, the final transmission, the last note of the last song, hanging in the air where a brother used to be. The grief literature lacks a chapter on this. The well-meaning casserole-bringers do not have a casserole for this. You just carry it, hot and jagged, and it cuts you every time you reach into your pocket. 

And you cannot put it down. And nobody tells you that you cannot put it down. 

The police told me he died on November 3. My birthday. They found him on the 5th, two days after he was already gone, and what I want you to understand about those two days is that the world just kept going. The sun came up and went down. People bought groceries and argued about shit that did not matter. My brother was alone in his bed in a shitty Texas apartment, and the world did not notice, and the world did not CARE. Neither did the universe, which turns out to be every bit as indifferent and savage as the most desperate person you know always suspected it was. 

November 3. My birthday. My brother left on the day I arrived, and I do not have a single word for what that is, and I am not going to pretend that I do. 

On Monday, the 10th, I did the video identification with the coroner. I took that on because I was the one who would do it. I looked at the screen and said, "Yes, that is Matt." Then I went on existing in the world, which is the most extraordinary and absurd thing I have ever done. I am still not sure whether it makes me strong or merely describes the mechanical persistence of a body that has not yet been granted permission to stop. 

I returned to work on November 12. Colleagues asked where I had been. In my soon-to-be former place of employment, whenever a death occurred in an employee's family, a message was sent out. This was not the case for my family. I guess I had to be ashamed? My family, my brother, wasn't worth a couple of lousy sentences. I will never forgive or forget this. I guess I am guilty of something because poor Matt chose to leave Earth on his own terms. 

The Sunday after Thanksgiving, I found myself in an emergency room with pancreatitis, which is the body's way of saying I have absorbed everything I can absorb. I am completely and totally DONE with this shit. I was vomiting. I was crying. I was in the kind of pain that strips away every pretense, every performance, every carefully constructed wall you have built around the unthinkable thing. And somewhere in the middle of all of it, a hospital social worker appeared at my bedside with a clipboard and a gentle voice, and I told her about Matt in between bouts of vomiting, which is not how I imagined that conversation going.

Still, grief does not care about your imagined conversations. Grief does not care about anything. Grief is not sentimental, not fair, and it does not give a shit about your timeline. 

They encouraged me to be admitted on a 72-hour voluntary hold. All I wanted was to sleep after 16 hours of vomiting and pain. I didn't know what I was signing. I want to be precise about that word: voluntary. Some part of me, some ragged and exhausted and barely functioning part,  reached out a hand and said I need the net. I am grateful for that part. I am also furious at everything that made it necessary. 

His trumpet, a Monette, because Matt did not do anything halfway, because when Matt committed to music, he committed to the finest instrument he could find, was retrieved in Texas by our parents. At his memorial. The memorial I was supposed to be at. The memorial I missed because I was behind a locked door in a psychiatric ward with a man who spent three full days threatening to rape me. 

Three days. 

While my parents stood in a room in Texas with Matt's colleagues and students, they said goodbye to him. At the same time, they carried his Monette home to Washington. While all of that was happening, I was behind a locked door in a place that was supposed to keep me safe, but it was not safe, and there was not a goddamn thing I could do about it. 

I want you to sit with that. I want you to understand what it means to miss the last goodbye because the place that was supposed to protect you became its own species of danger. The bottom has a trapdoor. I am here to tell you that the bottom has a trapdoor and beneath it is more bottom, and the whole thing is just shitty, irredeemably, completely shitty, all the way down. 

And sometimes there is not enough of you left. 

On April 27, I had a stroke, and now there are days my words come out stuttered and slurred, days my hearing does what it wants, days my vision goes sideways, days my emotions detonate without warning like a faulty wire in a building that was already on fire.

The neurologists have words for all of this. Everyone has words. What nobody has is an answer to what it means to grieve your brother. At the same time, your own brain has become unreliable, and the instrument you use to process the world has been damaged.

While you are doing all of this, you are surviving with equipment that is no longer factory-standard and was never designed for this much loss. 

Here is what nobody tells you about losing someone this way: the world does not pause for it. The world is a filthy lurching machine, and it keeps GOING, relentlessly, obscenely, without apology, and you are somehow expected to keep up. The checkout clerk wants to know if you have a rewards card. Your bank demands the mortgage payment. Some lunatic on the radio is losing his shit about something that happened in Congress.

And you are standing in the fluorescent light of a grocery store thinking: my brother played the trumpet like it was the last language left on earth, and now he is gone, and none of you people understand that everything should be different now, that the atmosphere itself should register this, that the universe should have the basic decency to acknowledge that a musician has left it. 

It does not. The atmosphere is fine. I am not fine. I have not been fine. I am a man who has lost his brother, had a stroke, spent three days behind a locked door with a predator, missed his brother's memorial, and watched his body revolt against seven months of the unsurvivable. 

I am DONE pretending that "Fine" is a place I have any relationship with. Fine is a lie people tell each other so they do not have to deal with the actual shit that is actually happening. I am not fine. I am the opposite of fine. I am a man standing in the wreckage of a year that tried to kill me, writing about my dead brother, and calling it what it is. 

The atmosphere is fine. I am not the atmosphere. 

I cannot listen to a trumpet. I cannot listen to jazz. The music that was Matt's whole language, his devotion, his reason, has become the one door I cannot open because on the other side of it is everything, and everything is still too much. So I sit in the dark without the music, and I dare the silence to tell me something I do not already know. 

Matt's ashes arrived at my address via FedEx. Because that is the world we live in. That is the dignity the machinery of death extends to the people it processes. The driver could not be bothered to walk them to my door, so he left them on the lawn at the end of my driveway, and I had to walk down and pick my brother up off the ground, and the world kept rotating on its axis the entire time, indifferent and relentless and fine.

My brother. In a box. At the end of my driveway. I had to walk down and pick him up. 

He is in Washington now with our parents and the Monette. I am here without all three in New York, a state that I hate, in an area of the country that I loathe. In a home I live in, surrounded by the ghosts of people I loved. I fear sleeping because I see them in my PTSD riddled dreams, only to wake up bathed in sweat and heart pounding. This turns out to be the hardest and most defiant thing I have ever done. 

What I know is that every time I hear a trumpet, at a parade, bleeding from a car window, a kid practicing scales in the apartments near my home, I stop moving entirely and for one half second, maybe less, I am certain it is him. It is never him. 

But for that half-second, Matt is still playing somewhere, and the world is still the kind of place that contains him. I am still the kind of person who has a brother, and he did not say fuck you; he said something else entirely, something I can almost hear if I stay very still, something that sounds like the note just before the music finds its way home. 

I would pay any price for that half-second. I would burn the whole kingdom down for one more bar. 

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Read Damon's bio by clicking his icon at the start of this article.

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