SISTER OF AN ARMY VET — Snowball Express, the year after he took his own life

My brother took his own life in 2022. He had been Army, two deployments to Iraq, separated in 2014, never enrolled with the VA. He left a wife and two kids. The kids were eight and five. The year after he died was the worst year of any of our lives. My sister-in-law went catatonic for three months. My mother lost twenty pounds. The kids had questions nobody had answers for. TAPS contacted my sister-in-law within two weeks. A peer mentor — another woman who had lost her husband to veteran suicide — was on a Zoom call with her in the third week. The two of them are still in touch. That woman was the bridge between my sister-in-law and the rest of her life. The kids went to Snowball Express in the December after he died. Five days at Disney with their mother and a thousand other kids who had also lost a parent to military service. My nephew, who had not spoken about his father in five months, came home from that trip and told me — unprompted, in my kitchen, eating a peanut butter sandwich — about a kid he had met whose father had been Special Forces and had also died. It was the first crack in the wall. My niece is twelve now. My nephew is fifteen. They are okay, by which I mean they are alive and in school and have friends and are sad in the way that this kind of loss makes you permanently sad. TAPS and Snowball Express held my family up in the worst year. I will support both organizations for the rest of my life.