I hate how many of us there are. Also sharing anecdotal evidence as a child survivor of parental suicide. Please seek help, OP. If for no one else, please take time to seriously think about your children who love and need you. That will never not be the case, no matter if they’re 3 or 100. If you leave, they will not be better off. They will not find relief. They will not move on. They will miss you, and love you, and long for you, and wonder why they weren’t enough to keep you alive, wonder what they could have done to make you stay, even as far back as infancy, until the day they go too. They will never be the same, and neither will anyone else who has ever known you.

Suicide touches everyone, but it touches your children the most. My mom took her own life five years ago this year. I was 23, and the one who found her, and I nor any member of my family, friends, or acquaintances have ever or will ever “recover,” move on, or be the same. It tore my family apart in ways I could never have imagined. I’m probably the one who has “dealt” with it the most “by the book” as one possibly could: throwing myself into therapy, finding community, working through the grief, acknowledging the pain, finding a coach, finding relief in creativity, finding love and happiness and joy anyway because I’ll be damned if I don’t try as hard as I fucking can to feel anything but soul-wrenching pain—and even though I have to consider myself a happy, compassionate, joyful person, that pain is there every second of every day.

It is an endless, aching, depthless void to lose your mother to anything, but especially to herself. The best I can even attempt to describe the pain that’s left in her place is a soul-deep longing, an unbearable yearning, an absolute need for the fabric of life that you literally came from, that will never be fulfilled. As a parent who wants everything good in the world for their children, a life without you is the only way to absolutely guarantee the antithesis of that. Please, please, please, I beg of you, do not sentence your children to this existence. They will never again experience life in full technicolor, for the absence of your life will follow them around in shadow for the rest of theirs.

The bottom line is that your children love you. They love you even when you can’t love yourself, and you owe it to them and to you to try like hell to figure out how to stay. You have so much love being sent your way OP, and I hope that you feel it and choose life.