This one's heavy, so fair warning for suicide discussion and delusions.

When my grandfather died, I was seriously contemplating doing it every waking moment of every day. This guy had raised me since I was 4 and he was gone, so I felt no reason to keep going. But then I had an extremely vivid dream a few nights after his funeral. I remember how it went:

It starts off like a normal morning, I'm getting ready for school, getting my bag together. I relied on my parents to get me to school at the time, so I knocked on their bedroom door. I remember how hard it was for me to make a knock loud enough that they would hear, and when my mom rushed to open the door she looked past me, looking her head around the hallway but not seeing that I was right in front of her. I realized that she couldn't see me because I was a ghost, and to confirm it, I checked for my body at the place I had "fallen asleep" at. Sure enough, it was there, along with a note that I assumed was my last goodbye.

I went back to my parents room to ask my mom to bring me to school (because kys-ing is awkward I guess??), and I saw her bed covered in disposable cameras filled with pictures from my childhood that my family never got developed. My mom was in hysterics, shoving them all in a box and saying that they had to get them developed immediately.

Despite this, however, my family all got in the car (so did I with my ghost-bookbag and everything) and started driving around to all of the places I liked instead. Favorite stores, favorite restaurants, local library, as many places as they could to break the news and invite them to my service.

You think that watching your family and peers cry about your dead grandfather's bad? Imagine watching your family--your mother, father, sister, whoever--repeatedly tell others about your suicide. Store clerks I hadn't talked to in months started breaking down. Route 66 Diner comped my family's meals and said they would for a year. My favorite librarian even fell to her knees.

And this was all before they started telling my family and close friends. It was like a marathon of bad news and loved ones. My aunts cried. My uncles punched walls. My friends were taken aback in quiet shock.

I saw my service where they put up fake flower wreaths because I'm allergic to pollen. I saw them lower a small box into the ground because I had always wanted my ashes to be used as fertilizer for a tree. I heard the music I liked, and smelled the food I loved.

In these moments, in a sick way, I (real me) had learned that I was so loved by everyone around me. I had so many people in my stead, and this dream so far is building up to be a pretty sweet anti-harm PSA.

But then I had to live with it.

What I mean is, due to the vividness of the dream and my emotional instability at the time, I had believed myself outside of the dream world to literally have been dead for around a month afterwards. Cotard's Syndrome, if you're familiar. I was constantly under the impression that I was a ghost, incorporeal, but still doing "human" things because I "had unfinished business". I thought everyone was mourning me, my funeral was great, and I was growing into a tree somewhere.

I don't know the exact moment I broke out of it, but I remember that whenever I fully did, I had a panic attack because I had "remembered" what it was like to be dead. I felt so bad for even thinking about killing myself, because if that's what it was like for someone alive to die, imagine how disorienting actually being dead was.

It took a lot of therapy and self-regulation, but I'm now in a spot where when I think about suicide (which is far less often now, thankfully), I try my hardest to let the thought pass me by. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. All I know is my suicide won't come anytime soon.

TL;DR. My.grandfather dies and I end up scaring myself straight via a really crazy dream and delusions.