Still Here: Letters on Suicide Loss, Trauma, and Choosing to Stay

"How are you still alive?"A therapist asked Misty Dawn that question two years after her father took his own life. She was on seven psychiatric medications, all of them pushed to the highest doses they could give her, and still not okay. She laughed. She said it wasn't for lack of trying. The therapist told her to write a book.She didn't. Not for twenty years.Still Here is what she finally wrote — in twelve days, in thirteen letters, counting down to the anniversary of the day her father chose to leave.The letters are unfiltered. They name what most grief memoirs quietly leave out: the childhood abuse no one was ever allowed to talk about. The harm that doesn't leave a bruise. The medications that treated the wrong thing for years. The mornings she did not think she would stay.Beneath every page sits the question she has carried since she was twenty-four years old.How am I still here?This is her honest answer. No redemption arc. No clean ending. No timeline that anyone is comfortable with — because survival rarely arrives on one.For readers of The Year of Magical Thinking, In the Dream House, and What My Bones Know.A memoir for survivors. For witnesses. For anyone still carrying something no one ever helped them put down.You are not alone. Read more