My daughter’s suicide didn’t happen in a vacuum. Lila was born more witty, clever, and hard-working than just about anyone else I’ve ever known. She was naturally driven to do her very best in every aspect of life, but she had two major internal factors working against her: she struggled to see social situations the same way others did, and her moods were stronger and more turbulent than most people’s. These internal factors (diagnosed by clinicians as “possible autism” and Cyclothymia, respectively) played a huge part in her decision to end her life in August 2020, but they weren’t the only factors in play. Her decision was also influenced by people and situations throughout her lifetime. From her kindergarten bus driver, who made her sit in the back with the eighth graders because her voice was too loud, to the childhood best friend, who ignored her in middle school because her mother had heard through the rumor mill that Lila had had a panic attack in class and no longer felt Lila was an appropriate friend for her daughter. From the loss of her beloved great grandfather when she lacked the words or the space to explain how deeply she was affected by his absence to my insistence that she achieve higher than she was comfortable in high school because I wanted to ensure she set her future up for success. So many big moments and little incidents combined with her brain chemistry to convince her that her best contribution to society would be to remove herself from it. I would do anything to have her back, but since that is not an option, I want to prove to everyone I can that they are more than the things that have happened to them, that not only is this life worth continuing to live, but that they can deal with the hardest things they’ve faced in life and heal enough to make a future better for themselves and the people around them. I want to help not only people who may be considering ending their lives, but also the people who interact with them: the people who might otherwise take out life’s frustrations on someone who didn’t cause them. I want to help provide tools that all of us can use to deal with our own trauma to live better lives and be better humans to each other. The first tool Live Oak Mental Wellness Project is creating is Processing Grief in Community, an 8-week group guide to navigating the grief journey, and it is written so that anyone, from licensed clinician to well-meaning passerby, can facilitate an effective grief support group if they have the space and the heart to do so. To further meet our goal of making this resource as accessible as possible, it will be available for children, transition-aged youth, and adults in both English and Spanish. Once this resource is in the hands of the people who need it, we plan to create the next tool in our series to support survivors of domestic and intimate partner violence. By giving other helpers the tools they require to support the needs they see, we will be able to increase our impact exponentially over what we would be able to achieve by only running these groups ourselves. We will begin to create a more healed community, and we will learn to show everyone around us that their lives are worth living.