Dealing with a loss

Loss, an event that is unavoidable and can change the course of your life. We've all experienced loss in varying degrees, and im going to highlight some of my own losses and how i've overcame them and in certain instances am still lost in tbe depth of them. The first major loss that ripped into my world was the sudden death of my father when I was 25 years old. My father was a succesful small businessman, he unfortunatrly dealt with a multitude of mental illnesses (anxiety, depression, substance abuse), which culminated together and ended tragically with him taking his life via firearm. I remember the day like it was yesterday, I was working as a correctional officer at the time on night shift and had just completed my 12 hour shift. I got into my vehicle and had a voicemail from my mother, it simply stated that my father had left a suicide note that morning and they couldn't locate him. Once, I heard that I essentially knew what the outcome was as a few months prior,I had taken a pistol from him outside of a bar because he was threatening to kill himself, it almost turned into a physical altercation between us but I managed to rip it away from him and he then crumbled into pieces. Back to the story at hand, I returned home and searched locally attempting to find him with no luck. I then laid down to sleep as I had to return to work in about 4 hours, and just before I had fallen asleep I heard a blood curdling scream from my sister who was also at my parents house at that time, I went downstairs to see our local police chief in our home, he confirmed our worst nightmare that he had in fact taken his life. I at the time was already well on my way to being an alcoholic or already was one. My first inclincation was to grab a beer which I did, he had killed himself beside his truck and when the truck returned, I took it upon myself to clean all the blood from the running boards etc to prevent my family from seeing it. I returned to work that same week only missing a few days to have his funeral etc. You may be wondering where does the dealing with a loss come into play, well im going to deduce down what not to do. I returned to work without processing anything and it ultimately led to my alcoholism and suicidal ideation that put me in a mental hospital for 10 days in 2018, the suicide occured in 2016. The worst thing you can do is try to push forward without taking time to truly digest the impact of such an event. I drank to forget everything which is a common tactic with a 0% success rate. I depressed all my emotions and covered them up, acting as if everything was just fine. The mental warfare that entered my head on the daily basis overwhelmed me and lead to me drinking, and that led to me acting out violently, times of uncontrolled emotions, and general volatility. Take time for yourself, and allow yourself time to breakdown the impact it's had on your life. It will eat away at you slowly if you don't take that time, some will tell you get back to your scheduled life as quickly as possible, to be quite frank, those types of individuals can fuck off, they will push you to continue your lifestyle without taking in the life changing event that has occured. I had an individual like that around me and I followed that ideology, it panned out horribly. This is my first true blog, and its not complete, looking to see if there's any interest in this type of thing. Ive got more to add if people want to see it, a completely different scenario is the recent sudden death of my 2 year old son, that has me lost to say the least, if youd like to hear about that as well, im open to sharing. thank you